By Juaniyo Arcellana
“It is death to be a poet, to love a poet, to mock a poet.” — Sufi saying
As previously mentioned, one can watch Lavrente Diaz’s latest film Death in the Land of Encantos (sometimes also called Death in the Land of Poets) any which way, almost like a post-postmodern work that can be viewed at one’s own time and pace — a couple of hours or so, then off to work or chores for the next hours, then back for the last several scenes all the way to the credits. There’s no rush, really, so long as one gets a feel of the movie, maybe even catch it at its next screening at another venue to fill in the blanks of the missing parts.
This sort of random viewing as recommended by the director himself is most open to free interpretation, and recalls the landmark novel of the late author, Paris-based Argentine Julio Cortazar, whose Hopscotch suggests an alternative way of reading the work, that is, apart from the usual front to back, the reader can jump from chapter to chapter interspersed throughout the book, really like playing piko with the plot. And though we haven’t finished Hopscotch in its entirety in either style, we liked what we read.
This unconventional movie watching mode we were able to experiment on Feb. 6 when the National Commission for Culture and the Arts screened the nine-hour Death in the Land of Encantos at the NCCA in Intramuros as part of National Arts Month. We watched two-and-half hours before coming to work at nearby Port Area, then caught the last one and a half hours after helping put the paper to bed. A total of four hours viewing time, and we liked what we saw.
Arriving about 30 minutes late for the 1 p.m. start of screening, we began the film with the scene of a childhood friend welcoming the balikbayan poet Benjamin “Hamin” Agusan in typhoon- ravaged Bicol, the camera panning the two men against the desolate landscape, the friend reciting from memory a poem by Agusan titled “Alimuom.”
The poet Agusan has been gone for a long time, teaching in Russia and roving Europe for the past seven years, until he decides to come home shortly after typhoon Reming hits Bicol and buries entire barangays in mud and lahar flow coming from the slopes of Mayon volcano.
The painter Dante Perez, who is the film’s production designer and one of the supporting actors, had texted shortly after Reming lashed his beloved province: “Daming patay dito p’re. Pero ang ganda ng buwan. Full moon empty heart.” He added that the filmmaker Lavrente was in town to do a movie shooting vast acres of devastation, the backdrop for the story of the returning poet-hero who finds many of his loved ones gone.
Agusan’s friend is Teodoro, who stayed behind in Bicol, at the foot of the volcano. Against stormswept surroundings they reminisce about their childhood, how they would talk about art, the country, mammary glands. The subject drifts to a common friend, Catalina, a sculptor in another nearby town who is Hamin’s old lover, in fact she has a son by him.
Catalina uses as her material the cooled rocks from the volcano, sculpting the stone in her studio where she has some young men as assistants, who she uses as “parausan.” But she could hardly care about the village gossips, she’s an artist nurturing an ambivalent relationship with Mayon.
Hamin’s visit to the studio of Catalina is notable for the director’s use of available light, as the viewer can discern various gradations of light as the conversation progresses between the ex-lovers, when the sun gets partly covered by a cloud or when the scene is awash in sunlight.
Over glasses of basi, Catalina says how Hamin’s former partner Amalia, whom he had left for that teaching grant in Russia, had always looked after his studio waiting for the poet’s return, until she too got buried by the lahar flow along with the studio.
There are documentary-like sketches where the director plays interviewer and asks the villagers about the storm’s aftermath, how the relief goods were mere tokens of one-and-a-half kilos of rice, a couple of noodle packs and some sardines. “May ginagawa ba ang gobyerno? May gobyerno ba tayo?” the man behind the camera asks a villager, who also volunteers that the misfortune may have been caused by some neighbors’ refusal to give a glass of water to a beggar a few days before the storm.
There’s a beautifully framed sex scene between Hamin and Catalina, some seconds of humping and pumping for old time’s sake, but wait, the poet seems to have a problem, a kind of erectile dysfunction, and the coitus appears to be unceremoniously interrupted, an unforced error. The old lover says that it could be Hamin has too many things on his mind, his mother lost to dementia, his sister a suicide, his father dead from loneliness, and Amalia buried under lahar.
There’s much discourse too in the brownout scene, where the three friends — Hamin, Catalina, Teodoro — talk about patterns of insects and what humans can learn from such dialectics. For the most part what we see are three lighted candles, and the outlines of faces in the shadows barely discernible. The director shuns close-ups and soundtrack music, prefering the long-range shot and natural sounds of nature — whistling wind, cock crows, waves lashing the shore.
Diaz at times seems to be creating his own symbology, as with the boy kapre playing hide-and-seek with unseen playmates, possible the boy Hamin and his sister Theresa, running through the glade.
The last hour or so has the characters talking about the death of the poet, and how he had lost his mind before that. Hamin’s body was discovered atop the mound of lahar that buried his studio, his throat slashed, a suspected suicide.
The filmmaker interviews persons close to Hamin and other villagers to ask if they believed the poet had lost his mind and committed suicide. Catalina doesn’t believe he went mad, neither does Teodoro. Each recite a poem by Hamin, one of the last titled “In Memoriam,” the other a popular favorite, “Ang Bahay ng Mga Rosas.” Perez as Mang Claro is also interviewed.
Theories are brought up that maybe it wasn’t suicide, Hamin was a former activist whose works riled the establishment.
There are flashbacks, too, to a place called Zagreb, and the narrator comparing himself to a rat stalking a woman named Svita, the camera a bit wobbly and blurred on the backs of strangers, watched by the stalker among the DVD stacks. Towards the end there is a lingering shot on the nude body of Svita, a tall European woman with small breasts and a generous bush, asleep on an altar-like bed, the muse of a man condemned by his fate, the circumstances of tragedy, the not so merry-go-round.
The last scene with Soliman Cruz as the torturer giving the treatment to the bound Hamin in a safehouse, complete with the fascist’s singing of the national anthem while turning the poet round and round and tearing up his book, speaks volumes of the subtle political undertones of the film.
“God sees the truth, but waits,” is a quote from Leo Tolstoy that is repeated at least twice in the film. Just as the viewer has the choice to watch Death in the Land of Encantos in its entirety in one sitting, but waits.
Those who eventually do would be rewarded for their patience. Perez in a text message said, “nasobrahan yata ako sa art.” It’s the perfect antidote to a lot of the drivel being fed to us lately by the mainstream.
Philippine Star, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
XIV. The True Best Picture
By Conrado de Quiros
I saw a dazzling Filipino movie the other weekend. It's not one of the entries in the current Metro Manila Film Festival. I don't know when--or if--it will be shown in regular theaters. I understand it's all the people who made the movie can do to find a booking for it.
I'm talking of Lav Diaz's "Batang West Side," which is a record Filipino movie in more ways than one. The most obvious way being that it is five hours and 15 minutes long, which in fact makes it a record movie anywhere in the world. There have been longer movies, one Japanese movie, if I recall right, being more than 12 hours, but they are meant to be watched in installments. This one demands to be seen in one blow. And should be. It's not episodic, it's one very tight piece of work.
Lav would tell me later he figured we had fairly solid tradition of watching long movies, to go by the double features in the provinces. But double features are precisely two movies, not one, and are generally comedies and action movies. Not one that requires thoughtful and sustained attention.
Which is the reason "Batang West Side" is having problems finding a place for exhibition. I saw it in Glorietta 4, which is a small theater with a reputation for showing largely non-commercial films. I understand that is also the reason it hasn't found a place in international competitions--to which it eminently belongs--since festival organizers impose a time limit on movies. Even Francis Ford Coppola apparently had to trim down "Apocalypse Now" to less than three hours to meet that requirement.
I don't know what Lav can do to satisfy the demands of practicality and aesthetics, public acceptance and artistic integrity. But I do know his work deserves as wide audience as possible, preferably in its pristine state. I wish him all the luck in the world.
"Batang West Side's" length aside, I myself am curious to know how the general public would greet its theme. It tells of the life of a group of Filipinos in America, which may not be so easy for everyone to relate to. I personally am wondering if my having gotten deeply engrossed in it does not owe to my having caught a glimpse of that life too. Certainly, the mood of the movie--which is one of the things it does so brilliantly, capture the mood of that life in all its wintry starkness--struck a sympathetic chord in me. But I also imagine that the phenomenon of the overseas Filipino workers will allow many Filipinos to experience the shock of recognition when they see the movie. The differences between living in the United States and in the OFW destinations--Hong Kong, Saudi arabia--may be monumental, but not so the feelings of homesickness, alienation and a sense of drift.
In "Batang West Side," Joel Torre is a Filipino cop in New Jersey (West Point graduate and 10-year resident) who investigates the murder of a Filipino youth named Hansel Harana. The cop's investigation leads him to a confrontation partly with the world he left behind, and with a world he barely knows. The latter is the life of Filipinos in America, a life lived on the fringes, or margins, or pores, of society, with its huge pains and small triumphs, with its unrelenting drudgery and sudden bursts of violence, with its invisibility and assertion through drugs, particularly shabu, the gateway to power trips.
Above all, Torre's investigation leads him to a confrontation with himself, to his own demons, whose assaults have left him as emotionally crippled as shabu has done mentally to the objects of his sleuthing. The ending may be a little bitin to an audience used to straightforward resolutions--and which has waited for more than five hours to know what really happened to Harana; they might cry out "harang"--but I myself found it as it should be. I'll leave the reader with that mysterious comment as an enticement to see the movie.
Everything about the movie is dazzling. It has very few false notes. The writing--which was done by Lav himself--is taut, the dialogue crisp and biting. He is one fantastic storyteller, introducing his details with the deftness of a magician performing a grand trick, till they work a shimmering, lingering, illusion--or truth--in the mind. He is an equally fantastic director, the whole movie resonating with control. Even the sudden bursts of violence controlled--controlled fury is always more furious than a wanton one. The acting is uniformly excellent. Torre, of course, is his usual excellent self, but the revelation is Yul Servo, who essays the teenager Hansel. There's a boy to watch out for.
A fierce intelligence runs through this movie, an intelligence however that is not artsy-craftsy. On the contrary, it is one that has a lot of heart. I felt moved by this movie in ways most other movies have not moved me, local or foreign. It insinuates itself into the mind and heart so subtly you are not sure at what point you have yielded completely.
If I have any quibbles with the movie, they are very small ones. Chief of them is that characters in this movie have very dysfunctional backgrounds. I would have been curious to see the effects of living in America--I suddenly remembered Woody Allen's quip that he believed there was an intelligence in the cosmos with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey--among people with more "normal" backgrounds. Which is also the reason I thought Torre's revelation of--and coming to terms with--a truly dark past seems a little superflous. You do not need to have such a past to develop that kind of alienated behavior as a Filipino in America. But like I said, these are minor, and just quibbling.
Cesar Montano should stop complaining. If there is a milestone in Filipino moviemaking, it is not "Bagong Buwan," it is "Batang West Side." It ups the ante on quality, local movies that aspire for the moon henceforth having this to reckon with. If it isn't a runaway winner in next year's movie awards, I'll have the most serious doubts about the competence of our judges.
Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 3, 2002
I saw a dazzling Filipino movie the other weekend. It's not one of the entries in the current Metro Manila Film Festival. I don't know when--or if--it will be shown in regular theaters. I understand it's all the people who made the movie can do to find a booking for it.
I'm talking of Lav Diaz's "Batang West Side," which is a record Filipino movie in more ways than one. The most obvious way being that it is five hours and 15 minutes long, which in fact makes it a record movie anywhere in the world. There have been longer movies, one Japanese movie, if I recall right, being more than 12 hours, but they are meant to be watched in installments. This one demands to be seen in one blow. And should be. It's not episodic, it's one very tight piece of work.
Lav would tell me later he figured we had fairly solid tradition of watching long movies, to go by the double features in the provinces. But double features are precisely two movies, not one, and are generally comedies and action movies. Not one that requires thoughtful and sustained attention.
Which is the reason "Batang West Side" is having problems finding a place for exhibition. I saw it in Glorietta 4, which is a small theater with a reputation for showing largely non-commercial films. I understand that is also the reason it hasn't found a place in international competitions--to which it eminently belongs--since festival organizers impose a time limit on movies. Even Francis Ford Coppola apparently had to trim down "Apocalypse Now" to less than three hours to meet that requirement.
I don't know what Lav can do to satisfy the demands of practicality and aesthetics, public acceptance and artistic integrity. But I do know his work deserves as wide audience as possible, preferably in its pristine state. I wish him all the luck in the world.
"Batang West Side's" length aside, I myself am curious to know how the general public would greet its theme. It tells of the life of a group of Filipinos in America, which may not be so easy for everyone to relate to. I personally am wondering if my having gotten deeply engrossed in it does not owe to my having caught a glimpse of that life too. Certainly, the mood of the movie--which is one of the things it does so brilliantly, capture the mood of that life in all its wintry starkness--struck a sympathetic chord in me. But I also imagine that the phenomenon of the overseas Filipino workers will allow many Filipinos to experience the shock of recognition when they see the movie. The differences between living in the United States and in the OFW destinations--Hong Kong, Saudi arabia--may be monumental, but not so the feelings of homesickness, alienation and a sense of drift.
In "Batang West Side," Joel Torre is a Filipino cop in New Jersey (West Point graduate and 10-year resident) who investigates the murder of a Filipino youth named Hansel Harana. The cop's investigation leads him to a confrontation partly with the world he left behind, and with a world he barely knows. The latter is the life of Filipinos in America, a life lived on the fringes, or margins, or pores, of society, with its huge pains and small triumphs, with its unrelenting drudgery and sudden bursts of violence, with its invisibility and assertion through drugs, particularly shabu, the gateway to power trips.
Above all, Torre's investigation leads him to a confrontation with himself, to his own demons, whose assaults have left him as emotionally crippled as shabu has done mentally to the objects of his sleuthing. The ending may be a little bitin to an audience used to straightforward resolutions--and which has waited for more than five hours to know what really happened to Harana; they might cry out "harang"--but I myself found it as it should be. I'll leave the reader with that mysterious comment as an enticement to see the movie.
Everything about the movie is dazzling. It has very few false notes. The writing--which was done by Lav himself--is taut, the dialogue crisp and biting. He is one fantastic storyteller, introducing his details with the deftness of a magician performing a grand trick, till they work a shimmering, lingering, illusion--or truth--in the mind. He is an equally fantastic director, the whole movie resonating with control. Even the sudden bursts of violence controlled--controlled fury is always more furious than a wanton one. The acting is uniformly excellent. Torre, of course, is his usual excellent self, but the revelation is Yul Servo, who essays the teenager Hansel. There's a boy to watch out for.
A fierce intelligence runs through this movie, an intelligence however that is not artsy-craftsy. On the contrary, it is one that has a lot of heart. I felt moved by this movie in ways most other movies have not moved me, local or foreign. It insinuates itself into the mind and heart so subtly you are not sure at what point you have yielded completely.
If I have any quibbles with the movie, they are very small ones. Chief of them is that characters in this movie have very dysfunctional backgrounds. I would have been curious to see the effects of living in America--I suddenly remembered Woody Allen's quip that he believed there was an intelligence in the cosmos with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey--among people with more "normal" backgrounds. Which is also the reason I thought Torre's revelation of--and coming to terms with--a truly dark past seems a little superflous. You do not need to have such a past to develop that kind of alienated behavior as a Filipino in America. But like I said, these are minor, and just quibbling.
Cesar Montano should stop complaining. If there is a milestone in Filipino moviemaking, it is not "Bagong Buwan," it is "Batang West Side." It ups the ante on quality, local movies that aspire for the moon henceforth having this to reckon with. If it isn't a runaway winner in next year's movie awards, I'll have the most serious doubts about the competence of our judges.
Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 3, 2002
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
XIII. Void in the Voices: The 44th Vienna International Film Festival
By Martina Lunzer and Barbara Wurm
If an annual festival like the Viennale were to be encapsulated by a general motto, this year’s edition might be called If there still is anything to say, how can we say it (in film). And although some of the most exceptional works like James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (2005), Uruphong Raksasad’s Reanglao jak meangnue (Stories from the North, 2005) or Lav Diaz’ monumental Heremias, Unang Aklat: Ang Alamat ng Prinsesang Bayawak (Heremias. Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess, 2006) hardly ever need words to say what needs to be said, there is no doubt about the fact that there still is a lot to say. Against all odds and against an inner cinematic force which over the last (its first) century of existence so often and so convincingly has been trying to prove the complete uselessness of speech and words in approaching the real, the true, the evident. And, more than anything, against a political state of affairs that, despite its utter ambivalence and heterogeneity in the mirror of world cinema, catches its own reflection as a clear cut and unambiguous image – the image of total collapse.
In Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) for instance, premiered at Cannes and shortly after the Vienna festival successfully promoted by Austria’s exclusive arthouse distributor Stadtkino-Verleih, this linkage between innovative concepts of language in film on the one hand and the political as a question of utterance, speech-regimes and disruption on the other, becomes evident shortly after the film has started. A man, who – like most of the other protagonists of this fictitious lawsuit brought to big international financial institutions by African civil society representatives and carried out in the small backyard of Sissako’s own family – is not an actor, but an average Bamako citizen, steps forward to an improvised microphone of an improvised court and speaks. When told that he would have to wait until he was asked, he answers (a fortiori taking his time): “There are things that need to be said, and they need to be said at the time when you feel like talking. If you do not let them out immediately, they will never be the same.” Followed by several other courageous and extensive speakers, among them the famous Mali writer and former cultural minister Aminata Traoré, who directs the (likewise real) judges’ attention to the paradoxical fact that Africa needs to be considered not a victim of poverty but one of wealth and abundance, what the film then establishes is the smooth yet aggressive, sad yet funny way of life inside a court. A simple court, but an ambiguous one – not just because a modern water tap is put next to an old well (merrily co-existing side by side), but also because “court” here stands for a place where people live, work, hang around, love and split up, as well as a judicial place where people fight for their rights – in this case against the hypocrisy of third world financing programs and the horrible economic effects of the so called structural adjustment policy.
