Abstract
On 14 th March, 2006 , The Road to Guantánamo (Whitecross, 1 Winterbottom) became the first film ever to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on broadcast television, on DVD and over the internet for streaming or downloading. This unprecedented adoption of a "day-date" release schedule by the film"s British distributor is a sign that, as a consequence of shifts in film-viewing practices, the cinema screen is no longer the first choice of platform for audiences. Releasing a film in several media formats simultaneously cuts the distribution costs (reducing the number of prints that need to be struck, and reducing the advertising costs, since the film only needs to be marketed once), and makes the distribution of such low-budget films as this £1.45m production viable. Importantly, however, simultaneous distribution allows a film like The Road to Guantánamo to reach a much wider audience on its immediate release than it might otherwise address if it were released only into cinemas in the first instance before being released over several months on satellite or cable, on DVD and video, and then, finally, on free-to-air broadcast TV. It can circulate in the public sphere in a significant and very particular way. On the one hand this "represents the emergence of 1 Although Mat Whitecross, who has been employed by Michael Winterbottom"s production company, Revolution Films, in a range of roles from runner to editor, is credited as co-director of The Road to Guantánamo, this article discusses the film primarily in relation to other films directed by Winterbottom. This is not to imply that Whitecross made no significant creative or authorial contribution to the film. Rather, analysing this film in relation to Winterbottom"s other work makes visible the way The Road to Guantánamo develops and explores the political and activist potential of popular cinema. new business models in film that seek to capitalize on the economics of consumer demand to access content when, and where, they want it" while also pre-empting "piracy" (Davies and Withers, 2006: 61). On the other, it exploits the technical developments that facilitate this commercial shift in order to reach large international audiences quickly. 2 There is, arguably, a relationship between the mode of production and distribution and the film"s capacity to intervene in the transnational circulation of mediated representations of the "war on terror". The simultaneous dissemination of the film in different formats allows the film to contribute to debates about terror and democracy and the legitimacy of the Guantánamo prison in a particularly direct and rapid way by addressing and generating multiple, overlapping publics through these different media. In recounting or making public the experiences of three British men imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, and perhaps provoking, or intervening in, broader debates about Britain"s alliance with the US and the "coalition of the willing", the invasion of Iraq, and "extraordinary rendition", the film is also engaged with making publics, with the project of generating an active/activist audience. The Road to Guantánamo is a film about the "war on terror" on which the US and its allies embarked in response to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC in September 2001. Rather than attempting to offer a comprehensive overview of this historical passage, however, the film explores these events synecdochically through a narrowly focused account of the terrifying and absurd experiences of a handful of 2 While the film remains available for streaming or downloading from the Channel 4 website at a fee, a complete low-resolution copy of the film can also be freely obtained from the file-sharing site, Google Video, where it can be viewed online or downloaded for viewing on a portable media player, greatly extending the transnational mobility of the film. individuals who are inadvertently swept up in the chaotic opening stages of the war. Telling the story of three British-Asian tourists who were arrested in Afghanistan and later removed to Guantánamo Bay prison where they were interrogated and tortured for months, the film offers a coolly detailed and unsensational account of the experiences of these men as they are transported across national borders and into the interstitial, heterotopic spaces of prisons and internment camps. Thus The Road to Guantánamo provides a counterpoint to the accounts of reporters and camera crews "embedded" with US and UK troops that have dominated coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Interviewed during the production of the film, co-director Michael Winterbottom suggested that the film adopts a "double perspective" from the point of view of western spectators (Anon 2006b: 11) . That is to say, we are shown events from a different angle of vision, that of marginal or excluded figures, revealing aspects of the scene that would otherwise have remained hidden from sight. In a sense, then, the film constitutes a "reverse shot", returning the mediated gaze of the western spectator. The film seems to have been conceived as an intervention in the transnational media spectacle of the "war on terror" in a very precise and partial way, as a competing or contestatory narrative. Winterbottom"s comment acknowledges the limited possibilities open to (art-house) film-makers or commentators in challenging or responding critically to the homogeneous and ubiquitous representations of the war within carefully managed Western news media. At the same time, he recognizes the distance between the activist function of the film and that of news reportage which, as film theorist Bill Nichols observes, "urges us to look but not care, see but not act, know but not change. The news exists less to orient us toward action than to perpetuate itself as commodity, something to be fetishized and consumed" (Nichols 1991: 194 ). Winterbottom"s comment also acknowledges the limitations of any individual account of the war, accepting that a single film can only ever offer a provisional, questionable narrative, rather than a true and definitive account of any set of events. Winterbottom, therefore, invites