The Forgotten Space

followthethings.com
Ship my order

The subject of the [Forgotten Space] is globalization and the sea, the ‘forgotten space’ of our modernity. Its premise is that the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest. But this truth is not self-evident and must be approached as a puzzle, or mystery; a problem to be solved. Sea trade is an integral component of the world-industrial system (Source: Burch & Sekula 2011, np link)

[It] follows the container transport aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, politicians and those marginalised by the global transport system (Source: Anon 2010, np link).

[It visits] everyone from displaced farmers and villagers in Holland to underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles and Filipino maids in China. Sekula and Burch offer a sobering portrait of workers’ conditions, the inhuman scale of sea trade and the secret lives of port cities (Source: Tate 2012, np link)

Sekula and Burch remind us that the calm orderliness of these containers belies the destruction they wreak on the world: the landscapes, as with the Betuwe railway that connects Rotterdam with Germany, they must tear through to reach consumers; the laborers that are exploited for there to be a profit (Source: Henely 2012, np link).

If The Forgotten Space is a personal film about the sea and the ill effects of capitalism, it’s because Sekula grew up in a harbor and is an anti-capitalist intellectual/artist (Source: Henely 2012, np link).

Since then much of his extraordinary body of experimental work has been devoted to chronicling the social, economic and political dynamics of life on the oceans (Source: Sandhu 2012, np link).

The idea for The Forgotten Space came about from a photographic book Sekula published in 1995 called Fish Story, and in particular one essay in it called ‘Dismal Science’, which in turn led to lengthy discussions with Burch about perceptions and ideologies of the sea. Gradually, as the film was shot and assembled over the course of six to seven years, in several countries including China, Holland, Hong Kong, Spain and the US, a script and a thesis emerged: the story of a logistical system – globalised capitalism – enabled by the explosion of mechanised trade on the oceans, using cargo as a broad political category (Source: Corless 2012, np link).

Sekula’s narration always feels personal. It’s this essayistic quality that makes the documentary more interesting than its subject alone, injecting, as it does, a critical edge into a film partly comprised of scenes of floating boats and people doing menial labor (Source: Henely 2012, link).

If you think of Wall Street as capitalism’s symbolic headquarters, filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch more or less show us … how the sea is capitalism’s global trading floor writ large (Source: Henely 2012, np link).

Yes, it is an old-fashioned, newly fashioned, Marxist movie, with its eye set square on the labourers. In other words, on the body, the cost of the body, the bending and reshaping of the body in an era of global capital (Source: Hoolboom 2010, np link).

What we fear we create. Mr.Sukhdev Sandhu and Mr Sekula have limited to no understanding of economics, either mircro or macro, so they lash out endeavoring to somehow demonize capitalist economies. Their lack iof understanding is sad when it drives them to such a fear. Get some real knowledge, lads, then try to comment when you know that of which you speak (Source: Augustine2 2012, np link).

Straight from the Adam Smith Institute (Source: Imrama 2012, np link).

The best thing you can do is go see “The Forgotten Space” and tell your friends about (Source: Proyect 2012, np link).

Much of [its] impact, as with the essay film at its best, derives from being privy to the flux and digressions of thought in process, in action. The argument put forward by Sekula’s voiceover is sophisticated, engaged, attuned to details as well as the bigger picture; woven into the mix are archive, film clips and interviews with workers, unemployed people and others directly affected by developments in globalised trade. There’s no attempt at spurious BBC-style balance or objectivity (Source: Corless 2012, np link).

In Barcelona last year, a gallery that screened The Forgotten Space was visited by many of the indignados who were protesting nearby. In Oakland, Occupy activists planned to show a pirated version of the film on a temporary screen they installed after blocking some of the streets in the port area (Source: Sandhu 2012, np link).

I wish Allan [Sekula] would work on a second film which would deal with the consumers. Us, as recipients of the goods of the container because I think there is a certain dimension of passivity that lets the consumer get away with not being recognised … responsible for their participation in the process (Source: Burris 2011, np link).