Reassigning local space its global status and thereby placing a very straightforward way of speaking against a complex topology of politics, Bamako is an outstanding allegorical attack on a global consciousness and a reflection on the way world cinema is challenged by it (and at the same time remains one of its last real challengers). The old man doesn’t give the slightest shit about what anyone could think of him or what others do or do not want him to say or not say. He obeys only one law, an inner law, maybe an ancient or local law, a law of a certain type of humanity and justice, the law of dignity and courage. His speech becomes part of a whole theory and practice of speech acts, challenging not only powerful international institutions like the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund but also world cinema – referred to in a comical film-in-film called “Death in Timbuktu”, where Danny Glover meets (and shoots) Israeli filmmaker Elia Suleiman (among others). It is by an artistic and yet marked-as-artificial interweaving of both, the documentary and the fictional side of film, that Bamako is able to reach a genuinely new level of speech act knowledge and to become a front combatant of a left wing movement that today’s politics so scarcely seems to be blessed with. What happens at this court could never happen in a real court, because, Moscow VGIK graduate and the 2007 Rotterdam film festival “filmmaker in focus” Sissako states, “no real court would ever question the law of the stronger”.
Another African lawsuit, this time Cameroon-based and set in the real courtroom of Kumba Town, is portrayed in Sisters in Law (2005). In this direct cinema study women’s rights activist Kim Longinotto observes the many obstacles a judge and an attorney are confronted with while discovering the truth about child abuse. However, and quite in contrast to Bamako, which in this sense is Brechter than Brecht, the film never really takes into consideration that what happens in front of the camera could also be a fine performance of people who are pretty sure about their performance (and who also know that what is negotiated in a court is not justice as such, but ways of uttering, rhetoric gestures or speech formulas).
If at all (in)justice and its institutionalisation is a topic in a European context, we need to look for it in (meanwhile post-)Berlusconian Italy. Not only is it present in the audience award-winning Balordi (Hoodlum, 2005), Miriam Kubescha’s sensitive and cinematographically magnificent film about long-term prisoners in a Tuscany jail, but Vincenzo Marra also puts up with it. His documentary L’udienza è aperta (The Session is Open, 2006) uses footage from inside the Court of Naples and leaves all judgements about the deeply rooted mafia-practices to his audience.
Another Italy, an Italy recalling its divine existence, when the tactus de coelo, the flash that came down from heaven, hit the ground (and religious/mythical thinking hit communist author Cesare Pavese), is an authentic setting for Quei loro incontri (2006), Danièle Huillet’s & Jean-Marie Straub’s masterpiece, the very last one to be completed in their ingenious togetherness. Danièle Huillet’s death beclouded and at the same time enlightened the Viennale screenings of the new and the old experiments in setting Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò en-scène. Like in Dalla nube alla resistenza (1978) QLI always presents “a dialogue of two, speech and objection, never neutralised, in a natural setting, which remains distant from the characters” (Frieda Grafe). The Monte Pisano scenery transforms into an estranged home for the gods who talk about humans, about us. They envy the human kind, for “wherever they go to the efforts and words, a rhythm, a sense, a calmness is born”. What the Straubs explore (and what they have been exploring for their entire life) is the cinematic sense of language, its transformations through pronunciation, intonation and declamation framed by a camera, through confrontation with a setting and its sounds (its own private, natural or social speech acts), through temporal, rhythmical and structural invasion. The way Pavese’s complex dialogues are performed – they are spoken by local farmers, strictly regulated by an external rhythm, causing long pauses or long and difficult passages of text – forces the spectator to listen carefully, hyper-sensually, hyper-attentively. If close reading is a method of formalist literary theory, here a certain type of close listening (combined with an exceedingly intense close looking) is established, gradually turning into a sensual, maybe even synaesthetic form of reading.
The extraordinary status of both the spoken word as well as talking landscapes in Straub & Huillet’s films could be put in relation to two superb retrospectives of this year’s Viennale: whereas “Tales from the Jungle”, a program bringing together a wide range of films from Cooper & Schoedsack’s awesome Chang: A Drama of Wilderness (1927) to Sud Pralat (Tropical Malady, 2004) and Worldly Desires (2005) by Thai shooting star Apichatpong Weerasethakul, explored the sensual qualities of perception and non-linguistic communication induced by life in the jungle, another, somewhat national-heritage-orientated, retrospective “Nicht mehr fliehen” (“No more escaping”), named after Herbert Vesely’s 1955 take off point for the New German Wave, turned out to be a prominent site of film speech and its correlation to the political. The juxtaposition of the other and the self, the very far (ape man and cobra woman, tropes and Amazonas) and the very near (Austrian countryside and Berlin city life after WWII), the other and the self, was a pure stroke of genius in terms of curating – let’s not forget that Austrian Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek got a carte blanche, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine starred in 18 films in a wonderful “Sisters act”-program, Peter Whitehead was selected for a tribute, and that, in cooperation with the Filmmuseum Wien, the Viennale organised a comprehensive Jacques Demy/Agnès Varda show as well as a special film program for Peter Sellar’s festival, New Crowned Hope.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new oeuvre Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century, 2006), resembling James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later in its clear cut twofold structure (where one part echoes the other), telling the fragmentary story around hospital life “back then” and now, was one of seven films commissioned by New Crowned Hope. Its policy to let films communicate with each other by explicitly directing their topical orientation towards actual political problems from a post-colonial point of view perfectly matches the Viennale’s course to accentuate non-western film cultures. By the bye: however meritorious this might be, one cannot but regret – and object – the mere absence of Eastern European cinema at a festival taking place just a few kilometres from the former boarder to the “East” – apart from Russia’s 2006 documentary highlights Grazhdanskoye sostoyanie (Civil Status) by Alina Rudnickaya, Sergei Loznitsa’s innovative footage-dubbing Blokada (Blockade, 2005) and Dushanbe-born Orzu Sharipov’s noteworthy 11.000 km ot New Yorka (11.000 km from New York, 2006), and apart from Viennale evergreens Vitaly Kossakovsky, Otar Iosseliani and Aleksandr Sokurov (whose unfinished version of Elegy of Life. Rostropovich. Vishnevskaya would be worth a – rather unfavourable – discussion in extenso, especially when applying a psychoanalytic reading of his “Europe-mother-complex” …), apart from these few exceptions and one Romanian feature film, there were no contributions from Eastern Europe (which makes it a 0.02 percent participation – rather sad among the many record-breaking figures the Viennale has to offer).
But let’s go back to the two great retrospectives, back to “Tales from the Jungle” and “Nicht mehr fliehen”, back to the two sides of one problem, the problem of how can we say it (in film). The jungle, as has been suggested earlier, not only implies its own rules and techniques of encoding and decoding messages, of reading and leaving behind tracks and traces, but it also unfolds the ferocious logic of the survival of the fittest – superbly displayed and critically questioned in Chang: A Drama of Wilderness, and ironically treated and transferred into the realm of a (pre-?)sexually primal form of existence in W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan, the Ape Man (1931). When in 1925, after three years of expedition, Merian Coldwell Cooper and former Mack Sennett cameraman Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack finished their first portrait of the dramatic migration of the Persian nomadic tribe Bakhtiari, Grass – A Nation’s Battle for Life, surprisingly enough this non-narrative film became a box-office-hit. The following two years Cooper & Schoedsack spent in the Jungles of Northern Siam (now Northern Thailand), shooting an outstanding semi-documentary on the life of the Lao-tribe-members Kru and his family and struggle to coexist with Chang (Thai for elephant). This time the story was scripted and had three explicit cast members: “Natives of the Wild, who have never seen a motion picture”, “Wild Beasts, who have never had to fear a modern rifle” and “The Jungle”. The adventure starts off with a seemingly naïve scenery of “domestic bliss” and “bucolic Eden” (Ray Young), but soon unfolds the natives’ spectacular fights (for, with and) against even more spectacular animals, leopards, tigers, or cow elephants. Schoedsack’s camera work (apparently he was covered by Cooper with a rifle) is as breathtaking as the variety of animals observed and the subtle balance of brutal aggressiveness and unseen delight and tenderness. Even if “Tales from the Jungle” offered a whole lot of rediscoveries – like Glauber Rocha’s revolutionary pamphlet Amazonas, Amazonas (1966), Yves Billon’s ethnographical-investigative documentary La Guerre de Pacification en Amazonie (1973) or Arne Sucksdorff’s Aga-Scope-pioneer En Djungelsaga (1957) – the semi-documentary Chang sets the benchmark for all jungle films to come.
The same “semi-documentariness” is explored in the three best-of-this-year’s-Viennale-bests: Zacharias Kunuk’s & Norman Cohn’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), Pedro Costa’s Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) and Lav Diaz’ Heremias, a 515 minute DV-cam-trip setting out on an ox drawn cart from Caromatan, Philippines, touching the core of private and social injustice and – since part 2, estimated to be some 11 hours, is yet to come – only transitorily ending at the very bottom of a pilgrim’s and our souls. Since one does not want to become a sinner, writing about this exclusive stranger in the abridging formulas of a familiarising film critic’s jargon, what remains to be said about this epic of retreat, downfall, devotion, and redemption is that spending one whole day in one and the same chair and in one and the same theatre was the best thing that could happen in the lives of the lucky few who were there. One cannot express it better than Philippine poet Cirilio F. Bautista in one of his poems, quoted by Olaf Möller in his homage to Diaz (disguised as a Viennale catalogue text): “Listen. Sketch the sound through the silence of sound / such that the syntax of nothing becomes speech.” (Cirilo F. Bautista: Sunlight on Broken Stones).
If Heremias is an exhaustive, critical and rebellious contemplation on modernisation, circling around its ruthless logic of linearity and progress and hereby establishing against it a miraculous time-regime which becomes essential for the anti-hero as an individual, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen displays a similar temporal time structure, but links it to the historical scene of first contact between social bodies. If Heremias’ inner personal estrangement is the background for the several first contacts he makes during a few days in today’s Philippines, the tragedy of Apak (Leah Angutimarik) and her father, the shaman Avva (Pakak Innuksuk), is related to the historical confrontation of the Inuit people with a group of Danish explorers taking place in 1922, and, even more challenging, with a group of converted, that is christianised, Inuit. Also shot with a hand camera, Kunuk’s successor to Atanarjuat (2001) is another mesmerising work of off-modern ethnic film, an experimental study not as much in visual anthropology as in finding images – majestic bright widescreen landscapes meet indigenous life meets alienated set ups of reality TV style – for the tragic loss of a rich cultural heritage and strong social, religious and cultural convictions. When his rebel daughter Apak finally gives in and defects, Avva can hardly bear the inner pain brought to the Arctic Circle community life by the intruders.
A third special event was the screening of Juventude em marcha, since last year’s Viennale brought a tribute to Pedro Costa which proved a full success. If one is familiar with Costa’s characters and non-professional actors (like Vanda from No quarto da Vanda, In Vanda’s Room, 2000) the latest magnum opus maybe opens up little faster than otherwise. On the other hand there are so many iconographical allusions in Juventude (for one of the most fascinating examinations see Andy Rector’s blog at http://kinoslang.blogspot.com) that the “opening up” of this dense cinema d’auteur might seem a rather overdrawn enterprise. When Ventura – whose pilgrimage through the Cape Verdean slums of Lisbon we follow for a torturous period of 155 minutes – in one of the scenes wears a white bandage around his head, the whole film with its narrow space policy, its expressionist Caligari-like slant stage-imagery suddenly transforms into a bizarre comment on Aki Kaurismäki’s Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man without a Past, 2002). A seriously angry comment in fact, since in Costa’s world, like in Ventura’s, there is no place for romance – not even the laconic and doubtful pseudo-bourgeois romance of girls from match factories or the bohemian outsiders developed in Kaurismäki’s “loser” trilogy, the third film of which, Laitakaupungin valot (Lights of the Suburb, 2005) was also shown at the Viennale.
No more lights, not even dim ones, in Ventura’s life. Just a handful of “relatives” – Ventura calls them his sons and daughters – who he visits regularly … and, but only occasionally, talks to, because he prefers them to do the talking. Ventura is the perfect listener, he is an observer of the life of the poor (his own people), he registers every gram of heroin taken, every bottle of Methadone hidden, every inch of misery, but also every centimetre of improvement when it comes to social relationships. His only comment over most of the time remains his look – a look of a severe and haunted, yet quiet face, just as if it were only getting ready to burst out every second. By paying his relatives a visit he honours them and lets them regain their last little life-sign as a deprived human being – giving them back their voice. Juventude em marcha – how ironic a title, since these young people look exhausted and they are definitely not about to march – was probably the loudest of all silent outcries against social injustice.
If Heremias or Ventura are confronted with a world in which evil has, if at all, only a vague face, alternative German and Austrian cinema after WW II had its own private and public, political and aesthetical enemies. Summing it all up, the Straub & Huillet-film Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (The Bridegroom, the Actress and The Pimp, 1968) starts out with a short but effective graffiti on a wall: “Stupid old Germany,” it says, “I hate it over here. I hope I can go soon.”
In Germany, filmmaking only gradually became a matter of opposition and resistance. Radical statements against the establishment had to be put in radically disturbing forms, since fascism seemed all too deeply rooted in even the most innocent ways of cultural production. Maybe back then, for reviewers and critics they never seemed radical enough (at least that’s the impression one gets when scrolling through some early numbers of Filmkritik), but looking back at the beginning of the New German Wave of the late ‘50s and ‘60s one cannot but be awestruck by the variety of ways to conquer a seeming lost territory (to Hans Mosers and Marika Rökks, waltzes and enchantments). “Nicht mehr fliehen”, a retrospective carefully curated by avant-garde filmmaker and historian Hans Scheugl for the Filmarchiv Austria, dug out some crazy examples of yet another attempt to explore the connection between political action and the specific speech act possibilities of cinema. Ten programs revealed what one might call the gradual transformation from existentialist nihilism (Nicht mehr fliehen, 1955) to the “titanic excess of revolt”, as Werner Herzog commented on his anti-hero Stroszek (1976). And they set up a finely woven context and background for films we think we know by heart, but are now able to see from a totally different angle, like Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974) or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969).
“Attention, World – this is Zero” is the last thing we hear in Herbert Vesely’s Cocteauesque pseudo-sci-fi Nicht mehr fliehen. The film is about the relicts of a world from which no one even tries to escape any more. Total standstill, total shutdown – a warning or rather a fractured and metallic swan song in the desert? It is only through a confrontation with the extreme closure of narrative traditions in Austrian and German pre- and post-war cinema that one can get a sense of how radically different avant-garde “absolute films” were. And yet they had to maintain a slight reference to their cultural backgrounds. One of these references, the main one, was an unbowed faith in literature. What might be surprising here is that side by side with new genres and traditions (like nouveau roman) early post-war German film experiments show a firm attachment to an older literary generation – like Franz Kafka in Vesely’s first film Und die Kinder spielen so gern Soldaten (1951; unfortunately not shown at the Viennale) or Georg Trakl in his second one, An diesen Abenden (1951/52), a mystified expressionist film adaptation of the poem Die junge Magd and the opening film of the retrospective. Surreal abstractions, an emphasis on sensual perception, the visual and the sound track – Vesely’s early films could also be considered Gerhard Rühm compositions, whose experiments in sound collage and twelve-tone music are another example of the new generation’s affiliation with pre-war avant-garde movements.
With its stylistic borrowings from Jean Cocteau or Maya Deren, An diesen Abenden and Nicht mehr fliehen demonstrate the international contextualisation of the New German Wave’s take off. Soon after, Heinrich Böll and other “members” of the “Gruppe 47” seemed the new warrantors. Not only Vesely’s Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1961), the official starting signal of the “Neuer deutscher Film”, also Straub & Huillet’s Machorka-Muff (1962) is based on Böll’s prose, obviously appearing adequate to produce “pictorial abstract dreams” instead of stories (as was the declared claim).
Portraying Vienna-born Vesely (who spent most of his life in Munich), lining his work up against Vlado Kristl’s queer surrealism (Der Damm, 1964; Autorennen, 1964; Arme Leute, 1963) or Straub & Huillet’s early German shorts, and leaving aside Ferry Radax or Marc Adrian or Peter Kubelka, the programming decision was to only marginally touch on the interdependencies of Austrian and German post-war cinema. Instead – and this seems to be the true value of this retrospective – it tried to point out the close affinity towards (and, undoubtedly, deconstruction of) industrial film, early TV documentaries, and Kulturfilm. One of the greatest discoveries in this sense was former Luis Trenker assistant Ferdinand Khittl’s Die Parallelstraße (1961), not by chance produced by his “Gesellschaft für bildende Filme” (“Society of educational film”). Not a third path, but a parallel street becomes the symbol of Khittl’s enterprise, a thoughtful and only occasionally winking meta-comment on metaphysics and documentary objectivity in film, sometimes extraordinarily hilarious, sometimes hardly able to get away from its deliberately starched setting. A group of young men is trying to analyse an enormous number of fragmentary film documents (shot by Khittl and his cameraman Ronald Martini during two extensive travels around the world in 1959 and 1960). The 308 “documents” – films about water and erosion, Brasilia, a volcano, rice in Asia or a meanwhile legendary Rosstäuscher (horse cheater) – are screened one after the after and intermitted by comments of the team members (who, on their part, are being commented by a supervisor). “In a Kafkaesque room five Ionescoesque people find themselves in a Sartreesque situation, trying to solve a Camuesque problem”, as back then pre-eminent critic Helmut Färber ironically described this setting.