us to regard The Road to Guantánamo not as a singular historical document, but rather as a complicating account that qualifies or puts into play other accounts of the war and that, in turn, will be read in relation to them. The term, "double perspective", is thus an accurate description of the film"s status as it circulates around the screens of Western Europe and the US and in discourses about the "war on terror". It is also an accurate and suggestive description of the political/textual strategies employed by the film. The film is structured around a double perspective in its visible blending of documentary actuality with dramatized re-enactment and one of the consequences of the film"s assemblage from this "material" is that its hybrid composition and unstable textual status remains subtly visible. The double perspective is incorporated into the film, to produce multiple perspectives. Rather than a clear view of events, then, the film induces a double vision of the various activities grouped and legitimated under the name of "warfare". A similar strategy of internal doubling (and a consciousness of context) may be found elsewhere in Winterbottom"s work. In an essay on recent transnational films concerned with immigration, Yosefa Loshitsky has argued that Winterbottom"s earlier film, In This World, employs a similar structural device of double perspectives. The film recounts the wretched journey of two young refugees from the Shamshattoo refugee camp on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border to Britain in search of a liveable life, and Loshitsky suggests that it refuses to resolve the image by privileging one perspective over the other. Instead, the film maintains a tension between the spectator"s touristic gaze, and that of the refugees, Jamal and Enayat, producing a complex "dialectics of gazes": 3 See Bennett and Tyler 2007 for a discussion of the problematic figure of the child refugee in Winterbottom‟s work. The spectator"s gaze (mimicking the tourist"s gaze) is negated by the refugee"s gaze. One contradicts the other. While one gaze is in search of pleasure (even an involuntary one), the other seeks survival […] The spectator"s gaze […] oscillates between the two gazes, the pleasure-seeking gaze of the tourist and the refuge-seeking refugee"s gaze. This oscillation between tourism and "poorism" is used in In This World has a distanciation effect, resulting in a Brechtian drama of alienation (Loshitsky 2006: 753) However, the distanciation effect of The Road to Guantánamo is quite different since the central figures are British and also, crucially, adults. 3 The result is in some respects a subtler play of perspectives. On the one hand, the pleasure-seeking touristic gaze of the spectator is frustrated since the film eschews the rich use of colour and striking images of landscape that characterize In This World in favour of a muted colour scheme (punctuated by the bright orange of the jumpsuits worn by the inmates at Guantánamo) and a claustrophobic emphasis on the interiors of vehicles, rooms, internment camps and prison cells. On the other hand, the film collapses an opposition between the gaze of the spectator and that of the main characters since they quite literally embody the touristic gaze. However, this alignment of gazes has the potential to produce a different sort of discomfort since, while Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul set out from Britain as tourists at the beginning of the film, as British-Asians their non-white bodies don"t correspond to the image of a Western traveller and this, we can infer, is the main reason for the subsequent repeated misrecognition of them as Islamist fighters or terrorists. This incompatibility may well also be the source of an uncomfortable identificatory relationship for white viewers, interfering with a conventional tendency to identify with a (white) narrative protagonist since, although they are not "other" in the same sense as the refugees in In This World, their hyphenated ethnic identities and bodies mark them as visibly different. The Road to Guantánamo tells the true story of four British-Asian men from Tipton in the Midlands, Iqbal, Ahmed, Rasul and Monir Ali. The film opens with the four friends flying to Pakistan in September 2001 to attend Iqbal"s wedding. Once there they take the opportunity to travel around Pakistan as sight-seers and then decide to cross the border to Afghanistan after hearing an Imam in a mosque call for volunteers to go to offer help to its impoverished population. Persuaded that the country isn"t about to be attacked, with time on their hands and eager for both "the experience" and the "big naans" you can find there, they cross the border. The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan begins shortly after they arrive in Kandahar in the south and they subsequently find themselves stranded in the capital, Kabul, unable to arrange passage back to Pakistan. In error, they take a minibus north to Kunduz province, which is on the frontline between Taliban forces and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. One of the four friends, Monir Ali, is separated (and is presumed to have been killed) during the evacuation of Kunduz and the remaining three are captured by the Northern Alliance along with foreign fighters after the truck convoy they are in is bombed by US aircraft. Narrowly avoiding execution at the hands of the Northern Alliance soldiers, they are imprisoned in Sheberghan before being handed over to US marines who detain them at Kandahar air-base. There they are interrogated and beaten both by the SAS and US soldiers. In early 2002 they are flown from Kandahar to the makeshift detention centre, Camp X-Ray (and later moved to the purpose-built prison, Camp Delta) at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba where they are imprisoned and interrogated by inquisitors from MI5 and the US. They are abused, beaten, tortured and held in isolation cells for months before finally being returned to the UK in March 2004 over two years later and released without charges. The film finishes, in a gesture towards conventional narrative resolution, with the three friends