Our speaker for kinetcs #7 (The War Game + Pandora’s Box) is Campbell Craig, Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. Craig has held senior fellowships at Yale University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the European University Institute, and, most recently, at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol. He has given invited lectures at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Chicago, Columbia, Cambridge, Sciences-Po, the Free University of Berlin, the London School of Economics, University of Copenhagen, and other universities.

This from the Daily Express when ‘The War Game’ was made - of note both for its determination to fly in the face of prevailing wisdom and in retrospect for the continuity of its editorial line as libertarian, right-wing and populist: 

‘MUDDLE-MINDED MR. WATKINS. This monstrous misrepresentation so accurately mirrors the claims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that it is a mystery how the BBC was induced to put up 10,000 pounds to make the film, which could more accurately be called ‘The C.N.D. Game.’

‘Line Describing a Cone’ (Anthony McCall, USA, 1973)

‘Daphne (Purple Red)’ (Sophie Michael, UK, 2014)

Film strips from ‘Existence is Song’, part of 'The Dante Quartet’ (Stan Brakhage, USA, 1987).

“Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with borders, a government, a flag and a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognized by any other nation state. And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Which is why my letter to Max was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea, a wink to the world of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi that Maxim Gvinjia seems to inhabit. But my letter arrived, and somehow fiction has penetrated the real.”

And so Eric Baudelaire launched on a letter writing campaign, 74 letters sent over 74 days, a script for a voiceover to a film in which Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the unrecognized state of Abkhazia, becomes the narrator. The film is structured by this exchange: letters that should not have arrived and yet somehow reached Max, his recorded responses, and images that Eric Baudelaire filmed in Abkhazia once their correspondence ended.

‘As in The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images... (FID 2011), the tools of cinema are not only at the service of information, but also act as makers of artefacts. What landscape footage is shown here: that of an emerging nation or that of an old country? The mute landscape of nature or the talkative one of politics? Once again, Baudelaire drags us into the obscure and twisted meanders of history.’ —Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille 2014