Khittl, who in 1961 like Vesely signed the famous Oberhausen manifesto, puts the end of his film at the beginning (a device we can later find in Vlado Kristl’s works), signifying that despite its message – the team is supposedly bringing the recordings in a certain order – his film will never get a structure than could be overlooked. Another aspect touched by Khittl is the special role of different forms of media used for recordings. What today would be called a media theory of the archive in 1961 was referred to not on a theoretical but on a highly entertaining and poetic level. Subtext and meta-text run on parallel tracks. The same duplication can be found in Vesely’s short TV studies Menschen im Espresso (1958) and Die Stadt (1960). Traditional forms of documentary filmmaking (like a then-popular manner of burying every image under an avalanche of words) are performed on a serious and on an ironic level at the same time. In Die Stadt, radically “liberal” images, subtle observations, light-weighted movements and an air of freedom are not only enhanced by blues, jazz or experimental music but also put next to texts in which a dry “objective” sociological jargon more than once merges into highly poetical forms of speech as well as into wild political statements against the father generation:
Because you are weak, you called us “halbstark” (beatniks). As long as we were kids, you bought our silence, paying for ice-cream and movie-tickets. You did not serve us; you served yourselves and to your own convenience. But we want to make a row, we won’t cry for things you never taught us. Our riot is uncovered. It’s you who brutally fight each other in the dark. You are weak. Only the strong ones leave for the jungle and heal niggers, because they, like us, despise you.
The striking tendency towards challenging forms of speech and speaking demonstrated in so many films of this year’s festival could also be found in contemporary Austrian and German cinema, which only reveals the fact that many of these films are rooted in the tradition of the New German Film (Neuer Deutscher Film) and its exploitations of documentary cinema. Some of them are now discussed under what has been labelled the “Berlin School” (Berliner Schule) in the ‘90s, represented by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec and others. Inviting Stefan Krohmer’s Sommer 04 an der Schlei (Summer ’04, 2006) and Valeska Grisebach’s purist and meticulous realistic love-story Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006) the Viennale has set the focus on Berlin School’s second generation, which together with Ulrich Köhler’s Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006) left a significant mark about new German films. By showing Rudolf Thome’s then latest film Du hast gesagt, dass du mich liebst (You Told Me That You Love Me, 2005) – in the meantime he and his favourite actress Hannelore Elsner have produced another one (as intimately set en-scène) – one could become aware of the close interdependency of the Berlin School with a German cinema once bred and cultivated in Munich, with films that only on their very surface might appear less “realistic” or less related to an abstract or structural understanding of social issues. Maybe Thome, who moved to Berlin in the ‘70s, is an exception, but it seems that the traditional Berlin-Munich-antagonism is – if it ever existed – history.
An even stronger engagement in realism (its modification, de-montage, destruction or dissimilation) could be noticed in current German documentary film. The aesthetic questions of how to work with emotionalised text as found footage and as fragments evidently lead to similar solutions like the re-embodiment or the re-enactment of somebody’s “real” experiences or actions. Anja Salomonowitz, Andres Veiel and Romuald Karmakar all used similar techniques of transmitting “real” events and once “really” uttered words into highly reflexive and minimalist, yet mannered forms of documentary filmmaking. This shall now be given a closer look.
In Kurz davor ist es passiert (It Happened Just Before, 2006), a film about female labour trafficking, Salomonowitz transferred the narratives of the affected women into other people’s physical bodies. Their environment thus forms the mise en scène, in which these protagonists (a cab driver, a bar manager) are staged to cite the victims’ statements. In terms of quotation it appears as if these sentences are freed from – but at the same time saved in – a familiar but still different setting.
Andres Veiel’s film Der Kick (2006) reconstructs the murder of a 16 year-old by his friends. His actors, a man and a woman, use quotations from court protocols and statements (of the accused, their parents and their neighbours) re-enacting the events in an empty building, without costumes or props. This minimalist method has been widely celebrated as a genuinely new form (which, one should add, it of course is not). It supposedly enables us to approach the “real” reasons – for the evil side of man and/or for a horrifying teenage reality scenario and its violent phantasmagorical origins (in fact, anthropological generalisations and social analysis seem to collapse in this scenario, becoming completely replaceable). What is so irritating about this technique is the fact that in all his statements, Veiel remains a perfect psychologist, a hermeneutical practitioner, trying to understand, trying to grasp the ungraspable, trying to get to the very bottom of things and sounds, and, finally, trying to cure (or at least reconcile a society / an audience remaining untroubled by “real” images). The more you listen to or read the director’s comments, the more you become convinced that his theatrical detachment of event and agent, this artistic staging of estrangement, is a mask behind which we’d have to expect the ultimate source, the final explanation of a fatal error.
But: whose error? Whose aberration? The method of depriving agents of their voice and transferring their testimonies into general propositions suggests that the lies are in words – but the sentences seem to have become too abstract for a specific social analysis, and yet they seem too singular, always remaining the words of a teenager, having watched too much American History X, or a woman, having tried to obey her husband’s patriarchal ideas, or a man, having spent too much time without work. (There is a film on the same Potzlow murder by young filmmaker Tamara Milosevic, Zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort [Wrong Time, Wrong Place, 2005] not shown at the festival. Milosevic portrayed a close friend of the victim. Here the propositions – the same helpless way of expressing oneself, the same tragic absence of a human surrounding, the same parental and governmental failure – are also transferred to a different person, but they remain within the specific social setting and therefore in a complex sensual texture of relations and reasons.)
Unlike Der Kick the disconnected context of speech in Hamburger Lektionen (Hamburg Lectures, 2006) seems not a matter of socio-psychologically- but one of historically-rooted problems of cultural translation, of verbal translation as such. Romuald Karmakar’s text-based documentary, his usage of the technique of re-reading reflects the symptomatic ambivalence of its subject – the reading of the Koran.
Two video tapes were the basis for Karmakar’s documentary. They were made during the lectures of Mohammed Fazazi who in the ‘90s was Imam of the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg. In his prayer room Fazazi answered questions about how to apply the Koran on everyday Muslim life in Germany. The tapes taken from this and sold “under the table” are precarious, not only because of their legitimisation of terrorist acts, but also because of the fact that three of the four suicide pilots of 9/11 had attended the mosque regularly. To avoid an “iconography of evil”, as Karmakar calls it, he applied a method as follows: writing down what was said on video, giving the text to six translators, opening an intensive process of translation. The German text was then read from paper by the actor Manfred Zapatka. The reading was filmed in a simply lighted studio.
In succession of the events, the difficulty of the re-quotation is not only that it implements a cause-related timeline (since only later have we learned about what happened during 9/11). Karmakar has used this method also in Das Himmler-Projekt (2000), but taking into account the new situation, here it unfolds a specific difference. In contrast to Das Himmler-Projekt (based on a written speech by SS-leader Heinrich Himmler) this film deals with a text completely based on the spoken word. Zapatka, the actor, never acts out gestures – with one exception, when an obvious gap in the text is substituted by a gesture of cutting somebody’s throat. This scene literally exposes the formal blanks.
In all these films we notice a tendency of a hermeneutic approach towards the text. Meaning detached from the multiple tinges of expression. As Edward Said has shown, (1) the reading of the Koran itself since the 11th century has been subject to this discourse of re-interpretation. Since the imperatives iqra and qul (“recite” and “talk”) are commands inscribed in the book of god, interpreters had to decide whether they wanted to contextualise or to hermeneutically interpret the text, in order to absorb a timeless truth.
A different, physical experiment in documentary and portrayal was performed in Harald Bergmann’s Brinkmanns Zorn (2006). When grand German post-war beat-poet Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940-1975) died, he left behind eleven hours of audio recordings (besides volumes of documentary material and numerous photographs). Bergmann has shortened these intense voice files down to 105 minutes. He has kept the audio and picturised it with imaginary reconstructions of the recording situation he assumed. So we see Brinkmann, performed by Eckhard Rhode, holding up his recorder, beating dustbins, shouting or scratching his wife’s stockings (to give sound a new materiality). Renowned photographer Elfi Mikesch caught these moments in illuminating, colourful pictures. Many of these realisations can be criticised, but whatever the image might try to complete, Brinkmann’s voice will dominate the space. And closing one’s eyes in the cinema will always lead to the point of what becomes the central sentence of this film, when Brinkmann angrily moans: “It is always this see-saw between the grand imagination and the shit that we face.” Not only in this sense, Brinkmanns Zorn, was one of the most honest documentaries of the 2006 Viennale.
The question of a post-revolutionary offspring after the late ‘60s/‘70s generation has been raised not only in a number of films but also public discussions. Filmmakers like Peter Whitehead and Kenneth Anger, both guests of the festival, were honoured for their constant contributions to the underground art scene of these days.
While Anger, born in Santa Monica, created magic and symbolic, expressive, homoerotic imagery, Whitehead on the other hand started his carrier in London, working on portraits of protest. Impressionistically but directly he fragmented and reassembled live recordings of the first meeting of American and European beat poets at Royal Albert Hall (Wholly Communion, 1965), footage of inner conflicts of Swinging London (Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, 1967), the severe criticism of U.S. politics (Benefit of the Doubt, 1967) and material of the demonstrations at Columbia University, New York (The Fall, 1969). Today Whitehead has become a dedicated writer, and generously turned away from cinema, but he still fascinates as oral witness of his own story, being in constant conflict with his particular time. In that way Paul Cronin’s biographic documentary In the Beginning Was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead – as indicated in the title, based on the artist’s own reflections – becomes an eventful, moving bright feature of 200 minutes. The retelling of Whitehead’s life creates its own process, full of narcissism and irony, deep insights and permanent reconsideration. In 1969 Whitehead wrote, “I have this psychological compulsion to make reality significant: I have to film constantly or write about it as well as experiencing it!” “However,” he resumes later, “I began to realise that in my role behind the camera I simply was a voyeur. So if I couldn’t change the world, maybe I should change myself.”
If Spanish director Albert Serra is necessarily a successor of the “Generation Revolution”, you can read his new film as a kind of poetic opposition. Rather than looking for significance, he chooses to go back a lot further, emptying the process of signification and systematically observing what is thereby left. In his second feature film Honor de cavallería (Honor of the Knights, 2006) (FIPRESCI rewarded) Serra staged Miguel Cervantes’ medieval novel Don Quixote in the Catalan countryside. He extracted a non-narrative telling from the adventurous plot, where windmills are substituted by a mere battle against the whistling wind. The non-action, the dramatic skies over the swathe of land, filmed on video in bright sunlight or darkest nights, the spare dialogues between Sancho and Quichote almost naturally seem to reflect upon the characters themselves.
After having gone through the contemplation of this film, silent and gentle as it is, it seems obvious that in this setting Sancho, the bondsman, can no longer remain the raw realist of the novel. When he is asked, “Would there be Sancho, if there was no Quixote?” the answer is already given. Moreover he becomes a soft, merely depressed but truly faithful follower of his lord. And also Quixote changes, as his visions are no more opposing a set civilisation. Instead he is surprisingly concerned to fight in the name of the Lord above: “Chivalry is civilisation”, he says to Sancho, “Chivalry is the reasoning of action.”
“The images and sounds we have gathered, assembled and put together, are not booty. They are an offer and an invitation, as temporary, beautiful, useful and extravagant as the world they are evidence of.” This was festival director Hans Hurch’s inducement. And there were plenty invitations. The Viennale 2006 showed 315 films in only two weeks, and it issued 88,900 tickets. Once again it proved its status as the city’s publicly most evoking cultural festival. Referring to what Senses of Cinema editor Michelle Carey in her report on the 2005 edition called a “cinephilic city”, it needs to be remembered that grounded on local institutions like the Austrian Filmmuseum, the Filmarchiv Austria, production companies, distributors, together with journalists, newspapers and sponsors, and a home grown scene of filmmakers, the festival is embedded in a multi-linked network enabling the Viennale to expand each year. It is this established paradisiacal infrastructure that allows a curating approach to keep the balance between contemporary artistic and continuous historical consolidation of cinema. Hence exactly this combination of strong local marketing and a highly demanding program produces strange contradictions: there are completely sold out minority programs like Ulrike Ottinger’s rarely screened Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979), chosen by Elfriede Jelinek on one side. And the sponsored VIP-bags, meanwhile cult objects, sold by auction on eBay on the other. However, cultural glamour with baroque outlines is grounded in Vienna and the Viennale stands right in-between this clash of growing local interests and internal artistic or international aesthetic forms.
Therefore the speeches given at the opening gala were filled with remarks on local politics, as Viennale started shortly after the Austrian elections for parliament. It appeared suitable to open with Stephen Frear’s The Queen (2006) and what sounds like a political satire. The film concentrates on the days after the death of Lady Di. It tries to imagine how the Royal Family and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have dealt with the situation, in private and in public. But in this context The Queen also seemed to pose an important question about the nature of political cinema. Isn’t the strength that lies in satire its quick reaction and sharp opposition to an actual political situation? And isn’t exactly that (production time and money) the reason why satire is nowadays mainly reserved for other forms of art, like theatre or literature?
The Queen could not propose a different strategy. Instead it used the form of a romantic comedy that sometimes felt even displeasing (if you have to watch the Queen cry in front of a deer in a moment of lonely desperation). In this sense it seemed to get caught in a multitude of cinematographic needs (between tragedy and satire, between the personal and the political reconstruction) mainly affirmative, turning to concentrate on the (re)construction of settings or faces (yes, we love Helen Mirren!). On a dramaturgical level, the same conservative undertones could be found in the use of the “common sense” idea to emotionalise political figures (in order to explain their public acts). The film continuously followed each character’s process of personal rehabilitation, turning them from medial caricatures into bloody human beings. Telling us: in terms of our failures, we could all be Queens – or Kings.
The sensuous one-minute-Viennale-trailer was shot on grainy 35mm film. Leos Carax, the director, turns his back to the camera. He lights a cigarette and types on a computer. The blue light of the screen glows in the middle of a smoothly candle lighten room. “Tonight, I stop smoking”. When we read this sentence, we ultimately doubt his intentions. But Carax puts down his glasses, drags on the cigarette one last time, takes a revolver and – shoots himself. What a final victory for the insufficient human: the turnoff. It was a sign of radicalism in this black humour that there was never great laughter in the audience. But the minute is not over yet. The display changes, the computer automatically plays private super8 material, showing a young boy, while a French chanson starts up. Uncanny, in this final struggle, the machine pays Carax its last respect.
Endnotes:
1. Edward W. Said, Die Welt, der Text und der Kritiker (German edition), Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 57.
Senses of Cinema, issue no. 42, jan-mar 2007
If an annual festival like the Viennale were to be encapsulated by a general motto, this year’s edition might be called If there still is anything to say, how can we say it (in film). And although some of the most exceptional works like James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (2005), Uruphong Raksasad’s Reanglao jak meangnue (Stories from the North, 2005) or Lav Diaz’ monumental Heremias, Unang Aklat: Ang Alamat ng Prinsesang Bayawak (Heremias. Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess, 2006) hardly ever need words to say what needs to be said, there is no doubt about the fact that there still is a lot to say. Against all odds and against an inner cinematic force which over the last (its first) century of existence so often and so convincingly has been trying to prove the complete uselessness of speech and words in approaching the real, the true, the evident. And, more than anything, against a political state of affairs that, despite its utter ambivalence and heterogeneity in the mirror of world cinema, catches its own reflection as a clear cut and unambiguous image – the image of total collapse.
In Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) for instance, premiered at Cannes and shortly after the Vienna festival successfully promoted by Austria’s exclusive arthouse distributor Stadtkino-Verleih, this linkage between innovative concepts of language in film on the one hand and the political as a question of utterance, speech-regimes and disruption on the other, becomes evident shortly after the film has started. A man, who – like most of the other protagonists of this fictitious lawsuit brought to big international financial institutions by African civil society representatives and carried out in the small backyard of Sissako’s own family – is not an actor, but an average Bamako citizen, steps forward to an improvised microphone of an improvised court and speaks. When told that he would have to wait until he was asked, he answers (a fortiori taking his time): “There are things that need to be said, and they need to be said at the time when you feel like talking. If you do not let them out immediately, they will never be the same.” Followed by several other courageous and extensive speakers, among them the famous Mali writer and former cultural minister Aminata Traoré, who directs the (likewise real) judges’ attention to the paradoxical fact that Africa needs to be considered not a victim of poverty but one of wealth and abundance, what the film then establishes is the smooth yet aggressive, sad yet funny way of life inside a court. A simple court, but an ambiguous one – not just because a modern water tap is put next to an old well (merrily co-existing side by side), but also because “court” here stands for a place where people live, work, hang around, love and split up, as well as a judicial place where people fight for their rights – in this case against the hypocrisy of third world financing programs and the horrible economic effects of the so called structural adjustment policy.
