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Simon Backes’ Shortlist

Published on October 20, 2009

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders—leaders like Simon Backes. We asked Simon to share his favorite films and his thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world.

So what films make Simon Backes’ Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Who is Simon Backes

Simon Backes

Filmmaker Simon Backes was born in France in 1972 and began shooting super 8 films at the age of 10. He later studied film direction at Institut National Superieur des Arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels. He directed several shorts, poised somewhere between fiction and documentary, including The Last Trick, 1999, Welcome in Utopia, 2000, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 2004, and worked as editor on shorts and TV documentaries. Backes has also co-directed a series of experimental, “fake fiction” feature-length films with Belgian artist Loïc Vanderstichelen, mostly shown in art galleries in Paris, Berlin, Brussels (Death in BrugesM, 2002 . Het Onmogelijke Onderzoek/The Investigation, 2004 . Gregoire House, 2005).

His first feature-length documentary, Stolen Art, completed in 2008, has been screened in major documentary film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival, HotDocs, Terzo Festival Internazionale del Film, Rome International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, and Etats Généraux du Documentaire.

Simon Backes’ on the Power of Film

They say we’re living in an age of the all-powerful Image. And indeed we are constantly being assaulted by images on all sides, carefully crafted to work their way inside our minds, to feed and guide our feelings, thoughts and desires. But these images rarely come without words, comments, legends, that betray the powers at work behind their creation and circulation. In order to resist these powers, and to preserve our individual integrity, we must therefore learn how to read these complex messages that operate simultaneously on several levels.

This is one thing that films have helped me doing throughout the years, eversince I was a teenager, trembling with joy as I discovered the world as seen through the eyes of Luis Bunuel and Sam Peckinpah, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Yasujiro Ozu, John Cassavetes and Sergio Leone, Godard or Nagisa Oshima…The visions of these people (and later of documentary filmmakers like Fred Wiseman, Robert Kramer, Raymond Depardon, and so many others) gave me keys to define my position in this world, both from a poetical and political point of view.

Films are flows of sounds and images, but encompassed in a closed time/space frame that allows them to become objects of thought in addition to being objects of pleasure. Not only can they open our eyes on the realities surrounding us, they also open our hearts and minds, and leave us with weapons to understand and face this world of ours, friendly weapons that we can share with millions of others. They are ideal tools to expand our conscience, and become more than just the cliché-fed, obedient consumers our society seems to consider as its ideal citizens.

Simon Backes’ Picks

Guy Debord-Son Art, Son Temps: French ultra-left wing activist and theorician Debord’s filmic testament is a worthy complement to his classic 1967 book La Société du Spectacle. Using only extracts from recent – mostly french - TV programs, intercut with particularly scathing written comments, Debord paints a frightening picture of what our society has come to. Commissionned by french premium pay TV channel Canal Plus, and only broadcasted once to my knowledge, this might be difficult to find, but remains a lesson in media decoding – most extracts being used in a way that reveals the ideological content of their very form in addition to their immediate information value.

View on YouTube

Culloden: 200 years after the decisive battle in which the people of Scotland lost all hope of ever retaining their independence from the British crown, Watkins recreates the event on a low budget, casting real-life descendants of the freedom fighters as their ancestors, and adding the presence of a documentary TV crew on the premises.

The result is a fascinating, extremely beautiful and angry film, and an excellent introduction to Watkin’s critical method of representing both history and its treatment by the media. Less well-known than his later classics The War Game or Punishment Park, it is really worth (re)discovering.

View on YouTube

F For Fake: A playful philosophical essay on the nature of our belief in pictures, and the stories attached to them, this shows Welles at his most inventive, ironic and nostalgic state. The presentation is dazzling, extremely fast-moving and modern.

View on YouTube

Z-32: Israeli filmmaker and activist Avi Mograbi wonders how he can turn a young Israeli soldier’s confession of war crimes into a film. While the soldier is given a small camcorder (and a variety of digitally-added masks keeping his identity concealed) to try and record his story himself, Mograbi seeks an appropriate way to stage his own thoughts and comments on the situation.

This is angry pacifist filmmaking at its best, constantly trying to find the right filmic form to probe the wounds of a divided society. Very controversial indeed, it doesn’t explain much, but reveals a lot.

View on YouTube

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes: Also by Avi Mograbi. I strongly recommend this film, especially for a thrilling civic disobedience scene at an army checkpoint.

Stranger than Paradise: I know it may look strange in this documentary list, but Jarmusch’s marvelous film was a true revelation for me when I first saw it, and has been a constant inspiration ever since. It proves with utmost elegance that comparatively action-deprived lives can be a fascinating film subject, and that surviving in this world is mainly a matter of adjusting to the particular pitch of the time and space around us. To me this is essential philosophical viewing, as hypnotically true-to-life as many of the best documentaries!

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It is very sad to me to see what we humans have become and what we now see as part of our nature. War, guns, sex, money is all I see whereever I go. Thank you for opening our eyes to see the truth. Again Thank You!

Posted on 2009 11 14 by NadrianaH