Hito Steyerl - November

#VOICEOVER: Hito Steyerl, November, 2004 from KALEIDOSCOPE Videoclub on Vimeo.

"Hito Steyerl's video November (2004) tells the story of one of these images, that of a friend from her youth, Andrea Wolf, as Wolf drifts from B-movie kung-fu fighter to martyr of the Kurdish liberation movement. In between these two extremes, Wolf is given many roles: an 'attractive' woman (as the film's voiceover says) and a friend; a female fighter in a fictional story (who uses martial arts instead of weapons) and an armed revolutionary (who also teaches martial arts to her fellow female fighters); a martyr for the Kurdish cause (executed by Turkish security forces) and a terrorist in hiding (according to the Turkish and German governments). Her two names (Andrea Wolf and Sehît Rohanî, which she adopted when joining the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK) already signify these shifts, but while this change was her choice, the full extent of the transformation of her image was not. As November shows, the destiny of her own image - paraded in the streets of Berlin next to that of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan - from the moment it was captured (in photograph, film or video) was out of her hands."
Quelle: For a Populist Cinema: On Hito Steyerl’s November and Lovely Andrea
By Pablo Lafuente http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.19/populist.cinema.hito.steyerls.november.and.lovely.