Reassigning local space its global status and thereby placing a very straightforward way of speaking against a complex topology of politics, Bamako is an outstanding allegorical attack on a global consciousness and a reflection on the way world cinema is challenged by it (and at the same time remains one of its last real challengers). The old man doesn’t give the slightest shit about what anyone could think of him or what others do or do not want him to say or not say. He obeys only one law, an inner law, maybe an ancient or local law, a law of a certain type of humanity and justice, the law of dignity and courage. His speech becomes part of a whole theory and practice of speech acts, challenging not only powerful international institutions like the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund but also world cinema – referred to in a comical film-in-film called “Death in Timbuktu”, where Danny Glover meets (and shoots) Israeli filmmaker Elia Suleiman (among others). It is by an artistic and yet marked-as-artificial interweaving of both, the documentary and the fictional side of film, that Bamako is able to reach a genuinely new level of speech act knowledge and to become a front combatant of a left wing movement that today’s politics so scarcely seems to be blessed with. What happens at this court could never happen in a real court, because, Moscow VGIK graduate and the 2007 Rotterdam film festival “filmmaker in focus” Sissako states, “no real court would ever question the law of the stronger”.
Another African lawsuit, this time Cameroon-based and set in the real courtroom of Kumba Town, is portrayed in Sisters in Law (2005). In this direct cinema study women’s rights activist Kim Longinotto observes the many obstacles a judge and an attorney are confronted with while discovering the truth about child abuse. However, and quite in contrast to Bamako, which in this sense is Brechter than Brecht, the film never really takes into consideration that what happens in front of the camera could also be a fine performance of people who are pretty sure about their performance (and who also know that what is negotiated in a court is not justice as such, but ways of uttering, rhetoric gestures or speech formulas).
If at all (in)justice and its institutionalisation is a topic in a European context, we need to look for it in (meanwhile post-)Berlusconian Italy. Not only is it present in the audience award-winning Balordi (Hoodlum, 2005), Miriam Kubescha’s sensitive and cinematographically magnificent film about long-term prisoners in a Tuscany jail, but Vincenzo Marra also puts up with it. His documentary L’udienza è aperta (The Session is Open, 2006) uses footage from inside the Court of Naples and leaves all judgements about the deeply rooted mafia-practices to his audience.
Another Italy, an Italy recalling its divine existence, when the tactus de coelo, the flash that came down from heaven, hit the ground (and religious/mythical thinking hit communist author Cesare Pavese), is an authentic setting for Quei loro incontri (2006), Danièle Huillet’s & Jean-Marie Straub’s masterpiece, the very last one to be completed in their ingenious togetherness. Danièle Huillet’s death beclouded and at the same time enlightened the Viennale screenings of the new and the old experiments in setting Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò en-scène. Like in Dalla nube alla resistenza (1978) QLI always presents “a dialogue of two, speech and objection, never neutralised, in a natural setting, which remains distant from the characters” (Frieda Grafe). The Monte Pisano scenery transforms into an estranged home for the gods who talk about humans, about us. They envy the human kind, for “wherever they go to the efforts and words, a rhythm, a sense, a calmness is born”. What the Straubs explore (and what they have been exploring for their entire life) is the cinematic sense of language, its transformations through pronunciation, intonation and declamation framed by a camera, through confrontation with a setting and its sounds (its own private, natural or social speech acts), through temporal, rhythmical and structural invasion. The way Pavese’s complex dialogues are performed – they are spoken by local farmers, strictly regulated by an external rhythm, causing long pauses or long and difficult passages of text – forces the spectator to listen carefully, hyper-sensually, hyper-attentively. If close reading is a method of formalist literary theory, here a certain type of close listening (combined with an exceedingly intense close looking) is established, gradually turning into a sensual, maybe even synaesthetic form of reading.
The extraordinary status of both the spoken word as well as talking landscapes in Straub & Huillet’s films could be put in relation to two superb retrospectives of this year’s Viennale: whereas “Tales from the Jungle”, a program bringing together a wide range of films from Cooper & Schoedsack’s awesome Chang: A Drama of Wilderness (1927) to Sud Pralat (Tropical Malady, 2004) and Worldly Desires (2005) by Thai shooting star Apichatpong Weerasethakul, explored the sensual qualities of perception and non-linguistic communication induced by life in the jungle, another, somewhat national-heritage-orientated, retrospective “Nicht mehr fliehen” (“No more escaping”), named after Herbert Vesely’s 1955 take off point for the New German Wave, turned out to be a prominent site of film speech and its correlation to the political. The juxtaposition of the other and the self, the very far (ape man and cobra woman, tropes and Amazonas) and the very near (Austrian countryside and Berlin city life after WWII), the other and the self, was a pure stroke of genius in terms of curating – let’s not forget that Austrian Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek got a carte blanche, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine starred in 18 films in a wonderful “Sisters act”-program, Peter Whitehead was selected for a tribute, and that, in cooperation with the Filmmuseum Wien, the Viennale organised a comprehensive Jacques Demy/Agnès Varda show as well as a special film program for Peter Sellar’s festival, New Crowned Hope.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new oeuvre Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century, 2006), resembling James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later in its clear cut twofold structure (where one part echoes the other), telling the fragmentary story around hospital life “back then” and now, was one of seven films commissioned by New Crowned Hope. Its policy to let films communicate with each other by explicitly directing their topical orientation towards actual political problems from a post-colonial point of view perfectly matches the Viennale’s course to accentuate non-western film cultures. By the bye: however meritorious this might be, one cannot but regret – and object – the mere absence of Eastern European cinema at a festival taking place just a few kilometres from the former boarder to the “East” – apart from Russia’s 2006 documentary highlights Grazhdanskoye sostoyanie (Civil Status) by Alina Rudnickaya, Sergei Loznitsa’s innovative footage-dubbing Blokada (Blockade, 2005) and Dushanbe-born Orzu Sharipov’s noteworthy 11.000 km ot New Yorka (11.000 km from New York, 2006), and apart from Viennale evergreens Vitaly Kossakovsky, Otar Iosseliani and Aleksandr Sokurov (whose unfinished version of Elegy of Life. Rostropovich. Vishnevskaya would be worth a – rather unfavourable – discussion in extenso, especially when applying a psychoanalytic reading of his “Europe-mother-complex” …), apart from these few exceptions and one Romanian feature film, there were no contributions from Eastern Europe (which makes it a 0.02 percent participation – rather sad among the many record-breaking figures the Viennale has to offer).
But let’s go back to the two great retrospectives, back to “Tales from the Jungle” and “Nicht mehr fliehen”, back to the two sides of one problem, the problem of how can we say it (in film). The jungle, as has been suggested earlier, not only implies its own rules and techniques of encoding and decoding messages, of reading and leaving behind tracks and traces, but it also unfolds the ferocious logic of the survival of the fittest – superbly displayed and critically questioned in Chang: A Drama of Wilderness, and ironically treated and transferred into the realm of a (pre-?)sexually primal form of existence in W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan, the Ape Man (1931). When in 1925, after three years of expedition, Merian Coldwell Cooper and former Mack Sennett cameraman Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack finished their first portrait of the dramatic migration of the Persian nomadic tribe Bakhtiari, Grass – A Nation’s Battle for Life, surprisingly enough this non-narrative film became a box-office-hit. The following two years Cooper & Schoedsack spent in the Jungles of Northern Siam (now Northern Thailand), shooting an outstanding semi-documentary on the life of the Lao-tribe-members Kru and his family and struggle to coexist with Chang (Thai for elephant). This time the story was scripted and had three explicit cast members: “Natives of the Wild, who have never seen a motion picture”, “Wild Beasts, who have never had to fear a modern rifle” and “The Jungle”. The adventure starts off with a seemingly naïve scenery of “domestic bliss” and “bucolic Eden” (Ray Young), but soon unfolds the natives’ spectacular fights (for, with and) against even more spectacular animals, leopards, tigers, or cow elephants. Schoedsack’s camera work (apparently he was covered by Cooper with a rifle) is as breathtaking as the variety of animals observed and the subtle balance of brutal aggressiveness and unseen delight and tenderness. Even if “Tales from the Jungle” offered a whole lot of rediscoveries – like Glauber Rocha’s revolutionary pamphlet Amazonas, Amazonas (1966), Yves Billon’s ethnographical-investigative documentary La Guerre de Pacification en Amazonie (1973) or Arne Sucksdorff’s Aga-Scope-pioneer En Djungelsaga (1957) – the semi-documentary Chang sets the benchmark for all jungle films to come.
The same “semi-documentariness” is explored in the three best-of-this-year’s-Viennale-bests: Zacharias Kunuk’s & Norman Cohn’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), Pedro Costa’s Juventude em marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) and Lav Diaz’ Heremias, a 515 minute DV-cam-trip setting out on an ox drawn cart from Caromatan, Philippines, touching the core of private and social injustice and – since part 2, estimated to be some 11 hours, is yet to come – only transitorily ending at the very bottom of a pilgrim’s and our souls. Since one does not want to become a sinner, writing about this exclusive stranger in the abridging formulas of a familiarising film critic’s jargon, what remains to be said about this epic of retreat, downfall, devotion, and redemption is that spending one whole day in one and the same chair and in one and the same theatre was the best thing that could happen in the lives of the lucky few who were there. One cannot express it better than Philippine poet Cirilio F. Bautista in one of his poems, quoted by Olaf Möller in his homage to Diaz (disguised as a Viennale catalogue text): “Listen. Sketch the sound through the silence of sound / such that the syntax of nothing becomes speech.” (Cirilo F. Bautista: Sunlight on Broken Stones).
If Heremias is an exhaustive, critical and rebellious contemplation on modernisation, circling around its ruthless logic of linearity and progress and hereby establishing against it a miraculous time-regime which becomes essential for the anti-hero as an individual, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen displays a similar temporal time structure, but links it to the historical scene of first contact between social bodies. If Heremias’ inner personal estrangement is the background for the several first contacts he makes during a few days in today’s Philippines, the tragedy of Apak (Leah Angutimarik) and her father, the shaman Avva (Pakak Innuksuk), is related to the historical confrontation of the Inuit people with a group of Danish explorers taking place in 1922, and, even more challenging, with a group of converted, that is christianised, Inuit. Also shot with a hand camera, Kunuk’s successor to Atanarjuat (2001) is another mesmerising work of off-modern ethnic film, an experimental study not as much in visual anthropology as in finding images – majestic bright widescreen landscapes meet indigenous life meets alienated set ups of reality TV style – for the tragic loss of a rich cultural heritage and strong social, religious and cultural convictions. When his rebel daughter Apak finally gives in and defects, Avva can hardly bear the inner pain brought to the Arctic Circle community life by the intruders.
A third special event was the screening of Juventude em marcha, since last year’s Viennale brought a tribute to Pedro Costa which proved a full success. If one is familiar with Costa’s characters and non-professional actors (like Vanda from No quarto da Vanda, In Vanda’s Room, 2000) the latest magnum opus maybe opens up little faster than otherwise. On the other hand there are so many iconographical allusions in Juventude (for one of the most fascinating examinations see Andy Rector’s blog at http://kinoslang.blogspot.com) that the “opening up” of this dense cinema d’auteur might seem a rather overdrawn enterprise. When Ventura – whose pilgrimage through the Cape Verdean slums of Lisbon we follow for a torturous period of 155 minutes – in one of the scenes wears a white bandage around his head, the whole film with its narrow space policy, its expressionist Caligari-like slant stage-imagery suddenly transforms into a bizarre comment on Aki Kaurismäki’s Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man without a Past, 2002). A seriously angry comment in fact, since in Costa’s world, like in Ventura’s, there is no place for romance – not even the laconic and doubtful pseudo-bourgeois romance of girls from match factories or the bohemian outsiders developed in Kaurismäki’s “loser” trilogy, the third film of which, Laitakaupungin valot (Lights of the Suburb, 2005) was also shown at the Viennale.
No more lights, not even dim ones, in Ventura’s life. Just a handful of “relatives” – Ventura calls them his sons and daughters – who he visits regularly … and, but only occasionally, talks to, because he prefers them to do the talking. Ventura is the perfect listener, he is an observer of the life of the poor (his own people), he registers every gram of heroin taken, every bottle of Methadone hidden, every inch of misery, but also every centimetre of improvement when it comes to social relationships. His only comment over most of the time remains his look – a look of a severe and haunted, yet quiet face, just as if it were only getting ready to burst out every second. By paying his relatives a visit he honours them and lets them regain their last little life-sign as a deprived human being – giving them back their voice. Juventude em marcha – how ironic a title, since these young people look exhausted and they are definitely not about to march – was probably the loudest of all silent outcries against social injustice.
If Heremias or Ventura are confronted with a world in which evil has, if at all, only a vague face, alternative German and Austrian cinema after WW II had its own private and public, political and aesthetical enemies. Summing it all up, the Straub & Huillet-film Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (The Bridegroom, the Actress and The Pimp, 1968) starts out with a short but effective graffiti on a wall: “Stupid old Germany,” it says, “I hate it over here. I hope I can go soon.”
In Germany, filmmaking only gradually became a matter of opposition and resistance. Radical statements against the establishment had to be put in radically disturbing forms, since fascism seemed all too deeply rooted in even the most innocent ways of cultural production. Maybe back then, for reviewers and critics they never seemed radical enough (at least that’s the impression one gets when scrolling through some early numbers of Filmkritik), but looking back at the beginning of the New German Wave of the late ‘50s and ‘60s one cannot but be awestruck by the variety of ways to conquer a seeming lost territory (to Hans Mosers and Marika Rökks, waltzes and enchantments). “Nicht mehr fliehen”, a retrospective carefully curated by avant-garde filmmaker and historian Hans Scheugl for the Filmarchiv Austria, dug out some crazy examples of yet another attempt to explore the connection between political action and the specific speech act possibilities of cinema. Ten programs revealed what one might call the gradual transformation from existentialist nihilism (Nicht mehr fliehen, 1955) to the “titanic excess of revolt”, as Werner Herzog commented on his anti-hero Stroszek (1976). And they set up a finely woven context and background for films we think we know by heart, but are now able to see from a totally different angle, like Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974) or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969).
“Attention, World – this is Zero” is the last thing we hear in Herbert Vesely’s Cocteauesque pseudo-sci-fi Nicht mehr fliehen. The film is about the relicts of a world from which no one even tries to escape any more. Total standstill, total shutdown – a warning or rather a fractured and metallic swan song in the desert? It is only through a confrontation with the extreme closure of narrative traditions in Austrian and German pre- and post-war cinema that one can get a sense of how radically different avant-garde “absolute films” were. And yet they had to maintain a slight reference to their cultural backgrounds. One of these references, the main one, was an unbowed faith in literature. What might be surprising here is that side by side with new genres and traditions (like nouveau roman) early post-war German film experiments show a firm attachment to an older literary generation – like Franz Kafka in Vesely’s first film Und die Kinder spielen so gern Soldaten (1951; unfortunately not shown at the Viennale) or Georg Trakl in his second one, An diesen Abenden (1951/52), a mystified expressionist film adaptation of the poem Die junge Magd and the opening film of the retrospective. Surreal abstractions, an emphasis on sensual perception, the visual and the sound track – Vesely’s early films could also be considered Gerhard Rühm compositions, whose experiments in sound collage and twelve-tone music are another example of the new generation’s affiliation with pre-war avant-garde movements.
With its stylistic borrowings from Jean Cocteau or Maya Deren, An diesen Abenden and Nicht mehr fliehen demonstrate the international contextualisation of the New German Wave’s take off. Soon after, Heinrich Böll and other “members” of the “Gruppe 47” seemed the new warrantors. Not only Vesely’s Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1961), the official starting signal of the “Neuer deutscher Film”, also Straub & Huillet’s Machorka-Muff (1962) is based on Böll’s prose, obviously appearing adequate to produce “pictorial abstract dreams” instead of stories (as was the declared claim).
Portraying Vienna-born Vesely (who spent most of his life in Munich), lining his work up against Vlado Kristl’s queer surrealism (Der Damm, 1964; Autorennen, 1964; Arme Leute, 1963) or Straub & Huillet’s early German shorts, and leaving aside Ferry Radax or Marc Adrian or Peter Kubelka, the programming decision was to only marginally touch on the interdependencies of Austrian and German post-war cinema. Instead – and this seems to be the true value of this retrospective – it tried to point out the close affinity towards (and, undoubtedly, deconstruction of) industrial film, early TV documentaries, and Kulturfilm. One of the greatest discoveries in this sense was former Luis Trenker assistant Ferdinand Khittl’s Die Parallelstraße (1961), not by chance produced by his “Gesellschaft für bildende Filme” (“Society of educational film”). Not a third path, but a parallel street becomes the symbol of Khittl’s enterprise, a thoughtful and only occasionally winking meta-comment on metaphysics and documentary objectivity in film, sometimes extraordinarily hilarious, sometimes hardly able to get away from its deliberately starched setting. A group of young men is trying to analyse an enormous number of fragmentary film documents (shot by Khittl and his cameraman Ronald Martini during two extensive travels around the world in 1959 and 1960). The 308 “documents” – films about water and erosion, Brasilia, a volcano, rice in Asia or a meanwhile legendary Rosstäuscher (horse cheater) – are screened one after the after and intermitted by comments of the team members (who, on their part, are being commented by a supervisor). “In a Kafkaesque room five Ionescoesque people find themselves in a Sartreesque situation, trying to solve a Camuesque problem”, as back then pre-eminent critic Helmut Färber ironically described this setting.
