Go West

The cover version of the Village People song of the same name, reinterpreted by the Pet Shop Boys as a satire on the unification of the systems following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a sense, this clip marks the starting point of the AMERIKA festival: During the 2005 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Shai Heredia, director of Experimenta, approached me to ask if I would like to present a selection from my programme [The Fallen Curtain](http://www.schwierin.de/gefallene.html ‘Opens an external link in a new window’) at her venue in Mumbai. There was just one problem: for Indian audiences, who are unaccustomed to sexuality on screen due to censorship, even an experimental film festival has certain limits. We removed one work from the programme, Amami se vuoi, in which Michael Curran allows his partner to spit into his open mouth – a film that is highly provocative even for Westerners. We kept Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, however, a birth scene shown in close-up with all the details. After all, it was a work for which Brakhage was once nearly shot in the Midwestern United States. The reaction to this film in Mumbai in 2006 was, surprisingly, the same as in Germany: breathless silence. After all the screenings, I asked Shai if there had been any reactions to the films shown. She said people had been very angry about Go West. She called it American propaganda. When I replied that the video was actually from England and was meant to be ironic, she retorted that Indians really hated America, and a bit of irony wouldn’t be enough for them. In the ensuing discussions, I was given a detailed account of all the faults of this abysmally bad country, which was nothing new to me; anti-Americanism is also in vogue in Germany.