Resolution 978 HD observes how technology mediated and conditioned the 2009-10 trial of François Bazaramba, a Rwandan citizen exiled in Finland, who was convicted for his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Conducted under universal jurisdiction, the trial took place in Rwanda and Tanzania, making use of modern videoconferencing technologies to transmit the legal proceedings to and from Bazaramba.

Via unearthed archival footage, obtained from a courtroom technician (or so the story tells us), Model Court’s Resolution 978 HD examines a strange and precedential case in the meeting of media and the law. On trial for participating in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is François Bazaramba, or rather a pixelated approximation of him, his digital presence a stand-in for his body, his voice lagging five seconds behind his face. The Finnish court has travelled 7000 kilometres to try him in his home country, as he sits in a Helsinki jail.

Resolution 978 HD does not critique the use of telepresence technologies in a legal context. Rather, the narrative—split up using abrupt test-card inter-titles reading “TRANSLATION” and “CRIME SCENE”—tests the idea of universal jurisdiction and its application. It asks how this trial, which appears as something of a fool’s errand, articulates the processes and technologies that have enabled the space of the camera and its images to transcend the jurisdictional limits of nation states. But it also provides an unsettling, and at times comedic, portrait of how deeply our beliefs in universalism, and the imagined smoothness of globalisation, diffuse a material corpus to the digital, articulating a particularly contemporary notion of habeas corpus. How many pixels does it take to present an absent body as a legitimate entity?

Much of the humour of the film derives from this miscalculation, of the mishaps of mundane material reality vs. the imagined, de-territorialised connectivity that perhaps instigated the investigation, or at least its parameters. In one scene, the narrator explains that the translation must go via a third interlocutor, first into Swedish or French, and back again, each time, as there is no interpreter between Kinyarwanda and Finnish. But this cyclical translation, and its losses and glitches, occurs too in the technological layering which at times utterly overwhelms the communication process. From the lens to the camera sensor, to the video conferencing codec, to the local internet hub, to the gateway, satellite, and finally to Bazaramba’s prison cell, and back again, each layer introduces new channel noise, and new delay. We witness as the court’s ethos of universal justice—an idea devoid of form or body—breaks down into stuttering, embedded fragments that cannot escape their context. Cables are made visible, knowable, by their failure. Power cuts plunge the scene into darkness, and torrential rain continually halts proceedings, so loud the trial cannot hear itself, and yet it sounds to us, the viewers, like the fizzing static of broken hardware.

We seem to witness, live, the unravelling of what Susan Sontag called “the world-as-image”, along with its accompanying idea of “the human family”, glued together by the surface of the image, which the trial relies on. A humanity wronged according to the principle of erga omnes—“towards all”. Nowhere is this clearer, and more painful, than in the re-calibrating of the camera’s exposure settings, from a white-friendly “zebra 70”, to one that can register the nuance of the black faces. In a strange shot—reminiscent of Broomberg and Chanarin’s project, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light (2012), which explored the “racist” exposure of Kodak film optimised only for white faces—a black Rwandan man stands beside a Finnish visitor, the camera adjusting and zooming in on their faces, readjusting to their skin tones, to bring the Rwandan face into the light, and into focus.[1] It is surreal, uncomfortable—a visual exercise of the power relations of the trial, and its underlying necessary myth.

The footage of this Finnish-led trial, as mediated by Model Court, reveals the unequal relations written into the very technology that apparently serves to extend and dissolve jurisdictional divides. But it also reveals a resolute faith in the image: ignoring the glitches and cock-ups which are written into the reality of telepresence, the trial exercises the belief that, as Ariella Azoulay has written, photography can serve as a basis for a “civil supra-state framework”.[2] And yet, the film witnesses the breaking-down of this idea, live: each lost connection and lagging delay serve to illuminate the awkward meeting of myth and reality, where post-colonial European heroism stumbles over the very technologies which promise to extend its power outwards.

1. Artists Broomberg and Chanarin refer also to Jean-Luc Godard’s refusal to shoot on Kodak film stock during a 1977 trip to Mozambique, on the grounds that it was “inherently racist”.

2. Ariella Azoulay in “The Family of Man: A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights” inThe Human Snapshot, 2013 (LUMA Foundation, Sternberg Press and CCS Bard).

Credits

A film by 

Model Court
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Lorenzo Pezzani
Oliver Rees

Material from the archive of Thomas Elfgren

Edited by Lasse Johansson

Produced by Robert Leckie

Simultaneous Translator Kirsti Gibbs

With thanks to: Thomas Elfgren, Taru Elfving and HIAP, The Helsinki Court of Appeal, Tom Hirst, Lasse Johansson, Robert Leckie, Juha Lode, The Porvoo District Court, Nora Razian, Eric Rossi, Susan Schuppli, Eyal Weizman

The film was commissioned by Gasworks, with the generous support of European Research Council, Forensic Architecture, HIAP, Danish Arts Council