Khittl, who in 1961 like Vesely signed the famous Oberhausen manifesto, puts the end of his film at the beginning (a device we can later find in Vlado Kristl’s works), signifying that despite its message – the team is supposedly bringing the recordings in a certain order – his film will never get a structure than could be overlooked. Another aspect touched by Khittl is the special role of different forms of media used for recordings. What today would be called a media theory of the archive in 1961 was referred to not on a theoretical but on a highly entertaining and poetic level. Subtext and meta-text run on parallel tracks. The same duplication can be found in Vesely’s short TV studies Menschen im Espresso (1958) and Die Stadt (1960). Traditional forms of documentary filmmaking (like a then-popular manner of burying every image under an avalanche of words) are performed on a serious and on an ironic level at the same time. In Die Stadt, radically “liberal” images, subtle observations, light-weighted movements and an air of freedom are not only enhanced by blues, jazz or experimental music but also put next to texts in which a dry “objective” sociological jargon more than once merges into highly poetical forms of speech as well as into wild political statements against the father generation:
Because you are weak, you called us “halbstark” (beatniks). As long as we were kids, you bought our silence, paying for ice-cream and movie-tickets. You did not serve us; you served yourselves and to your own convenience. But we want to make a row, we won’t cry for things you never taught us. Our riot is uncovered. It’s you who brutally fight each other in the dark. You are weak. Only the strong ones leave for the jungle and heal niggers, because they, like us, despise you.
The striking tendency towards challenging forms of speech and speaking demonstrated in so many films of this year’s festival could also be found in contemporary Austrian and German cinema, which only reveals the fact that many of these films are rooted in the tradition of the New German Film (Neuer Deutscher Film) and its exploitations of documentary cinema. Some of them are now discussed under what has been labelled the “Berlin School” (Berliner Schule) in the ‘90s, represented by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec and others. Inviting Stefan Krohmer’s Sommer 04 an der Schlei (Summer ’04, 2006) and Valeska Grisebach’s purist and meticulous realistic love-story Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006) the Viennale has set the focus on Berlin School’s second generation, which together with Ulrich Köhler’s Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006) left a significant mark about new German films. By showing Rudolf Thome’s then latest film Du hast gesagt, dass du mich liebst (You Told Me That You Love Me, 2005) – in the meantime he and his favourite actress Hannelore Elsner have produced another one (as intimately set en-scène) – one could become aware of the close interdependency of the Berlin School with a German cinema once bred and cultivated in Munich, with films that only on their very surface might appear less “realistic” or less related to an abstract or structural understanding of social issues. Maybe Thome, who moved to Berlin in the ‘70s, is an exception, but it seems that the traditional Berlin-Munich-antagonism is – if it ever existed – history.
An even stronger engagement in realism (its modification, de-montage, destruction or dissimilation) could be noticed in current German documentary film. The aesthetic questions of how to work with emotionalised text as found footage and as fragments evidently lead to similar solutions like the re-embodiment or the re-enactment of somebody’s “real” experiences or actions. Anja Salomonowitz, Andres Veiel and Romuald Karmakar all used similar techniques of transmitting “real” events and once “really” uttered words into highly reflexive and minimalist, yet mannered forms of documentary filmmaking. This shall now be given a closer look.
In Kurz davor ist es passiert (It Happened Just Before, 2006), a film about female labour trafficking, Salomonowitz transferred the narratives of the affected women into other people’s physical bodies. Their environment thus forms the mise en scène, in which these protagonists (a cab driver, a bar manager) are staged to cite the victims’ statements. In terms of quotation it appears as if these sentences are freed from – but at the same time saved in – a familiar but still different setting.
Andres Veiel’s film Der Kick (2006) reconstructs the murder of a 16 year-old by his friends. His actors, a man and a woman, use quotations from court protocols and statements (of the accused, their parents and their neighbours) re-enacting the events in an empty building, without costumes or props. This minimalist method has been widely celebrated as a genuinely new form (which, one should add, it of course is not). It supposedly enables us to approach the “real” reasons – for the evil side of man and/or for a horrifying teenage reality scenario and its violent phantasmagorical origins (in fact, anthropological generalisations and social analysis seem to collapse in this scenario, becoming completely replaceable). What is so irritating about this technique is the fact that in all his statements, Veiel remains a perfect psychologist, a hermeneutical practitioner, trying to understand, trying to grasp the ungraspable, trying to get to the very bottom of things and sounds, and, finally, trying to cure (or at least reconcile a society / an audience remaining untroubled by “real” images). The more you listen to or read the director’s comments, the more you become convinced that his theatrical detachment of event and agent, this artistic staging of estrangement, is a mask behind which we’d have to expect the ultimate source, the final explanation of a fatal error.
But: whose error? Whose aberration? The method of depriving agents of their voice and transferring their testimonies into general propositions suggests that the lies are in words – but the sentences seem to have become too abstract for a specific social analysis, and yet they seem too singular, always remaining the words of a teenager, having watched too much American History X, or a woman, having tried to obey her husband’s patriarchal ideas, or a man, having spent too much time without work. (There is a film on the same Potzlow murder by young filmmaker Tamara Milosevic, Zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort [Wrong Time, Wrong Place, 2005] not shown at the festival. Milosevic portrayed a close friend of the victim. Here the propositions – the same helpless way of expressing oneself, the same tragic absence of a human surrounding, the same parental and governmental failure – are also transferred to a different person, but they remain within the specific social setting and therefore in a complex sensual texture of relations and reasons.)
Unlike Der Kick the disconnected context of speech in Hamburger Lektionen (Hamburg Lectures, 2006) seems not a matter of socio-psychologically- but one of historically-rooted problems of cultural translation, of verbal translation as such. Romuald Karmakar’s text-based documentary, his usage of the technique of re-reading reflects the symptomatic ambivalence of its subject – the reading of the Koran.
Two video tapes were the basis for Karmakar’s documentary. They were made during the lectures of Mohammed Fazazi who in the ‘90s was Imam of the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg. In his prayer room Fazazi answered questions about how to apply the Koran on everyday Muslim life in Germany. The tapes taken from this and sold “under the table” are precarious, not only because of their legitimisation of terrorist acts, but also because of the fact that three of the four suicide pilots of 9/11 had attended the mosque regularly. To avoid an “iconography of evil”, as Karmakar calls it, he applied a method as follows: writing down what was said on video, giving the text to six translators, opening an intensive process of translation. The German text was then read from paper by the actor Manfred Zapatka. The reading was filmed in a simply lighted studio.
In succession of the events, the difficulty of the re-quotation is not only that it implements a cause-related timeline (since only later have we learned about what happened during 9/11). Karmakar has used this method also in Das Himmler-Projekt (2000), but taking into account the new situation, here it unfolds a specific difference. In contrast to Das Himmler-Projekt (based on a written speech by SS-leader Heinrich Himmler) this film deals with a text completely based on the spoken word. Zapatka, the actor, never acts out gestures – with one exception, when an obvious gap in the text is substituted by a gesture of cutting somebody’s throat. This scene literally exposes the formal blanks.
In all these films we notice a tendency of a hermeneutic approach towards the text. Meaning detached from the multiple tinges of expression. As Edward Said has shown, (1) the reading of the Koran itself since the 11th century has been subject to this discourse of re-interpretation. Since the imperatives iqra and qul (“recite” and “talk”) are commands inscribed in the book of god, interpreters had to decide whether they wanted to contextualise or to hermeneutically interpret the text, in order to absorb a timeless truth.
A different, physical experiment in documentary and portrayal was performed in Harald Bergmann’s Brinkmanns Zorn (2006). When grand German post-war beat-poet Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940-1975) died, he left behind eleven hours of audio recordings (besides volumes of documentary material and numerous photographs). Bergmann has shortened these intense voice files down to 105 minutes. He has kept the audio and picturised it with imaginary reconstructions of the recording situation he assumed. So we see Brinkmann, performed by Eckhard Rhode, holding up his recorder, beating dustbins, shouting or scratching his wife’s stockings (to give sound a new materiality). Renowned photographer Elfi Mikesch caught these moments in illuminating, colourful pictures. Many of these realisations can be criticised, but whatever the image might try to complete, Brinkmann’s voice will dominate the space. And closing one’s eyes in the cinema will always lead to the point of what becomes the central sentence of this film, when Brinkmann angrily moans: “It is always this see-saw between the grand imagination and the shit that we face.” Not only in this sense, Brinkmanns Zorn, was one of the most honest documentaries of the 2006 Viennale.
The question of a post-revolutionary offspring after the late ‘60s/‘70s generation has been raised not only in a number of films but also public discussions. Filmmakers like Peter Whitehead and Kenneth Anger, both guests of the festival, were honoured for their constant contributions to the underground art scene of these days.
While Anger, born in Santa Monica, created magic and symbolic, expressive, homoerotic imagery, Whitehead on the other hand started his carrier in London, working on portraits of protest. Impressionistically but directly he fragmented and reassembled live recordings of the first meeting of American and European beat poets at Royal Albert Hall (Wholly Communion, 1965), footage of inner conflicts of Swinging London (Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, 1967), the severe criticism of U.S. politics (Benefit of the Doubt, 1967) and material of the demonstrations at Columbia University, New York (The Fall, 1969). Today Whitehead has become a dedicated writer, and generously turned away from cinema, but he still fascinates as oral witness of his own story, being in constant conflict with his particular time. In that way Paul Cronin’s biographic documentary In the Beginning Was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead – as indicated in the title, based on the artist’s own reflections – becomes an eventful, moving bright feature of 200 minutes. The retelling of Whitehead’s life creates its own process, full of narcissism and irony, deep insights and permanent reconsideration. In 1969 Whitehead wrote, “I have this psychological compulsion to make reality significant: I have to film constantly or write about it as well as experiencing it!” “However,” he resumes later, “I began to realise that in my role behind the camera I simply was a voyeur. So if I couldn’t change the world, maybe I should change myself.”
If Spanish director Albert Serra is necessarily a successor of the “Generation Revolution”, you can read his new film as a kind of poetic opposition. Rather than looking for significance, he chooses to go back a lot further, emptying the process of signification and systematically observing what is thereby left. In his second feature film Honor de cavallería (Honor of the Knights, 2006) (FIPRESCI rewarded) Serra staged Miguel Cervantes’ medieval novel Don Quixote in the Catalan countryside. He extracted a non-narrative telling from the adventurous plot, where windmills are substituted by a mere battle against the whistling wind. The non-action, the dramatic skies over the swathe of land, filmed on video in bright sunlight or darkest nights, the spare dialogues between Sancho and Quichote almost naturally seem to reflect upon the characters themselves.
After having gone through the contemplation of this film, silent and gentle as it is, it seems obvious that in this setting Sancho, the bondsman, can no longer remain the raw realist of the novel. When he is asked, “Would there be Sancho, if there was no Quixote?” the answer is already given. Moreover he becomes a soft, merely depressed but truly faithful follower of his lord. And also Quixote changes, as his visions are no more opposing a set civilisation. Instead he is surprisingly concerned to fight in the name of the Lord above: “Chivalry is civilisation”, he says to Sancho, “Chivalry is the reasoning of action.”
“The images and sounds we have gathered, assembled and put together, are not booty. They are an offer and an invitation, as temporary, beautiful, useful and extravagant as the world they are evidence of.” This was festival director Hans Hurch’s inducement. And there were plenty invitations. The Viennale 2006 showed 315 films in only two weeks, and it issued 88,900 tickets. Once again it proved its status as the city’s publicly most evoking cultural festival. Referring to what Senses of Cinema editor Michelle Carey in her report on the 2005 edition called a “cinephilic city”, it needs to be remembered that grounded on local institutions like the Austrian Filmmuseum, the Filmarchiv Austria, production companies, distributors, together with journalists, newspapers and sponsors, and a home grown scene of filmmakers, the festival is embedded in a multi-linked network enabling the Viennale to expand each year. It is this established paradisiacal infrastructure that allows a curating approach to keep the balance between contemporary artistic and continuous historical consolidation of cinema. Hence exactly this combination of strong local marketing and a highly demanding program produces strange contradictions: there are completely sold out minority programs like Ulrike Ottinger’s rarely screened Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979), chosen by Elfriede Jelinek on one side. And the sponsored VIP-bags, meanwhile cult objects, sold by auction on eBay on the other. However, cultural glamour with baroque outlines is grounded in Vienna and the Viennale stands right in-between this clash of growing local interests and internal artistic or international aesthetic forms.
Therefore the speeches given at the opening gala were filled with remarks on local politics, as Viennale started shortly after the Austrian elections for parliament. It appeared suitable to open with Stephen Frear’s The Queen (2006) and what sounds like a political satire. The film concentrates on the days after the death of Lady Di. It tries to imagine how the Royal Family and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have dealt with the situation, in private and in public. But in this context The Queen also seemed to pose an important question about the nature of political cinema. Isn’t the strength that lies in satire its quick reaction and sharp opposition to an actual political situation? And isn’t exactly that (production time and money) the reason why satire is nowadays mainly reserved for other forms of art, like theatre or literature?
The Queen could not propose a different strategy. Instead it used the form of a romantic comedy that sometimes felt even displeasing (if you have to watch the Queen cry in front of a deer in a moment of lonely desperation). In this sense it seemed to get caught in a multitude of cinematographic needs (between tragedy and satire, between the personal and the political reconstruction) mainly affirmative, turning to concentrate on the (re)construction of settings or faces (yes, we love Helen Mirren!). On a dramaturgical level, the same conservative undertones could be found in the use of the “common sense” idea to emotionalise political figures (in order to explain their public acts). The film continuously followed each character’s process of personal rehabilitation, turning them from medial caricatures into bloody human beings. Telling us: in terms of our failures, we could all be Queens – or Kings.
The sensuous one-minute-Viennale-trailer was shot on grainy 35mm film. Leos Carax, the director, turns his back to the camera. He lights a cigarette and types on a computer. The blue light of the screen glows in the middle of a smoothly candle lighten room. “Tonight, I stop smoking”. When we read this sentence, we ultimately doubt his intentions. But Carax puts down his glasses, drags on the cigarette one last time, takes a revolver and – shoots himself. What a final victory for the insufficient human: the turnoff. It was a sign of radicalism in this black humour that there was never great laughter in the audience. But the minute is not over yet. The display changes, the computer automatically plays private super8 material, showing a young boy, while a French chanson starts up. Uncanny, in this final struggle, the machine pays Carax its last respect.
Endnotes:
1. Edward W. Said, Die Welt, der Text und der Kritiker (German edition), Frankfurt am Main, 1997, p. 57.
Senses of Cinema, issue no. 42, jan-mar 2007
Sunday, February 3, 2008
XII. A River Runs Through It: Reflections on a Shot in Lav Diaz’s Heremias
By Alexis A. Tioseco
We walk a narrow dirt path lined randomly with fragmented rocks, working our way down to the point that runs parallel to a long river; a river that serves as a divide between the ground I walk on and the grassy terrain on side opposite. The landscape on this side rises up drastically: dirt, low-cost housing is being prepared on the main plain some twenty feet higher. Lav Diaz, sporting a worn back t-shirt, (which appears to have weathered many battles) and black jeans torn at the knees, his cinematographer (twenty-something Mara Benitez, daughter of a well-known underwater cinematographer) following suit, steps gingerly into the water. They cross to the midpoint in the narrow river, water reaching their ankles, their pants are rolled up just below the knees.
The soundman Bob Macabenta tests the levels of the DAT recording device (borrowed from cinematographer Neil Daza). There is loud noise coming from the construction going on in the main plain above us, and it dominates the audio. Rolly (the stout production manager), and Celso (the diligent AD and line producer), quiet the workers, asking that they halt their work briefly for the duration of the shot. They oblige, intrigued by what is going on, and watch intently the proceedings from their birds-eye position.
Bob sends Lav a thumb's up sign, signaling the sound is clear. Lav takes one more peek through the eyehole of the camera, a glance at the LCD display detailing the frame, then a final look at the river, whose water persists, tranquilly. He folds his arms in front of his chest, and in his typical crooked stance (he has muscle problems) yells out into the distance, “Action!”. The crew looks on, the construction workers are paused, watching, and I observe standing on the dirt road to the side of the river. We wait…
Since first watching the 5-hour “Batang West Side”, at its World Premiere during Cinemanila in 2001, I've been an ardent believer in the cinema of Lav Diaz. “Batang West Side” not only changed the way that I viewed cinema and the possibilities of Philippine cinema, but it was the film that made cinema matter to me, personally. It impact to me was like that of “Night and Fog” to Daney: a numbing revelation of the power this medium.
Diaz's long takes feel right. I've seen “Batang West Side” (edited by Ron Dale) three times now and the 11-hour “Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino” (edited by Diaz himself) four, and the rhythm of each shot seems timed to near-perfection. Diaz's shots linger long enough to let thoughts ferment and to let the eyes explore and wander; absorbing in equal measure the crevices of the frame, the ambient sounds of the world captured in it, and the audiences own personal reflections on the relation of what one is seeing now to what has been shown to him prior. They cut, in my viewing experience; at the moment when it feels ones attention may soon be diverted.
This, however, is the first time I am on the set of a Lav Diaz film…
As minutes pass, the frame remains stagnant, nothing changing, nothing moving, save for the natural ebb and flow of the river. Far in the distance on the dirt road in front of me there is movement. Heremias (played by Ronnie Lazaro) is walking forward towards me at a snails-pace, his cow trailing slightly to his side, guided by a rope he holds loosely. So beaten and worn is this character (by what we know not) that he has chosen to leave his band of traveling handicraft vendors and venture off on his own. His feet don't walk, they labor, and considering the incredible distances he must traverse (first with his cow, later alone), the toll it takes on the body and the mind must be incredible. This is solitude, this is loneliness, and it is the path he has chosen.
