Open Letter from Jem Cohen

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Hello, I'm reposting this open letter from Jem Cohen from nettime. I thought this incident & issue would be of interest to NowPublic readers.

--minty

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Hello. I'm attaching an open letter regarding an incident that took 
place in January. I was stopped from filming out of a train window and
had my  film confiscated and turned over to the Joint Terrorism Task
Force and the  FBI.

I went to the ACLU,
and have been assisted by a lawyer at the NYCLU  (New York Civil
Liberties Union). I wrote a piece about it and included the attached
letter in the last issue of Filmmaker Magazine.

Recently, the lawyer called to say that the FBI was returning the film,
as it had been cleared by the authorities. When I went to pick it up,
I  found that the original box and reel had been sent back, but the
reel was  empty, save for a few inches of film. The matter remains
unresolved, and for me, deeply disturbing. Most of us are inundated
with email, and I had mixed feelings about  sending yet another mass
missive. Please forgive the intrusion. I'm not asking for you to do
anything, and that includes write me back. I'm sending this simply
because I feel that people should know about such incidents. You are
welcome to pass along the attached letter, although  I would prefer
that my email address not be made entirely public. I would be glad to
talk to the press about it, although an editor I  spoke to at the New
York Times suggested that it might not be of interest to the media
because such incidents are becoming too commonplace.

Thank you for having a
look.
 Sincerely,

Jem
Cohen

 
---------------

 
An open
letter to the film and arts community:

 
On January 7th, 2005, I
was filming from the window of an Amtrak train going from New
York to Washington D.C., and my film was confiscated by  police,
due to supposed national security concerns. At first, I was told by a  ticket taker that I couldn't shoot because I was in the 'quiet
car,' but when  I got
ready to move, he said I couldn't shoot at
all. I explained that I was  a filmmaker who'd done this for
years, and politely asked to speak with someone else about it. I stopped
filming, waited, and asked again, but  no one came. When the
train stopped in Philadelphia, at least four uniformed
officers
entered the car and demanded that I step off the train with  the
camera. They took my personal information and told me to give them the 
film from the camera. Not wanting to ruin it, I insisted on rewinding
the  roll, which I then gave up. Upon arrival in D.C., I was
immediately met and
questioned by more officials, this time out of
uniform. My film has apparently been given to the Joint Terrorism Task
Force, and then to  the F.B.I. As of this writing, I have not
been able to get it back. (I  took my case to the American Civil
Liberties Union, who are working on it). I'd been shooting in
16mm, using an old, hand-wound Bolex. I was
filming the passing
landscape as I've often done over the past 15 years. As a 
filmmaker who does most of my work in a documentary mode and often on
the  street, my role is to record the world as it is and as it
unfolds. I build  projects from an archive of footage collected
in my daily wanderings, and in  travels across this country and
overseas. I film buildings and passersby, the  sky, streets, and
waterways; the structures that make up our cities, life as it
is lived. I cannot pre-plan and attempt to obtain permits every time that I shoot; it is an inherently spontaneous act done in response to
daily life and unannounced events.

I believe
that it is the work and responsibility of artists to create such
a record so that we can better understand, and future generations can  know, how we lived, what we build, what changes, and what
disappears. This  has been the work of documentarians and
artists including Mathew Brady, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Helen
Levitt, Gary Winogrand, Robert Frank, and so on. Street
shooting is one of the cornerstones of photography itself, and it
is facing serious new threats, some declared, many not. In New York, the MTA
 apparently intends to forbid all unpermitted photography of
and from its trains and subways. I have heard about a film
location scout in  upstate New York being interrogated for
hours, even after presenting clear documentation that he was
working for a legitimate production company; about documentary
crews having their license plates called in and being visited by the FBI; about photojournalists working for the New York Times being stopped from doing the work that they have always done.

As a filmmaker, I am concerned about what this kind of clampdown means 
both to our livelihood and to the public, historical record. As a
citizen,  I am concerned about a climate in which a person can
be pulled off of a train and
have their property confiscated
without warning or redress.
 I am also, frankly, concerned about
terrorism, and genuine threats to our lives and cities. This
leads me to ask if these are efficient,  intelligent allotments
of limited law enforcement resources and personnel. Does stopping us from photographing a bridge make us safer when anybody can
search  the internet and see countless photographs of the same
bridge? Are all of  those photographs to be somehow suppressed?
Given that anyone can purchase a video recorder with a lens the
size of a shirtbutton or any number of hidden camera devices, are the
people openly taking pictures such an actual  threat? What about
all of those cell phones with cameras? As Ben Franklin said: "They that
give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."  Are we even gaining any safety?
Given that intimidation and the curtailing of our freedom are exactly what terrorists want, I wonder if these infringements of our civil  liberties are not in fact a form of
capitulation.

            I write this to urge the film and arts
communities to keep a record of such incidents and to notify
their representatives in Congress and such organizations as the
ACLU when they occur. This is also a call to publications, curators, and
programmers:  I recommend that you make the public aware of what
important past work would not exist if these restrictions had been in
place.

 Lastly, I write this to encourage a more general
awareness of the ways in which, under the rubric of an endless
"war on terror," we are seeing  the denigration of due process,
free speech, and the right to privacy,  which are crucial safeguards of a free and democratic society.

As printed
in Filmmaker Magazine, Spring 2005

Postscript:

 I was recently informed by my contact lawyer at the
New York Civil Liberties Union office that the FBI was
returning my film, as it had been cleared by the authorities.
When I got to the office I was relieved to see the original
film container. Unfortunately, the reel inside it was empty, save for a
few inches of film.

 One bit of great news: faced with
opposition from the public and the  NYCLU, the MTA has backed
down from its proposal to ban photography in and of the
subways.