Documentarian George Gittoes painting in his Berlin studio

“What irritates me a bit about the fine art world,” director George Gittoes told me this week, “Is if I make a sixty-minute film about Iraq, which I do, I see my sixty-minute program as art, and I don’t the art world has caught up with Andy Warhol and other people like him. They still feel something has to go through a museum before it becomes art.”

So began our epic interview in his publicist’s sprawling West Village conference room. George is unlike most documentarians you’ve seen before, in a great many ways. For one thing, he’d rather be interacting with his subjects, for better or worse, whether it puts him in harm’s way or not. He has been shot at, arrested, and sentenced to death—on more than one occasion. He views news as a form of art, and therefore, warfare falls into this category. But not without lasting affects. “People talk about the psychological damage war does to people, but it also has a damaging spiritual affect. I don’t know how many times, in all the years I’ve been covering war, I’ve been with a bunch of soldiers and there’s one who keeps saying “I want to pop my cherry,” meaning he wants to kill someone. He wants to have contact. They think that once you’ve fought in combat and you’ve killed an enemy, you become a man like it’s a right of passage. I’ve always told them that they don’t want to do that, because it’s stupid. I don’t know how many times that same night, that same soldier has spent the whole night weeping on my chest, my clothes wet with his tears. As soon as you kill someone, you discover that you’ve killed part of your own soul. It’s just a fact.”

Gittoes just released Miscreants of Taliwood, a documentary about the Pakistani Pashto film genre, or, we should say, the dead Pashto genre. Gittoes tells us the story of the artists who make these films having their industry ransacked by fundamentalists and Taliban warlords who believe that films are for infidels and they should no be permitted to exist in their beloved holy land. For the time being, they’ve won, as the entire industry sits in stalemate, waiting for something or someone to intervene. Once again, Gittoes comes to the aid of the people he’s meant to be observing. He has gotten peacekeeping heavy-hitter Oxfam to step in and fund the industry, giving thousands of people their creativity—and careers—back.

AMC’s Norm Schrager tells us about Miscreants of Taliwood: “When it comes to bizarre films, Pashto movies are in a class by themselves. The cheaply made products of a once-thriving Pakistani industry have an unmistakable style, slathered in operatic overacting, automatic weapons and strange song-and-dance numbers — they’re like the twisted step-cousins to Bollywood features. We Westerners would instantly call them ‘cult.’ Australian artist George Gittoes would call them home. In the chaotic, entertaining Miscreants, Gittoes continues his mission to deliver art in the world’s danger zones, setting up Pashto productions on deadly Pakistani ground for two years, flaunting a love of cinema right under the Taliban’s nose.

“But Gittoes’ aim is true. He intends to expose the ways in which widespread control of media and arts can destroy an entire society. Smartly, he digs deep within the Pakistani culture, befriending one of the local DVD shop owners, talking with straight men who secretly engage in gay relations, and interviewing Peshawar intellectuals who have clear theories about the downfall of art and thought. It adds up to an illuminating look at street-level extremism, far from the evening news. And it’s all told with ridiculously crude editing and graphics, much like the populist Pashto films themselves.”

SPREAD ArtCulture was able to sit down and get George talking.

SPREAD ArtCulture: How is the film being received?

George Gittoes: A lot of people have said a great many stupid things in reviews about the film. Variety said, “We’re on the Taliban’s side. These films are so bad that we’re glad they’re closing them down.” I hate that. The poor guys that make the films have to follow a bit of a formula, as they’re supplying them to a mostly illiterate audience. There are no financers there. Some of these directors have made more films than anyone in Hollywood, and when they finally get this funding from Oxfam, they’re going to be able to make the films that they want to make. It’s going to be really exciting.

SAC: What gave you the idea to do this film?

GG: I’ve been making films about war, with an element of art, for more than thirty years. In 1986, I made Bullets of the Poets, which was in Nicaragua, and features the women who were fighting the Contra. I focused on the women poets who were doing this amazing existential poetry that was inspired by Ernesto Cardinal, and at the same time they’re going out and killing people. So it’s a bit of a contradiction that you can be a woman and you can be a poet and have all that sensitivity, and you can still believe in something enough to go out and kill for it, and kill lots of people. I’ve always done film, photography, writing, and painting, and my history is that in 1968, Celement Greenberg liked my art and helped me come to New York to pursue it. Instead of doing what Greenberg wanted me to do, which was continuing this minimalist tradition, I met up with first Joseph Delaney (a star of the civil right movement). He dared me to go out in the street and make art based on the Civil Rights Movement.

The other person I bumped into was Andy Warhol who let me have access into his movie cameras and his world. This was after he had been shot, when he was around Union Square, and he was very kind to me, and I was inspired by him. I remember saying to Andy, and he already knew this, but I was a stupid nineteen-year old, I said “You know, I think news is pop art,” and he said “Yeeeeah yeah!” in the way that he did. It was something he’d figured out a long time ago.

SAC: As war is a facet of the news, is war art?

GG: My attitude to art is that all good art comes out of discomfort. I don’t have anywhere to live; I love in war zones. I don’t have a dealer and I run huge financial risks making these films. My actual life itself is extremely uncomfortable. Even here, I’ve gone from Houston to Washington, D.C., to here, staying in cheap hotels. Whenever it’s uncomfortable, you’ll be doing fucking good art. Comfort is the artist’s ultimate enemy.

George Gittoes