Heremias, feet dragging, head bowed humbly, has finally reached the point of entry into the river. He steps in first, legs weary, and dips his hand in the water as his cow trails him along the slippery path. He walks to the middle of the river, the center of Diaz's frame (which has remained stationary throughout), and places the shirt that has been resting on his shoulder on a rock, dipping his hands into the river to clean them. He turns again to his majestic cow, the soothing sounds of water flowing in the river in the background, and begins to wash him, gently dabbing water from the river on it's body, rubbing it over its torso and legs in an effort to cleanse it from the dirt it must have accumulated over the course of their journey.
Often when Diaz's characters enter a stagnant frame from a distance, the shot will be held until the character exits the frame; it is a pattern you become accustomed to and begin to expect when watching a Lav Diaz film. For the uninitiated it can be unbearable to endure, for those that have come to expect it, it is therapy.
Heremias pauses for a moment and looks out into the distance of the river…
Ronnie Lazaro has a magnificent body. It has nothing to do with muscle (which he has; his chest built like a gladiator) nor stature (he is not tall though neither is he short), but with the relation of his body, to the manner in which he carries it; the way he moves, sits, stands, pauses. Simple put— his way of being. He is representative of the every-Filipino: humble yet strong, quiet yet resilient. Sturdy, and able to endure.
Luc Dardenne, members of the Jury that awarded the short film he starred in, “Anino” (Shadows), the Palme D'or in Cannes in 2000, described Ronnie Lazaro as a beautiful, enigmatic image on the screen. I must agree with Dardenne, and I believe this enigma, this mystery, is borne out of the contradictions of Lazaro's body (imposing) and his nature (meek). But this meekness is not a manifestation of humility without conviction, but rather the opposite: it is the demeanor of one who has/is contemplating the world around him, and choosing if and when the proper time to act is. The body ensures survival while searching; the search leads to conviction in moments of action.
He turns back to his cow, placing hand on its shoulder, and looks diagonally to that which is beyond the scope of our frame (opposite from the side he entered). His head is barely taller than the back of the cow. The moment passes… and he returns to washing his companion, darting underneath him at one point to better wash his underside.
He then rests himself down on a rock near his cow. He seeks a moment to himself, once again, before his cow, equally noble in appearance and having hardly have moved at this point, nudges him slightly with his head, causing Heremias to turn and pat him lovingly on the nose. We are now 12 minutes into the shot at this point, and the crew all light up with smiles at this sight, as if the cow, reading their minds, was nudging Ronnie to say “get up, let's go!” knowing Diaz's modus operandi, that “cut” would only enter the vocabulary once they exited the frame.
Heremias sits undeterred by the prodding, and his cow then lowers his head resigned to wait and drinks from the river. After a beat Heremias walks to the rock where he placed his shirt, and puts it back on. Again, he takes a moment to sit, head-lowered, and let the water pass through legs…
Remember that the workers above have halted their grind and are watching, quizzically, as, in their eyes, nothing is happening.
I stand silent, alone in my thoughts, still in the same position I was in when the camera began its set-up. I am getting impatient at this spectacle, nervously glancing at the workers, bystanders, and various members of the crew. A devout cinephile and lover of long takes pregnant with meaning I am, not to mention a devout believer in the cinema of Diaz, but at this precise moment I am no better than any other person on the set. We all began the scene with intent concentration but at this point we've been broken. It is only Lav, Ronnie and the cow who remain in focus. Or maybe just Lav and Ronnnie…
Minutes pass and Heremias stands up, tugging the rope that is tied to his cow, leading him out of the river and back to the road in front of me; the road from which they came. They walk, slowly, continuing to preserve patient movement proper to the film. I didn't know this at the time, but the left side of the frame of the shot ends just before the dirt road begins; the view of the path that they walk is obstructed almost completely by shrubbery (as with many shots in his films, it is not a matter of seeing the characters that is important to Diaz, it is that we know they are there).
The crew waits with giddy anticipation, and as Heremias and cow wander far off into the distance, Diaz yells, “cut”. The crew applauds, the onlookers wonder why, and the construction workers resume their grind.
When I watch the finished film of Heremias for the first time I notice this shot. It was one of a small handful that I had the privilege to witness firsthand. In the film, the beginning and ending of the shot are abbreviated—we see Heremias and his cow, walking to us and away from us only briefly. I sink into the river while watching and listening to this scene, enraptured by the beauty of nature, entranced by the soothing sounds of the water flowing; feeling, understanding, what this moment means to Heremias. Diaz's air on set, his resiliency and belief in his art, in art period, represent the melding of what Ronnie Lazaro's body represents and his meekness seeks. There is humility in Diaz's patience, and a resiliency in his unwavering gaze, unwavering patience of his camera. It is a patience born from a conviction.
I did not concede to this on the set, but understood when watching the film. Standing on that dirt road, I was anxiously anticipating the word “cut”. Sitting in my cinema seat, I wish this shot could go on forever…
KINO Magazine, Slovenia, 2006
We walk a narrow dirt path lined randomly with fragmented rocks, working our way down to the point that runs parallel to a long river; a river that serves as a divide between the ground I walk on and the grassy terrain on side opposite. The landscape on this side rises up drastically: dirt, low-cost housing is being prepared on the main plain some twenty feet higher. Lav Diaz, sporting a worn back t-shirt, (which appears to have weathered many battles) and black jeans torn at the knees, his cinematographer (twenty-something Mara Benitez, daughter of a well-known underwater cinematographer) following suit, steps gingerly into the water. They cross to the midpoint in the narrow river, water reaching their ankles, their pants are rolled up just below the knees.
The soundman Bob Macabenta tests the levels of the DAT recording device (borrowed from cinematographer Neil Daza). There is loud noise coming from the construction going on in the main plain above us, and it dominates the audio. Rolly (the stout production manager), and Celso (the diligent AD and line producer), quiet the workers, asking that they halt their work briefly for the duration of the shot. They oblige, intrigued by what is going on, and watch intently the proceedings from their birds-eye position.
Bob sends Lav a thumb's up sign, signaling the sound is clear. Lav takes one more peek through the eyehole of the camera, a glance at the LCD display detailing the frame, then a final look at the river, whose water persists, tranquilly. He folds his arms in front of his chest, and in his typical crooked stance (he has muscle problems) yells out into the distance, “Action!”. The crew looks on, the construction workers are paused, watching, and I observe standing on the dirt road to the side of the river. We wait…
Since first watching the 5-hour “Batang West Side”, at its World Premiere during Cinemanila in 2001, I've been an ardent believer in the cinema of Lav Diaz. “Batang West Side” not only changed the way that I viewed cinema and the possibilities of Philippine cinema, but it was the film that made cinema matter to me, personally. It impact to me was like that of “Night and Fog” to Daney: a numbing revelation of the power this medium.
Diaz's long takes feel right. I've seen “Batang West Side” (edited by Ron Dale) three times now and the 11-hour “Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino” (edited by Diaz himself) four, and the rhythm of each shot seems timed to near-perfection. Diaz's shots linger long enough to let thoughts ferment and to let the eyes explore and wander; absorbing in equal measure the crevices of the frame, the ambient sounds of the world captured in it, and the audiences own personal reflections on the relation of what one is seeing now to what has been shown to him prior. They cut, in my viewing experience; at the moment when it feels ones attention may soon be diverted.
This, however, is the first time I am on the set of a Lav Diaz film…
As minutes pass, the frame remains stagnant, nothing changing, nothing moving, save for the natural ebb and flow of the river. Far in the distance on the dirt road in front of me there is movement. Heremias (played by Ronnie Lazaro) is walking forward towards me at a snails-pace, his cow trailing slightly to his side, guided by a rope he holds loosely. So beaten and worn is this character (by what we know not) that he has chosen to leave his band of traveling handicraft vendors and venture off on his own. His feet don't walk, they labor, and considering the incredible distances he must traverse (first with his cow, later alone), the toll it takes on the body and the mind must be incredible. This is solitude, this is loneliness, and it is the path he has chosen.
Heremias, feet dragging, head bowed humbly, has finally reached the point of entry into the river. He steps in first, legs weary, and dips his hand in the water as his cow trails him along the slippery path. He walks to the middle of the river, the center of Diaz's frame (which has remained stationary throughout), and places the shirt that has been resting on his shoulder on a rock, dipping his hands into the river to clean them. He turns again to his majestic cow, the soothing sounds of water flowing in the river in the background, and begins to wash him, gently dabbing water from the river on it's body, rubbing it over its torso and legs in an effort to cleanse it from the dirt it must have accumulated over the course of their journey.
Often when Diaz's characters enter a stagnant frame from a distance, the shot will be held until the character exits the frame; it is a pattern you become accustomed to and begin to expect when watching a Lav Diaz film. For the uninitiated it can be unbearable to endure, for those that have come to expect it, it is therapy.
Heremias pauses for a moment and looks out into the distance of the river…
Ronnie Lazaro has a magnificent body. It has nothing to do with muscle (which he has; his chest built like a gladiator) nor stature (he is not tall though neither is he short), but with the relation of his body, to the manner in which he carries it; the way he moves, sits, stands, pauses. Simple put— his way of being. He is representative of the every-Filipino: humble yet strong, quiet yet resilient. Sturdy, and able to endure.
Luc Dardenne, members of the Jury that awarded the short film he starred in, “Anino” (Shadows), the Palme D'or in Cannes in 2000, described Ronnie Lazaro as a beautiful, enigmatic image on the screen. I must agree with Dardenne, and I believe this enigma, this mystery, is borne out of the contradictions of Lazaro's body (imposing) and his nature (meek). But this meekness is not a manifestation of humility without conviction, but rather the opposite: it is the demeanor of one who has/is contemplating the world around him, and choosing if and when the proper time to act is. The body ensures survival while searching; the search leads to conviction in moments of action.
He turns back to his cow, placing hand on its shoulder, and looks diagonally to that which is beyond the scope of our frame (opposite from the side he entered). His head is barely taller than the back of the cow. The moment passes… and he returns to washing his companion, darting underneath him at one point to better wash his underside.
He then rests himself down on a rock near his cow. He seeks a moment to himself, once again, before his cow, equally noble in appearance and having hardly have moved at this point, nudges him slightly with his head, causing Heremias to turn and pat him lovingly on the nose. We are now 12 minutes into the shot at this point, and the crew all light up with smiles at this sight, as if the cow, reading their minds, was nudging Ronnie to say “get up, let's go!” knowing Diaz's modus operandi, that “cut” would only enter the vocabulary once they exited the frame.
Heremias sits undeterred by the prodding, and his cow then lowers his head resigned to wait and drinks from the river. After a beat Heremias walks to the rock where he placed his shirt, and puts it back on. Again, he takes a moment to sit, head-lowered, and let the water pass through legs…
Remember that the workers above have halted their grind and are watching, quizzically, as, in their eyes, nothing is happening.
I stand silent, alone in my thoughts, still in the same position I was in when the camera began its set-up. I am getting impatient at this spectacle, nervously glancing at the workers, bystanders, and various members of the crew. A devout cinephile and lover of long takes pregnant with meaning I am, not to mention a devout believer in the cinema of Diaz, but at this precise moment I am no better than any other person on the set. We all began the scene with intent concentration but at this point we've been broken. It is only Lav, Ronnie and the cow who remain in focus. Or maybe just Lav and Ronnnie…
Minutes pass and Heremias stands up, tugging the rope that is tied to his cow, leading him out of the river and back to the road in front of me; the road from which they came. They walk, slowly, continuing to preserve patient movement proper to the film. I didn't know this at the time, but the left side of the frame of the shot ends just before the dirt road begins; the view of the path that they walk is obstructed almost completely by shrubbery (as with many shots in his films, it is not a matter of seeing the characters that is important to Diaz, it is that we know they are there).
The crew waits with giddy anticipation, and as Heremias and cow wander far off into the distance, Diaz yells, “cut”. The crew applauds, the onlookers wonder why, and the construction workers resume their grind.
When I watch the finished film of Heremias for the first time I notice this shot. It was one of a small handful that I had the privilege to witness firsthand. In the film, the beginning and ending of the shot are abbreviated—we see Heremias and his cow, walking to us and away from us only briefly. I sink into the river while watching and listening to this scene, enraptured by the beauty of nature, entranced by the soothing sounds of the water flowing; feeling, understanding, what this moment means to Heremias. Diaz's air on set, his resiliency and belief in his art, in art period, represent the melding of what Ronnie Lazaro's body represents and his meekness seeks. There is humility in Diaz's patience, and a resiliency in his unwavering gaze, unwavering patience of his camera. It is a patience born from a conviction.
I did not concede to this on the set, but understood when watching the film. Standing on that dirt road, I was anxiously anticipating the word “cut”. Sitting in my cinema seat, I wish this shot could go on forever…
KINO Magazine, Slovenia, 2006
XI. Heremias
By Francis Cruz
Ox-driven carts full of native crafts line up at a concrete road. We painfully await each and every one of the caravans to finish their diagonal descent and disappear from Lav Diaz's immobile frame. Ten minutes has passed by, then another fifteen of the same scene of nomadic crafts merchants travelling from one end of the screen to another. The amount of time forces you to observe the surroundings of the traveling group: You delight at the clouds who also move slowly from right to left, the wild grass swaying in relaxed abandon, the majestic view from atop the hill. Before you know it, you share with these crafts merchants the pristine value of time: since you have so much of it. At night, you listen to their songs over a bonfire, their tales of girlfriends throwing away their vows of love to leave with a Japanese man, their worries that their little ones might catch a fever. Diaz pleads you to take a few hours to immerse yourself with their lifestyle; it's not exactly a harsh request as Diaz rewards you with beautiful scenery --- the still scenes may be likened to black and white post cards of rural life in the Philippines.
Titular character Heremias (Ronnie Lazaro) suddenly wants to separate from the group. He actually has no reasons why; the fact that a super typhoon is hitting the country within a few days makes the decision more brash, irrational and dangerous. Alone, he wanders about aimlessly. At one junction. he again makes an irrational decision of opting for the dirt road rather than the safe and predictable cement road. His ox seems wary of Heremias' choice of road, and needs to be pulled to the dirt road instead of driven comfortably. The typhoon arrives --- we actually feel its power (the non-stop downpour of rain, the frequent thunders, the deafening wail of the wind). Heremias and his ox take shelter at an abandoned building by the dirt road. The next morning, he finds his cart and his ox gone.
Lav Diaz's nine-hour masterpiece Heremias is only the first part of two films. If anything, it's one lengthy prelude to the main narrative. The main character is mostly an aimless character. It's quite difficult to grasp anything from the character as his interactions are mostly bare and pointless. Midway the film, we learn more about the film's geographic setting than the character. We learn that Barrio Hapon (the area wherein Heremias loses his ox and cart) was named so because it became a haven for Japanese stragglers after the Pacific War. Heremias' night companions detail how a certain Oshima was executed by military officials for being a vicious soldier during the Japanese occupation; the other companion debate on whether Oshima was really kindhearted or evil. On a bus stopover, the bus driver details to Heremias how a town called Prinsesa Bayawak (Princess Lizard) got its name; that a couple's daughter was taken away and was never to be found again, and in her stead, a lizard who can tell whether a visitor is of good or bad nature arrives.
When Heremias re-unites with his merchant companions and tell them how his wares got stolen, and how inutile and corrupt the local policeman was, one of his companions begin to tell another tale of how a woman was able to catch her husband's murderer by returning to the crime scene. Thus, Heremias again separates from his group to return to the abandoned house, hiding himself efficiently in the forests to begin a lengthy observation of passers-by. The observation culminates when a gang of teenagers arrive and start popping drugs, drinking, vandalizing, and throwing profanities. When the effects of the alcohol, the drugs, and the hype have died, they start plotting to rape a girl. All this, Heremias has witnessed, and like the biblical prophet of the same name, started to go about town telling first, the police, then the priest, of what is about to happen. His warnings are unheeded mostly because the supposed perpetrators are relatives of a high-ranking and dangerous government official. His last resort was God, and pleads to save the girl in return for his sacrifice to walk and fast for forty days.
It's quite hard to empathize with Heremias' situation. Diaz's visuals doesn't allow for close-ups, Ronnie Lazaro can only do much with bodily gestures and moans of supposed anguish. Yet with all the stylized distance Diaz reserves for his beloved character, there is this one point in the film that an unadulterated emotion aches with so much power, that it surpasses almost everything. Right after being driven away for merely wanting to save the girl, right after being punished physically and psychologically for his new-found knowledge, he struggles painfully within the darkly-lit and rain-drenched forest. Diaz makes you suffer with him; the same way he allowed you to feel how it is to die painfully in Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004). Amidst the blanketing greys (this is most probably a technical effect, rather than an artistic one --- Diaz never makes use of artificial lighting), we hear Heremias pleas to God (who is mostly absent from the film save for a few acknowledgements, mostly gathered from the Philippines being a traditional Catholic nation) and an occasional glance at his desperate face gathering bits of light making it distinguishable to the careful eye. At that moment in the film, Heremias finally bares his soul to us --- the effect is powerful and tremendous; it's almost akin to Faust dealing with the devil, but in this case, it's the exact opposite, Heremias transforms into a selfless individual and makes a contract with God.
