Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 148

The Destruction of Memory
Tim Slade
Tim Slade’s films have screened at more than 70 international film festivals. He has won a Gold
Plaque at the Chicago HUGO Television Awards, and was nominated for awards at the Banff
World Television Festival, the International Documentary Association Awards, and the Australian
Film Institute Awards. Other documentary films include Blank Canvas and Musical Renegades.
He studied film at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
In ����, I read Robert Bevan’s The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War.
The book is an exploration of intentional cultural destruction and its use as
a tool of warfare. Cultural destruction in this book becomes a type of war
in its own right, in which the targets are buildings and monuments rather
than an opposing army or enemy population. Bevan, an English heritage
architect, writer and journalist, skillfully invests the book with urgency
and revelation. Bevan draws out the crucial relationship between physical
attacks on a people and simultaneous attacks on their cultural identity, as
part of a concerted attempt by the perpetrator to erase the group’s trace and
singular presence.
Historical events such as the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of
Bamiyan in ����, the horrors of Kristallnacht and the fate of Carthage were
known to me. But I did not know the extent to which the dynamics of this
pervasive and deliberate process receded into the fog of war and conflict.
Often seeming or being passed off as collateral damage, cultural destruction
is an insidious process in which history, present, and future of a people can
be effectively erased. People are more than their human form. Their cultural
artefacts – their books, their buildings, their monuments, are where their
collective identity is stored. When they are destroyed, so is this identity.
I embarked on adapting Bevan’s book as a documentary in mid ����, and the
completed film was released in ���� at a time when tragic ongoing events in
Syria, Iraq and elsewhere gave the message of Robert Bevan’s book and the
film an extra urgency. Despite humanity’s attempts to preserve its heritage,
Bevan’s message remains important: the general public as well as politicians,
military personnel, lawyers and policy makers ¬– need to continue to hear it.
147