themselves, rather than the actors, returning to Pakistan for Asif"s wedding. Michael Winterbottom describes The Road to Guantánamo as "part-road movie, part-war film, part-prison movie" and while this is a broadly accurate outline of the sequence in which events take place within the film, it is also somewhat disingenuous since Winterbottom"s film has little in common with the melodrama and eroticized fascination with masculinity and homosociality that is often intrinsic to these genres (Anon. 2006b: 11) . The Road to Guantánamo is not a film about heroic resistance and endurance, and unlike many examples of the genres Winterbottom cites, with its flat, matter-of-fact style, the film does not invite us to read it as allegory or myth. However, what Winterbottom"s description of the film as an unlikely assemblage of disparate generic elements does suggest effectively is the somewhat inconsistent structure of this hybrid film that splices together interviews with the three men, dramatized reconstructions of their experiences, documentary material and archive news footage. Thus, the film has a heterogeneous form, combining and juxtaposing different orders of representational material without privileging one over another. This formal disunity or incoherence is a consistent feature of Winterbottom"s work. The prolific director has produced films in a wide range of genres such as "postheritage" costume dramas (Jude (1996 ), The Claim (2000) ) and romantic comedies (Go Now (1995) , With or Without You (1999)), a sexually explicit art-house film ( 9 Songs (2004)), a road movie (Butterfly Kiss (1995)), a war film (Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)) and a science fiction film (Code 46 (2003) ). Like The Road to Guantánamo, all of these films sit uneasily in any particular generic category. They are often formally complex and playful texts that foreground the signs of the film"s construction or employ metanarrative devices such as characters that comment upon the film they are part of, or the placing of real historical individuals alongside the actors who play them in the film. The imbrication of documentary and drama is nevertheless a particularly significant and appropriate device for the exploration of some of the questions raised by The Road to Guantánamo with regard to visibility, representation and mediation, not least because of the ethically/ontologically/generically problematic status of the dramatized documentary. Winterbottom has stated (echoing ethnographic film-maker Jean Rouch) foot_1 that, "I don"t think there"s a border between fiction and reality". foot_2 While the delineation of this boundary in cinema may be unclear or mobile, nevertheless it is certainly the case that a number of his films are preoccupied with this border, crossing and re-crossing it repeatedly to varying effects. Film theorist Bill Nichols suggests that films that mix documentary footage with filmed reconstructions in the interests of spectatorial engagement, or in order to compensate for the absence of useable or extant material, inevitably "trade documentary authenticity for fictional identification" (Nichols 1991: 250) . This practice involves film-makers in ethical and political compromises, he argues, and also risks undermining the "credibility" of a film since the result of such a collocation of actuality and staged sequences is that: the special indexical bond between image and historical referent is ruptured. In a re-enactment, the bond is still between the image and something that occurred in front of the camera but what occurred occurred for the camera (Nichols 1991: 21) . Nichols recognizes that "historical indexicality" can never be guaranteed since "one person"s historical evidence is another person"s fiction"; nevertheless, he insists that documentary and fiction are distinguished fundamentally by their referential function (161). As he explains, "Documentary shares the properties of a text with other fictions […] but it addresses the world in which we live rather than worlds in which we may imagine living" (112). Responding to Nichols"s argument, Neil Paget argues that this apparently clear distinction is untenable in relation to the dramatized documentary, a form that provocatively posits an equivalence between documentary and fiction, and that remains directed towards lived reality: From its "moment of presentation" in fictional, dramatic form dramadoc/docudrama points beyond the realm of fiction to a realm of nonfiction that is always already lived. In one sense, all drama aspires to this condition, but this kind of drama, by pointing at an explicit rather than implicit reality, "indexes" that explicit reality in ways that are difficult to ignore even if we deny them (Paget 1998: 136) . In this respect, for Paget, an insistence upon the irreducible distinction between drama and documentary is unhelpful in its disregard for the historical realities which dramatized documentaries both represent and trouble. While stating that "some form of truth is the always receding goal of documentary film", Linda Williams contends that the political value of such films lies not in a demystificatory capacity to lay bare to us the truth of contemporary/historical reality, but in their capacity to intervene in the mediated public sphere (Williams 1998: 393) . Williams acknowledges that the specific cultural context in which films are viewed will necessarily frame their meaning and so the truths represented or embodied by a particularly film are inevitably relative and partial, though not necessarily insignificant or ineffective. However, in the strategic deployment of staged scenes and reconstructions, documentary films can articulate "contingent" truths that function to counter dangerous or destructive fictions. Thus for Williams: and verisimilar fictional space are constituted from the same worldly “stuff” – the former giving existential ballast to the „realism‟ of the latter even as its specificity is usually bracketed and put out of play and on the sidelines of our consciousness (Sobchack 2004: 275). The choice is not between two entirely separate regimes of truth and fiction. The choice, rather, is in strategies of fiction for the