A question arises: Is Heremias' sacrifice a useless one? Is there a God who would make true his end of the bargain? Diaz never really answers the question, or if he will, we'd have to wait another year (Diaz is currently shooting the second part of the film), and a few more hours of his meditative filmmaking, to know. In my opinion, despite the obvious absence of a God in the film, there is indeed a predestined design to have Heremias land in that particular situation. Heremias' sudden anxiety and discomfort with his life's transient nature, his decision against all notions of logic to separate from his group, the strong typhoons, those shared tales that discuss the distinguishable and the undistinguishable natures of goodness and evil, the tale of the woman who discovers her husband's murderer, Heremias' role as the world's solitary observer: all these were carefully placed to land the reactionary character in that moment wherein he would have to bet his life to ease that fate-driven burden of guilt knowing that a girl is about to be raped and killed. By a mile, this is probably this year's best film.
Ogg's Movie Thoughts, Lessons from the School of Inattention, 2006
Ox-driven carts full of native crafts line up at a concrete road. We painfully await each and every one of the caravans to finish their diagonal descent and disappear from Lav Diaz's immobile frame. Ten minutes has passed by, then another fifteen of the same scene of nomadic crafts merchants travelling from one end of the screen to another. The amount of time forces you to observe the surroundings of the traveling group: You delight at the clouds who also move slowly from right to left, the wild grass swaying in relaxed abandon, the majestic view from atop the hill. Before you know it, you share with these crafts merchants the pristine value of time: since you have so much of it. At night, you listen to their songs over a bonfire, their tales of girlfriends throwing away their vows of love to leave with a Japanese man, their worries that their little ones might catch a fever. Diaz pleads you to take a few hours to immerse yourself with their lifestyle; it's not exactly a harsh request as Diaz rewards you with beautiful scenery --- the still scenes may be likened to black and white post cards of rural life in the Philippines.
Titular character Heremias (Ronnie Lazaro) suddenly wants to separate from the group. He actually has no reasons why; the fact that a super typhoon is hitting the country within a few days makes the decision more brash, irrational and dangerous. Alone, he wanders about aimlessly. At one junction. he again makes an irrational decision of opting for the dirt road rather than the safe and predictable cement road. His ox seems wary of Heremias' choice of road, and needs to be pulled to the dirt road instead of driven comfortably. The typhoon arrives --- we actually feel its power (the non-stop downpour of rain, the frequent thunders, the deafening wail of the wind). Heremias and his ox take shelter at an abandoned building by the dirt road. The next morning, he finds his cart and his ox gone.
Lav Diaz's nine-hour masterpiece Heremias is only the first part of two films. If anything, it's one lengthy prelude to the main narrative. The main character is mostly an aimless character. It's quite difficult to grasp anything from the character as his interactions are mostly bare and pointless. Midway the film, we learn more about the film's geographic setting than the character. We learn that Barrio Hapon (the area wherein Heremias loses his ox and cart) was named so because it became a haven for Japanese stragglers after the Pacific War. Heremias' night companions detail how a certain Oshima was executed by military officials for being a vicious soldier during the Japanese occupation; the other companion debate on whether Oshima was really kindhearted or evil. On a bus stopover, the bus driver details to Heremias how a town called Prinsesa Bayawak (Princess Lizard) got its name; that a couple's daughter was taken away and was never to be found again, and in her stead, a lizard who can tell whether a visitor is of good or bad nature arrives.
When Heremias re-unites with his merchant companions and tell them how his wares got stolen, and how inutile and corrupt the local policeman was, one of his companions begin to tell another tale of how a woman was able to catch her husband's murderer by returning to the crime scene. Thus, Heremias again separates from his group to return to the abandoned house, hiding himself efficiently in the forests to begin a lengthy observation of passers-by. The observation culminates when a gang of teenagers arrive and start popping drugs, drinking, vandalizing, and throwing profanities. When the effects of the alcohol, the drugs, and the hype have died, they start plotting to rape a girl. All this, Heremias has witnessed, and like the biblical prophet of the same name, started to go about town telling first, the police, then the priest, of what is about to happen. His warnings are unheeded mostly because the supposed perpetrators are relatives of a high-ranking and dangerous government official. His last resort was God, and pleads to save the girl in return for his sacrifice to walk and fast for forty days.
It's quite hard to empathize with Heremias' situation. Diaz's visuals doesn't allow for close-ups, Ronnie Lazaro can only do much with bodily gestures and moans of supposed anguish. Yet with all the stylized distance Diaz reserves for his beloved character, there is this one point in the film that an unadulterated emotion aches with so much power, that it surpasses almost everything. Right after being driven away for merely wanting to save the girl, right after being punished physically and psychologically for his new-found knowledge, he struggles painfully within the darkly-lit and rain-drenched forest. Diaz makes you suffer with him; the same way he allowed you to feel how it is to die painfully in Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004). Amidst the blanketing greys (this is most probably a technical effect, rather than an artistic one --- Diaz never makes use of artificial lighting), we hear Heremias pleas to God (who is mostly absent from the film save for a few acknowledgements, mostly gathered from the Philippines being a traditional Catholic nation) and an occasional glance at his desperate face gathering bits of light making it distinguishable to the careful eye. At that moment in the film, Heremias finally bares his soul to us --- the effect is powerful and tremendous; it's almost akin to Faust dealing with the devil, but in this case, it's the exact opposite, Heremias transforms into a selfless individual and makes a contract with God.
A question arises: Is Heremias' sacrifice a useless one? Is there a God who would make true his end of the bargain? Diaz never really answers the question, or if he will, we'd have to wait another year (Diaz is currently shooting the second part of the film), and a few more hours of his meditative filmmaking, to know. In my opinion, despite the obvious absence of a God in the film, there is indeed a predestined design to have Heremias land in that particular situation. Heremias' sudden anxiety and discomfort with his life's transient nature, his decision against all notions of logic to separate from his group, the strong typhoons, those shared tales that discuss the distinguishable and the undistinguishable natures of goodness and evil, the tale of the woman who discovers her husband's murderer, Heremias' role as the world's solitary observer: all these were carefully placed to land the reactionary character in that moment wherein he would have to bet his life to ease that fate-driven burden of guilt knowing that a girl is about to be raped and killed. By a mile, this is probably this year's best film.
Ogg's Movie Thoughts, Lessons from the School of Inattention, 2006
Thursday, January 24, 2008
X. Future tense
By Noel Vera
Lav Diaz broke a record when he made “Batang West Side” (West Side
Avenue)--with a running time of five hours, it’s the longest Filipino film
ever, one of the most complex, and certainly one of the most ambitious. On
one level it’s an investigation into the murder of a Filipino youth; on
another it’s a meditation on the Filipino-American experience; on yet
another it’s an urgent query into the ultimate direction being taken by the
Filipino people. Diaz continues to flout the rules of standard Filipino
filmmaking with his next project, “Hesus Rebolusyunaryo” (Jesus the
Revolutionary), possibly the first serious work of Filipino science fiction
ever made.
It’s set in 2011, nine years into the future, when the Philippines has been
taken over by a military junta; the leader, a General Racellos, wields tight
control over the country’s single TV station, radio station, and newspaper.
Racellos’ power is being challenged by Muslim secessionists, by the
Communist movement, and by a rival military group’ in the middle of this
turmoil stands Hesus Mariano (a quietly volatile Mark Anthony
Fernandez)--scholar, musician, sharpshooter, poet, warrior.
“Hesus” is an unusual blend of low-budget filmmaking and filmmaking
sensibility. Most of it was shot at night, in deserted city streets strewn
with garbage--deserted because it’s the cheapest way to shoot a film (you
save on extras), but also deserted because General Racellos has declared a
curfew, so while you see suggestions of crowded urban life (the piles of
garbage) you don’t actually see the crowds.
When you do see people it’s in places beyond the government’s control, like
the shantytown Hesus hides out in, an extraordinary combination of wretched
squalor and natural lakeside beauty--the makeshift houses are suspended,
Venice-like, over water, an entire community on bamboo stilts, eking out a
living. Nine years into the future, Diaz seems to say, and we have yet to
take our cue from the opulence of the surrounding Filipino landscape; nine
years, and we still insist on huddling close together, miserable in our
poverty and choking on the stink of our own waste.
“Hesus” is somewhat unusual even by the standards of today’s
science-fiction--except for the deserted streets and spray-painted graffiti
you won’t see any evidence of advance technology, any sign at all that it’s
almost a decade into tomorrow; if anything, things appear to have gotten
worse…which is exactly Diaz’s point.
“Hesus” is what you may call “dystopian” science fiction, a genre of SF that
depicts nightmare futures instead of idealized ones; in this sense, it’s
solidly in the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or George
Orwell’s “1984.” Perhaps a spiritual cousin to “1984;” despite the
science-fictional elements--Newspeak, Big Brother, the video screen that
watches you as you watch it to name a few. Orwell’s novel is more concerned
with the present than it is with the future--“1984” is as much about 1948
(the year it was written) as it is about 1984, just as Diaz’s film is about
Philippines 2002 as much as it is about Philippines, 2011.
Even the storytelling in “Hesus” is unusual, with scenes of violent gunfire
interleaved with scenes of extended meditative stillness. The action is
fast and intense, but after a while you sense the repetitiveness, you notice
the improbable premise (Hesus fends off dozens of soldiers wielding
automatic rifles with a mere handgun). Then you realize that the action is
patterned after the popular “Counterstrike,” with Hesus rounding corridors
and descending stairways in the police-approved stance for handgun
shooting--both arms straight out, swiveling with the eye-line like a tank’s
gun turret--the only variation being the different settings where each gun
battle takes place. Firefights or action sequences in action movies, Diaz’s
seems to tell us, are like video games, and about as meaningful--you only
indulge in them to get to the next level. The film’s real concerns (aside
from making the aforementioned point) are elsewhere…though taken as action
sequences, the gunfights are paradoxically well done--cleanly staged and
coherently filmed.
One such gunfight is followed by a lengthy sequence where a Colonel Simon
(the always great Joel Lamangan) waits for the wounded Hesus to wake up from
a coma. Simon reads to Hesus one of his own poems, and while the moviegoer
may puzzle over this sudden break to do a poetry recital the poem is
actually the heart of the movie, the same way the song Jeanne Moreau pauses
to sing is the heart of Francois Truffaut’s masterful “Jules and Jim.”
Reading the poem Colonel Simon describes a simple meal of tomatoes, fish and
rice--he could almost be reading back to the prisoner Hesus’ dream of a
simple life, the same way Orwell’s protagonist, dreaming of a better future,
thought only of simple things: a mug of beer, a bit of bread and cheese, a
woman to lie in bed with. It’s a quietly epiphanic moment, and a quietly
moving one.
There is one more source of inspiration I see Diaz acknowledging with this
film, and that’s the godfather of all modern Filipino revolutionaries, Jose
Rizal. “Hesus Rebolusyunaryo” is Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” cast in
science-fiction terms; Hesus is a younger Ibarra, slowly learning to be
disillusioned not only with the society he has chosen to oppose, but with
the communists he has chosen to oppose society with (Diaz reveals that the
film’s premise was based on the 1996 purges in the Communist party, where
comrade accused fellow comrade, and entire cells were killed on the basis of
mere suspicion). Hesus’ commanding officer, Miguel (the extraordinary
Ronnie Lazaro), acts as a more mysterious, more malevolent Elias, whispering
subversive thoughts to Hesus, guiding him along paths of either sudden
damnation or eventual enlightenment (Hesus can’t be sure which).
A film about the future, mixing the influences of George Orwell, Jose Rizal
and video games! “Hesus” was made on a shoestring budget (around five
million pesos) and shot in roughly twenty days, but the ideas teeming in it
are enough for a half-dozen lesser films. It’s an action flick with an
attitude, a political satire with a philosophical bent, a science-fiction
drama with a committed political stance; it’s also, after all is said and
done, something of a surprise that films like this can still be made, in
this country, in these times. No, more than a surprise--it’s a freaking
miracle.
Lav Diaz broke a record when he made “Batang West Side” (West Side
Avenue)--with a running time of five hours, it’s the longest Filipino film
ever, one of the most complex, and certainly one of the most ambitious. On
one level it’s an investigation into the murder of a Filipino youth; on
another it’s a meditation on the Filipino-American experience; on yet
another it’s an urgent query into the ultimate direction being taken by the
Filipino people. Diaz continues to flout the rules of standard Filipino
filmmaking with his next project, “Hesus Rebolusyunaryo” (Jesus the
Revolutionary), possibly the first serious work of Filipino science fiction
ever made.
It’s set in 2011, nine years into the future, when the Philippines has been
taken over by a military junta; the leader, a General Racellos, wields tight
control over the country’s single TV station, radio station, and newspaper.
Racellos’ power is being challenged by Muslim secessionists, by the
Communist movement, and by a rival military group’ in the middle of this
turmoil stands Hesus Mariano (a quietly volatile Mark Anthony
Fernandez)--scholar, musician, sharpshooter, poet, warrior.
“Hesus” is an unusual blend of low-budget filmmaking and filmmaking
sensibility. Most of it was shot at night, in deserted city streets strewn
with garbage--deserted because it’s the cheapest way to shoot a film (you
save on extras), but also deserted because General Racellos has declared a
curfew, so while you see suggestions of crowded urban life (the piles of
garbage) you don’t actually see the crowds.
When you do see people it’s in places beyond the government’s control, like
the shantytown Hesus hides out in, an extraordinary combination of wretched
squalor and natural lakeside beauty--the makeshift houses are suspended,
Venice-like, over water, an entire community on bamboo stilts, eking out a
living. Nine years into the future, Diaz seems to say, and we have yet to
take our cue from the opulence of the surrounding Filipino landscape; nine
years, and we still insist on huddling close together, miserable in our
poverty and choking on the stink of our own waste.
“Hesus” is somewhat unusual even by the standards of today’s
science-fiction--except for the deserted streets and spray-painted graffiti
you won’t see any evidence of advance technology, any sign at all that it’s
almost a decade into tomorrow; if anything, things appear to have gotten
worse…which is exactly Diaz’s point.
“Hesus” is what you may call “dystopian” science fiction, a genre of SF that
depicts nightmare futures instead of idealized ones; in this sense, it’s
solidly in the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” or George
Orwell’s “1984.” Perhaps a spiritual cousin to “1984;” despite the
science-fictional elements--Newspeak, Big Brother, the video screen that
watches you as you watch it to name a few. Orwell’s novel is more concerned
with the present than it is with the future--“1984” is as much about 1948
(the year it was written) as it is about 1984, just as Diaz’s film is about
Philippines 2002 as much as it is about Philippines, 2011.
Even the storytelling in “Hesus” is unusual, with scenes of violent gunfire
interleaved with scenes of extended meditative stillness. The action is
fast and intense, but after a while you sense the repetitiveness, you notice
the improbable premise (Hesus fends off dozens of soldiers wielding
automatic rifles with a mere handgun). Then you realize that the action is
patterned after the popular “Counterstrike,” with Hesus rounding corridors
and descending stairways in the police-approved stance for handgun
shooting--both arms straight out, swiveling with the eye-line like a tank’s
gun turret--the only variation being the different settings where each gun
battle takes place. Firefights or action sequences in action movies, Diaz’s
seems to tell us, are like video games, and about as meaningful--you only
indulge in them to get to the next level. The film’s real concerns (aside
from making the aforementioned point) are elsewhere…though taken as action
sequences, the gunfights are paradoxically well done--cleanly staged and
coherently filmed.
One such gunfight is followed by a lengthy sequence where a Colonel Simon
(the always great Joel Lamangan) waits for the wounded Hesus to wake up from
a coma. Simon reads to Hesus one of his own poems, and while the moviegoer
may puzzle over this sudden break to do a poetry recital the poem is
actually the heart of the movie, the same way the song Jeanne Moreau pauses
to sing is the heart of Francois Truffaut’s masterful “Jules and Jim.”
Reading the poem Colonel Simon describes a simple meal of tomatoes, fish and
rice--he could almost be reading back to the prisoner Hesus’ dream of a
simple life, the same way Orwell’s protagonist, dreaming of a better future,
thought only of simple things: a mug of beer, a bit of bread and cheese, a
woman to lie in bed with. It’s a quietly epiphanic moment, and a quietly
moving one.
There is one more source of inspiration I see Diaz acknowledging with this
film, and that’s the godfather of all modern Filipino revolutionaries, Jose
Rizal. “Hesus Rebolusyunaryo” is Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” cast in
science-fiction terms; Hesus is a younger Ibarra, slowly learning to be
disillusioned not only with the society he has chosen to oppose, but with
the communists he has chosen to oppose society with (Diaz reveals that the
film’s premise was based on the 1996 purges in the Communist party, where
comrade accused fellow comrade, and entire cells were killed on the basis of
mere suspicion). Hesus’ commanding officer, Miguel (the extraordinary
Ronnie Lazaro), acts as a more mysterious, more malevolent Elias, whispering
subversive thoughts to Hesus, guiding him along paths of either sudden
damnation or eventual enlightenment (Hesus can’t be sure which).
A film about the future, mixing the influences of George Orwell, Jose Rizal
and video games! “Hesus” was made on a shoestring budget (around five
million pesos) and shot in roughly twenty days, but the ideas teeming in it
are enough for a half-dozen lesser films. It’s an action flick with an
attitude, a political satire with a philosophical bent, a science-fiction
drama with a committed political stance; it’s also, after all is said and
done, something of a surprise that films like this can still be made, in
this country, in these times. No, more than a surprise--it’s a freaking
miracle.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
IX. Batang West Side: The Space of Absence and the Site Of Resistance
By Andrej Sprah
“Cognition, like culture, is organic, where meaning can flow without imposing manipulative forces or elements. Humankind’s capacity to grasp meaning is organic, too. Cinema can create this culture. But the real power of cinema comes when there is honesty in the work. You can use or discard all the theories, philosophies and verities that have sprung out of this great modern art but I believe that its greatest value will be that of honesty. And qualifying honesty must always be on the level of responsibility. The search for the truth must always go hand in hand with responsibility.”
