SKRA (Image, Son, Kinescope et Réalisations Audiovisuelles, meaning “spark” in Russian), an independent production and distribution company, currently boasts a catalogue of over 160 films.
ISKRA’s origins lie in the story of Slon (Service de Lancement des Œuvres Nouvelles [Service for the Launch of New Works], meaning “elephant” in Russian). And “Slon was born from an obvious truth: that traditional cinema structures, through the predominant role they assign to money, constitute in themselves a censorship heavier than all other forms of censorship. Hence Slon, which is not a company, but a tool—defined by those who practically participate in it—and justified by its catalogue of films, films THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST!”
More than fifty years later, ISKRA can still lay claim to this Manifesto, which dates back to 1971, three years after the founding of the cooperative (born to produce Loin du Viêt-Nam [Far from Vietnam] and À bientôt j’espère [Be Seeing You, Hopefully], two collective works led by Chris Marker)—even if the conditions of the struggle have evolved. After all, are production sources and distribution channels any more open today to difference, to salutary dissent, or to the screening of carefully buried truths? In 2002, is it not still about using images and sounds to “bear witness, encourage reflection, and give a voice to minority groups, whether in hardship or in conflict”—in a word, to assert an inalienable right to the image for everyone?
Is it not about, both then and now (and tomorrow too, as long as oppression persists), echoing the struggles of Besançon and Santiago de Chile; reporting on critical situations in Val Fourré, the French countryside, Lebanon, or the Moulinex factory in Mamers; acting as a loudspeaker (“…one cannot fight in a whisper…”) to expose the scandals of nuclear power or Diethylstilbestrol (DES); and serving as a refuge and a darkroom for unparalleled cinematic experiments? These are works that must always be discovered so as not to lose hope in an art form so often hijacked and domesticated: Fernand Deligny, Josée Manenti, and Jean-Pierre Daniel’s exemplary Le Moindre Geste [The Slightest Gesture], but also Michel Desrois’s Lettre à mon ami Pol Cèbe [Letter to My Friend Pol Cèbe] and Jean-Pierre Thiébaud’s Le Traîneau-Échelle [The Ladder-Sled]—two films on the fringes of militant cinema, singular offshoots of the “Medvedkin Groups,” and the unprecedented fruits of a successful graft between a Parisian production structure and provincial working-class filmmakers.
Far from any armchair humanism, but instead developing a human-scale logistics tailored to the shifting realities on the ground—filming in 16mm and video, and being more pragmatic than dogmatic—Slon-ISKRA always takes a social and political state of affairs as its starting point. Each subject then invents the form that suits it, the one the subject itself demands. For ISKRA (perhaps a foundational influence from Marker?) has this unique characteristic: it views aesthetics as a form of politics, and form as both a necessity and a strength. It is this documented perspective on things that defines ISKRA films and leaves a lasting impression; it is this openness that shapes the contours of the catalogue, and this rigor that gives it its value.</p
In the credits of Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), Marker pays tribute to the “countless cameramen, sound recordists, witnesses, and militants whose work constantly opposes that of the Powers That Be, who would have us without memory.” Since the very beginning, this work has also been that of Iskra.