approach to relative truths. Documentary is not fiction and should not be conflated with it. But documentary can and should use all the strategies of fictional construction to get at truths. In other words, the truth-value of documentaries is that they can work to challenge, contradict, qualify or affirm univocal truth claims already in circulation; they are texts that can interfere with the contexts through which they move, generating alternative or multiple perspectives. In bringing together different orders of material, The Road to Guantánamo constitutes a troubling intervention amid the proliferation of justificatory, belligerent or putatively "even-handed", liberal representations of the Guantánamo Bay prison and the wider conduct of the "war on terror". In this film, the authenticity of those shots and scenes that appear to be unstaged gives a greater impact to those moments that are apparently dramatized, a quality that Vivian Sobchack describes as the "charge of the real" (Sobchack 2004 ). Writing on the interplay between represented reality and irreality in fiction films that incorporate documentary elements -such as real historical figures or star couples who play fictional couples -Sobchack has argued that the distinction between these supposedly different elements of a film turns as much on the extra-textual knowledge and expectations with which films are viewed, as it does on any indexical properties or textual qualities of the film image. In a sense then, the distinction between documentary and fiction film is more a distinction between different modes of spectatorship or consciousness, than a distinction between irreducibly different sequences of film. Moreover, Sobchack observes that our mode of spectatorial engagement is mobile or distracted, so that we typically move between these different modes of consciousness in the course of viewing a film. When, for example, we watch a scene with an actor playing a fictional character on a crowded city street we may find our attention wanders to fall on the people in the surrounding crowd as we reflect on whether they know they are in a film: As we scrutinize their faces for signs of possible awareness of the camera filming them or of what suddenly becomes not the character but the actress acting in their midst, they no longer are generalized in status, no longer merely quasi characters necessary to the verisimilitude of the realist mise-en-scène. Rather, they become for us real people, ambiguous existential ciphers (Sobchack 2004: 275) . Many of the early scenes of The Road to Guantánamo seem to have been shot guerrilla-style with the actors apparently improvising as they travel around Pakistan and Afghanistan on foot and in various forms of transport, and the scenario Sobchack describes characterizes well the experience of watching many scenes in this film. 6 They pose the question not so much whether or not this is documentarya question that is attendant on viewing any film or TV documentary and that is, in any case, unanswerablebut to what degree a particular scene may be considered to be documentary. As Sobchack suggests, this question may just as easily be posed by a fiction film since a shift of perspective, in which we recognize that what we are watching is a filmed record of a staged event, is a common experience of filmviewing. Indeed, we could ask whether this layered mode of spectatorship, a double perspective of a different order, always characterizes film-viewing. For example, the success of a star performance is dependent upon our recognition that it is, precisely, a performance, no matter how unmediated, before a camera: For a moment, then, in the midst of a fiction, we find ourselves in a documentary. This quite common experience demonstrates that although documentary and fictional consciousness are incommensurable, they are compossible in any given film. Furthermore, it demonstrates that documentary 6 The film was shot in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Britain. and verisimilar fictional space are constituted from the same worldly "stuff"the former giving existential ballast to the "realism" of the latter even as its specificity is usually bracketed and put out of play and on the sidelines of our consciousness (Sobchack 2004: 275) . The Road to Guantánamo, more clearly, perhaps, than any of Winterbottom"s other films, is structured from this heterogeneous "worldly "stuff"", in an aggregate of fiction and documentary. Rather than carefully bracketing the documentary material and pushing it safely to the margins, on the contrary Winterbottom"s films put it into play with the fictional components, and so watching The Road to Guantánamo it is frequently unclear whether we are watching actuality or drama. The effect of this complex "double perspective" is that the dramatic reconstructions and conjectured sequences are given a "charge of reality" from the documentary material (rather than being "exposed" by this juxtaposition as fictional), while the distance between the documentary and reconstruction is largely maintained and made visible. At the same time, however, since the dramatized elements of the films are at times indistinguishable from documentary due to the use of improvisation, hand-held cameras, non-actors, and guerrilla-style shooting on location with hidden microphones, the reliability of the documentary sequences is, in turn, put into question. For instance, the scene in which the four friends are shown travelling across the border into Afghanistan opens with a caption, "PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN BORDER 13 OCTOBER 2001" superimposed on what appears to be an excerpt from a contemporaneous British TV news report or documentary as it is accompanied by this fragmentary voice-over: "Border trade continues unimpeded. Among those crossing are brave Afghan aid workers. The people rely on them for food and healthcare and to explain their needs to the outside world". A montage of shots of shifting crowds of people, soldiers, motorbikes and trucks, is intercut with shots of the actors making their way across the border on foot or riding pillion on motorcycles.
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