home
next
previous
swedish

Erik Pauser works as an artist and as a film-maker. Most recently, Pauser's and Johanna Ekstrñm's exhibition Crime was shown at Stockholm's Färgfabriken [The Colour Factory] (autumn of 1999). Earlier, the exhibition toured Sweden, being shown in Umeås Bildmuseet [The Image Museum] and at the Gothenburg Art Museum, among other places. Erik Pauser´s and Johan Söderberg's feature film "Lucky People Center International" will be released in the UK in November of 1999, and in Switzerland and Austria in the winter of 2000. The film has also been distributed in Sweden, Denmark, Canada, and Germany.

Annika Hansson is the chief editor of CRAC in Context http://www.crac.org . At the same time, she contributes to the Moderna Museet web site http://www.modernamuseet.se. Earlier, she was the chief editor of Art Orbit http://www.artnode.se/artorbit .

At the end of the 1960s the Vietnam War reached its culmination. Pictures from the war were cabled out to TV sets around the world. In front of the camera a handcuffed North Vietnamese prisoner was executed on the street by a shot to the head. The year was 1968 and at home in a small Swedish town a boy sat in front of the television and saw the weapon fired against the manÌs temple. The boy was Erik Pauser, eleven years old. He did not forget the picture and thirty years later it provided the starting point for his documentary film "466 Ly To Thai Street" which was produced for the Swedish Broadcasting CorporationÌs television programme Ikon. The title of Erik PauserÌs film is the address in Saigon where the man was killed inf front of photographer Eddie Adams'Ìcamera. This is the point of departure for the film, geographically, historically, politically and, not least, emotionally.

In making the film Pauser, as an artist, has worked in the same fashion as a journalist. From idea to research, travel, interviews, filming, editing and, in due course, the finished product. This way of working is well known to Pauser who has worked in a similar manner with other projects. His view is that much can be discovered from the interview situation in which it is possible to deal with the most sensitive issues - which one would not dare to do in normal social intercourse. and it is precisely the interviews with the two American Vietnam veterans that form a frame to Pauser´s film. The now greying men tell us about what they experienced as young soldiers. They explain how the war influenced them and they seem still, in their own minds, to seek an explanation to the grim actions they themselves were responsible for. With their voices the pictorial sequences become more than just a balck and white archive film from a distant place and a distant time. It becomes relevant here and now.

For a long time Pauser assumed that Adams intention with filming the execution on the street was to protray the cruelty of war. He was obliged to change his view when he discovered that the camera had not just happened to be at this particular place when the execution took place. On the contrary, the prisoner was killed there because the camera was there. The South Vietnamese general Loan, who fired the shot, wanted to set an example and to show it to the rest of the world. The Vietnam War is often termed the first TV war and the general knew this very well. Here Pauser puts his finger on the matter of the photograph as the mediator of facts - what we experience as documentary in a film or a picture. Here he questions the common view of the camera as a "passive", recording eye: just as the camera portrays events like this so it can set them in motion.

It is also the case that the photographer, Eddie Adams - who received the Pulitzer Prize for this picture - deeply regrets having taken the photograph. Not because of the fact that the presence of his camera indirectly caused the brutal death of another human being but because the film sequence ruined the life of the general. The decisiveness and superiority that the general intended to demonstrate appeared, as we know, in a completely different light when the critical voices became sufficiently strong. The picture of the execution marked a turning point in the way the media reported the war and public opinion turned against the USA´s involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Pauser had booked an interview with Adams but the latter withdrew at the last minute. In the documentary an actor reads a quotation from a previous statement by Adams. We learn that the photographer maintained contact with the general for several decades after the picture was taken - as though to salve his bad conscience. The film "466 Ly To Thai StreetÓ rouses many questions, yet there is one that summarizes all the others:"why?" In the veterans´ narration, in Pauser´s quiet but shiningly intense attention and in the sequences of Adams´s pictures, the viewer is forced to conclude that there is no unambiguous "because". Not in this war and not in any other. But with his documentary Pauser does the only thing possible: he communicates a limited section of possible explanations presented by those who were actually there.

Translation by William Jewson