Year: 2003 / Original format: black-white 16 mm transferred to DVD / Screening format: DigiBeta / Duration: 21 minutes / Language: English speaking with german or french or italian subtitles
The project Artists' statement Review by Axel Lapp Credits Stills Artists' info Download brochure		In the film Capitulation Project (2003), four performers and a dozen passive extras struggle to come to terms with staging the horrors of war. Their acting fluctuates between brutal renditions of fictional violence, the ostensibly neutral communication of sanctioned historical fact and the dramatisation of subjective testimony. The action takes place on several levels, with the levels overlapping and subverting each other in a variety of ways. The actors keep switching between their own character and the role they are playing in the staging of the Vietnam War. The ‘Civilian’ is both a Vietnamese victim and a revolutionary communard; the ‘Soldier’ is an automated murderer as well as a charming animator for the extras. The ‘Reporter’ is cast as an interpreter in the dramatised conflict and reports on current events in the present of the play; and the ‘Officer’, having announced that they have to “push” two more villages, remarks in an aside that the lieutenant was thinking in military terms at that point. As members of a politically active, experimental theatre group, the four protagonists act out different methods of dealing with history while analysing it at the same time. As a result, they question not only their own understanding of perpetrators and victims but also their own approach and even the very possibility of communicating their subject matter. On the morning of 16 March 1968, American soldiers swept into My Lai. Within a few hours they had murdered several hundred unarmed civilians: old men, women, children. When news and pictures of this bloodbath finally reached the public in the autumn of 1969, a flood of shock and indignation spread throughout the world. In 1970, General Peers was ordered to conduct an official inquiry. Hotly debated both in the United States and elsewhere, the “Peers Report” launched the decline of public support for military intervention in Vietnam. The imagery of Capitulation Project addresses the constantly recurring questions of guilt and violence. The My Lai massacre is used as an exemplum for the investigation of processes that turn people into murderers, and of the consequences such acts have for the survivors. Since objective history can never make this atrocity comprehensible, the actors in the play strive to unravel the many layers of reality through their performance. However, the testimonies used to evoke an image of what happened in My Lai come only from surviving perpetrators – their victims have been irrevocably silenced – and the violence played out on stage reflects the actors’ own preconceptions. Thus, their dramatised approach to reality necessarily remains a fiction and the massacre itself incomprehensible and irreproducible. This piece is a capitulation of the search for truth! Nonetheless, the characters in the film are buoyed by the hope that their investigative work will prevent such atrocities in the future. They realise neither how little the realities of war and of civil society have in common, nor how little the people involved differ. When the actors join in singing about friendship at the end of scene, it sounds to us today like echoes of a distant era when people still believed that songs could change the world. However, despite the historical implications suggested by the acting, by the intensity of the conflict and even by the costumes and hairstyles of the actors, visitors to the exhibition, who walk around in the installation Capitulation Project or sit down on the accompanying stage, do not see a document from the times of the Vietnam war. Nor do they see an authentic re-enactment from the piece Commune by the Performance Group. Only the basics of the scene have been adopted from what is known of the historical performances. Everything else has been developed by Moser / Schwinger in order to produce a drama and a film that exemplify the ways in which violence is filtered through the media. The drama within the film thus functions as an exposition of the entire project. For visitors in the exhibition space, the wooden stage of Capitulation Project becomes a place to reflect on the function of theatre and on the massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Furthermore, the artists’ retrospective look at that historical debate inevitably directs our attention to current events as well. The parallelism of recurrent military conflicts and their historical continuum are as obvious as the divergence in the way people react. The intensity, in the film, of trying to cope with horror is juxtaposed with the passive act of contemporary observation.