-- Lav Diaz
A deserted night street, covered with a few inches of dirty snow, showered with the cold light of the street lamps…; and there at the very bottom of this image a human figure arises from afar, wandering in its long and slow arriving past the patient eye of the camera… This scene, so saturated with loneliness and emptiness that it hurts to the bone, represents not only the initial but also the most frequently used image Filipino director Lav Diaz confronts us with in his in-depth and extensive investigation into the unenviable reality of his people’s diaspora in the North American Jersey City: Batang West Side (2002). The film, which aroused the interested film public with its epic structure and monumental design, starts out as a classic whodunit - with a body found lying on the pavement if West Side Avenue and a detective handling the case in a committed and meticulous manner. The victim of an unknown perpetrator is Hanzel Harana (Yul Servo), a barely 21-year-old Filipino immigrant who had but two years before come to stay with his mother in “the promised land”. The detective is his countryman, Juan Mijarez (Joel Torre), who is not in the least left indifferent by the suffering, the lack of perspective and the tragic fate of his kinsmen. The death of this young man, in a deserted street late at night with no credible witnesses, turns out to be a complex, Rashomon case, whose investigation is with every new actor ever more removed from the rules of the genre and is slowly turning into a complex psycho-sociological drama with the main –symbolic - protagonist becoming the Filipino man himself.1 Namely, in his fourth feature film, Lav Diaz concentrates above all on the question of the (lost) identity of the Filipino man. He is our contemporary, placed in the now, which spares but the few wealthiest people in the world, and in a diasporal environmental, in a kind of paradigmatic community where its inhabitants' basic identity problems crystallize in a concentrated form. Namely, an individual abroad is never only a bearer of the subjective social role but is always also a representatives of his people. Through the investigation procedure, we, together with Mijarez come to meet with Hanzel’s family members living in the USA; with his mother (Gloria Diaz), his grandfather (Ruben Tizon) and – only by the way – his father, who comes utterly distort from the Philippines only to collect his son’s body. Besides the mourning, frustrated representatives of the divided family, the detective’s interrogations introduce us to Hanzel’s girlfriend, his closest friends and a number of individuals, be they Hanzel’s acquaintances and allies or his enemies – the key suspects of the case. The colourful collection of actors and companions of the tragical death soon proves to be a precisely conceived matrix of typical characters by which Diaz carefully sets up a paradigmatical structure of Filipino society as a whole. The selected protagonists, their relationship and their role and positioning in the unfolding of this complex narration bear evidence that nothing is left to chance and that the director exercises control over the extensive subject-matter of the five-hour film narration with incredible ease, certainly and confidence in himself and the medium of his expression. In this narration, Diaz’ subjective auteur vision comes to its full expression alongside his unflinching belief that an endeavour to restore the severed link between man and world is the precondition of creativity and the overcoming of the manipulative nature of the film medium itself: “…in creation, you will have a thousand and one options that represent the truths of your process assuming you, the maker, are the one who makes the decision. It is a process that would culminate in an eventual dynamic between the film and the viewer, and the viewer and the world. And if you believe that your work can truly be elevated in an aesthetic domain and that it can sustain itself, then its potential for meaning is vast and limitless so that it would be complete.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee).2 In his awareness of a film’s self-existence, Diaz comes very close to those conceptions in modern discussions of creativity that assign to a work of art a privileged place of the only thing in the world that sustains (itself): “[Art] preserves and is preserved in itself (quid juris?), although actually it last no longer than its support and matrials – stone, canvas, chemical colour, and so on (quid facti?). /…/ The work of art is being of sensations and nothing else: it exists in itself.” (Deleuze, Guattari 1994: 163-64) In Diaz’ case the aspect of self positing is at the same time a principle of an entirely concrete creative process – by letting the shot scenes come alive in all their greatness, a film rises above its subject-matter, is established as a whole and stands up on its own – independently and necessarily: “I couldn’t do anything anymore, that’s the work, that’s it.” (Diaz)3 The feeling of the necessity of the sequence of events is the driving force of the inner dynamics of Batang West Side, where the nature of police work itself reveal a network of relation running much deeper and entangled more fatally than it first appears in view of the seeming outer pragmatic looseness. In such a consonant composition the only “ dissonant element” of the film seems to be Mijares’ – accidental – meeting with a documentary filmmaker who, with his camera , is on the lookout for the truth of the Filipino people’s life in diaspora. “The camera will catch plenty of stories. Some even true, I hope”, is his motto in decisively opposing the detective’s initial aversion, which at the end of the film – when two meet again and at first glance surprisingly bond – bring us to the revelation of one of the key enigmas of the film. But the aforementioned tight composition, based on Diaz’ efforts to search for truth according to the valuation criteria of an artist’s honesty and his unflinching responsibility for man and world, is of the kind that is not supported by “ the laws of physics” or – in our case – by the normative controls of the established ways of film production. It is held together by the inner means supporting the work of art and that binding notion of “the ultimate cinema” , put forward by Diaz’ great role model Andrey Tarkovsky: “I see chronicle as the ultimate cinema; for me it is not a way of filming but a way of reconstructing, of reconstructing life.” (Tarkovsky 1994: 64-65)4 And in accordance with life itself the basic conception of Batang West Side – its need to reconstruct the life of the murdered young man – is permeated by the tragic determinations of death and bitter memory. Its key sound dimension is therefore a collection of cries, sighs, shivers, (self)-accusations and whispers…, its predominant emotional dimension is a combination of the feeling of grief, fear, loss, desperation and solitude… its elementary spatiality is a claustrophobic series of ghetto streets and temporary housing suffocating one even in the case of a lavish rich suburb villa… its central temporary is the momentariness of the opening letting the past emerge – both recent ( the last two years of Hanzel’s life ) and, above all, the time of Martial Law as one of the most traumatic periods of Filipino history. The various dimensions of Diaz’ accomplished narration continuously flow into each other in a permanent ellipsis and, at the same time, a constant – narrative superimposition. Ellipsis, as the actual characteristic narrative method of Batang West Side, as well as double exposure (which does not figure directly but as a specific form of double encoding, giving expression to the dramatical function specifying the essential determiners of Diaz’ narration: the coexistence of two levels of reality – concrete physical and imaginary, non-material) is a figure that besides its primary narrative function always conveys also the heterogeneity of film time.
This pervasion of time can be clearly seen already in the prologue of Batang West Side – the starting ten-minute exposition ending with a murder of a young Filipino as the initial plot set-up… “I grew without a father. I have a father, but my memories of him are all from when I was only seven years old. His image remains incomplete in me save for the rare picture my mother kept and for brief memories of him taking care of me. When I was seven, he left. My mother wept for a long time waiting, than looking for him. It almost drove her mad.”
These are words in the off field underlying the introductory sequence of the film, in which from the depth of the frame, along a deserted night street, an at first barely noticeable figure of a staggering, evidently “absent” young man slowly approaches. In the scene, filmed as a patient long take in full shot, which is one of the most typical ways Diaz shoots exteriors, we follow the protagonist – in whom we shall recognize Hanzel Harana, a soon-to-be victim and subject of a police investigation up to the immediate vicinity of the spot, about to become the place of his death. A cross cut takes us to a dream-like, breath-taking black and white scene in the Filipino countryside where grief consumes both a child and his desperate mother as well as a grown up man sobbing on the shoulders of a young man, collecting his falling teeth into his hand…Cutting back to a man dozing off in a parked car and the sound of a far off shot waking him, reveals that it was him we have just seen in the dream – i.e., detective Juan Mijarez, who obviously dozed off while on a stake-out. Mijarez diligently writes down his dreams and then checks whether his nightmare ( teeth falling out in a dream supposedly fortell death) harmed anyone. He calls the hospital where his mother is lying, connected to machines keeping her alive. Learning she is fine, he calls his wife, who he lives separate from and has not called in two years, to check on his two sons. Before leaving the stake-out scene, he receive a message from his partner about a murdered Filipino youth on West Side Avenue. When he arrives at the scene of the crime, he recognizes the victim Hanzel, whom he did not know personally but who was familiar to him from the indispensable “ inventory” of the streets. ( “I’m familiar with Hanzel Harana. I always see him at West Side Avenue. One time I bumped into him,” the detective recalls in inner monologue.) It is exactly this inner monologue as a particular kind of voice-over – providing to be a standard method of Diaz’ introspection – and the visual reconstruction of the moment when the policeman and the young man bump into each other that give the whole its specific meaning of a crucial scene. Not only because of the fact that this is the only scene in the entire film in which Diaz, as an emphasis, uses both slow-motion and replay at the same time, but also because it introduces the principle of retrospective reconstruction as the key narrative strategy of Batang West Side. It is clear now that the introductory monologue did not speak of Hanzel’s childhood (though his situation was exactly the same save him growing up without his mother), that it was detective Mijarez stressing his father’s absence and it is therefore he who at the very beginning proves to be the central (individual) protagonist of the film. It becomes clear also that the shot waking Mijarez from his nightmare meant the moment of Hanzel’s death. “Dissonance” between the visual and acoustic dimension of the scenes, on the one side, and on the other, the stressing of elements explicitly talking about the nature of film time – the sound of the shot for example has the function of a kind of acousmatic quilting point – are factors indicating that the passing between different time levels is the basic stylistic bravura of Batang West Side. At the same time the images of the sketched prologue material acquire a characteristic saturation with meaning, at first coming off more or less as one-dimensional, because of their of their ascetic visualization, but in the – subsequent or retroactive – contextualization within the whole, they reveal all their multiplicity of meaning. Such a complex structure, with all its registers of multiplicity, coming to its full the very first few moments, is a sign of an ambitious aesthetic conception giving itself over to organicity wherein the key emphasis crystallizes through aspects of temporality.
As mentioned before, one of the fundamental aesthetic elements of Diaz' film articulation is the long take, i.e. , the sequence shot, and the specifically, as he himself points out, the long take in real time.5 Between its two most common variants, the stationary or quasi – stationary long take and its mobile counterpart, the author favours the first. This is quite understandable if we take as a presupposition that it is principles of the first that give the director an opportunity for “integrity and patient intensity of his gaze” (Le Fanu). These are precious elements of liberating that gaze, embellishing Diaz’ endevours for an authentically cinematic image – such as abides in the binding principle of Andrey Tarkovsky: “The image becomes authentically cinematic when (among other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even with in each separate frame.” (Tarkosvsky 1994: 68) With the patient arranging of everyday scenes in their basic time/space determinations – as a kind of observation “of life’s facts within times, organized according to the pattern of life itself" (Tarkovsky) – the author takes up a committed task of according the viewer’ s film experience to the immediate experience of his own ordinariness. In putting everything on the presence of time as the fundamental “tension“ of the shot, steadily persisting in its slow pace, putting forward the feeling of duration even when the “narrative logic” of a whodunit would dictate a dynamical build up of the visual pyrotechnics of lightening montage cuts, a specific relationship with the viewer is being established. Submitting to duration, necessary in order to establish the tension of the gaze that in his artistic integrity Diaz strives for, is a (pre)condition for opening up the viewer’ s perception – for his letting the filmmaker captivate him with his gaze. Such a mobilizing of the gaze – attainable through different film techniques – is intensified with the stylistics of long takes mostly when this is a means of those aspect of essentialization that reflect in a tendency towards presence as such.6 With the strict intensification of screen existence in the scenes of the simple moments of everyday life (where narrative time is usually prolonged and diegetic nullified), the reactualization of the interest in the ordinaries of life comes to its full expression, wherein the merely apparent banality of man’s everyday experience deservedly comes under a detailed investigation… His conscious and uncompromising focus on life in its immediacy places Diaz in a constructive dialogue with some important stands of contemporary film art. On one side, he comes close to elements of contemporary minimalism, which carefully exposing the social emptiness of a common man’s everyday and focusing on the here and now, reveals above all aspect of individual desolation – the consequences of catastrophic social “ development “. With redirecting its interest to immediate experience, minimalist art comes to clear stands on the nature of reality. Its essentialization is reflected in its apparent simplicity, as a result of a strict focus – the elimination of all superfluous factors. It is a process of careful distillation and concentration wherein “a sort of crystallized abundance” ( Motte ) is expressed. Minimalist art is not simplified and obscured but it actively transforms the very center of current values: “it locates profound experience in ordinary experience”. ( Serota, Francis ) In view of the correspondence between Diaz’ creative efforts and certain minimalist elements, we cannot talk about his visual asceticism as a reductionism or nihilism, on the contrary, it can be considered as a principle of substantialization bringing to its full expression above all the in–depth interest in presence as such. With it artistic activity turns again towards the questions of perception, which means there also comes to a reconsideration of the subject. On the side, a resonance of the current new realistic initiatives all over the globe, most notably perhaps the creative approaches of French new realism, can be sensed in Diaz’ coming close to the throb of reality. The most prominent place in French new realism belong to the so called realism of proximity (“un reel de proximate”), reflecting above all in the “documentary style of the observation” ( Powrie ) and in the thought–through selection of a film’s subject matter: individuals or social groups the director knows thoroughly. The film treatment itself is not an indirect rendition of an imagined experience, but rather the reality of an individual being endangered by the “achievements” of brutal capitalism coincides with the activity of the author who is himself often explicitly engaged in identifying and actualizing the pressing problems of socio–cultural reality. The characteristic new realistic elements of Batang West Side can be considered in view of the Brechtian conception of realism as an uncompromising “probing of reality”, originating from a need for the reconstruction of phenomena, penetrating the mere surface of things as a kind of speculum allowing us to probe the world. In doing this, it takes no notice of the set rules, “clichés” of opinion; Brechtian "…idea of realism is not a purely artistic and formal category, but rather governs the relationship of the work of art to reality itself categorizing particular stance towards it.” ( Jameson 1980: 205). At the same time the radical rejection or even undermining of conventionality presents an obvious manifestation of progressive film. Progressive in the context of a definition by Robert Philip Kolker, who stresses it is all about “…cinema that invites emotional response and intellectual participation, that is committed to history and politics and an examination of culture, that asks for the commitment of its audience; a cinema that offers ways to change, if not the world, at least the way we see it.” (Kolker 2001: 2) This illumination gives a wider contextualization and with it an “outer” argumentation to the director’s statement, which we dare take as a universal “programme declaration”, as his creative credo, wherein he decidedly emphasizes: “…that the foundation of a truthful work should be honesty and responsibility. My struggle lies here: my so–called verite or aesthetic stand”. (Diaz in conversation with Wee).7 Even in view of Diaz’ exciting concurrence with the most actual of present times it is by no means surprising that in his “programme guidelines”, there echo many principles from renowned chapters in film history, e.g., the postulate of “the artist’s responsibility” as conceived by Andrey Tarkovsky in the homonymous chapter in Sculpting in Time, where he emphasize that: “…the more he [the artist] aspires to a realistic account, the greatest his responsibility for what he makes.” (Tarkovsky 1994: 184) In line with the committed correspondence to certain characteristics of contemporary film searchings, defined above all by the awareness of the mutual responsibility of us all in the world and to the world – which is the precondition of an active partaking in the shaping of its structure – we can consider Diaz’ conception and expression of film time also as an opposition to certain tendencies in the “modernizing” conception of temporality caused by a massive progress in new media technologies. It is exactly the specifics of the long take with reference to the question of real time aesthetics that have been decisively ritualized due to the concord with some of the important current discussions raising the question s of change in the treatment of the real (time) conditioned by new technologies.8 The notion of real time, moving first from cinematic perception of continuity to the TV conception of “liveness”, had culminated in the computer time of instantaneity, and is now through digitalization coming back to film in the universal form of special effects. In the unconstrained process of technological progress, in which the question of reality moves right along the temporal axis, the insistence on articulating time such as is made possible by the long take is perceived as a kind of an opposition praxis. It is a form of resistance to the present which, placing everything on the presence of time ( in pure form ), opposes the new–technology tendencies towards “an erasure of memory and history”.9 It is exactly history and memory (as we have already mentioned and will see later on) that are among the key factors of Diaz’ artistic enlightenment project; his organic tendency towards the redemption of the Filipino soul, accurately captured in the form of his binding principle: “…I formulated my thesis that true cinema can redeem the Filipino soul.”
Though we assigned to the long take in real time a primary place in the aesthetic conception by which Diaz establishes inner continuity and quality of a particular scene – “For it is the continuous time, the real time in the long take which allows for the possibility of contingency, the unforeseen, the unexpected, in the cinema.” (Doane) – we must point out that Batang West Side is in a chronological sense a most non-continuous and non-linear work. The present of its diegesis is suspended through out with longer or shorter time jumps (as indicated by the above description of the key points of the points of the prologue). The central narrative line of the police investigation into Hanzel’s death – representing the temporal anchor of diegetic present – is subject to constant digressions with which Diaz explores the possibility of accessing the truth about the young man’s life. This is then also supposed to help reveal the truth about his death. The story of a short-lived “diasporal experience” of the young Filipino man comes to life in a certain narrative stratification of different time levels taking place parallel to the investigation into his death. The dispersed fragments of truth thus return to their original moment in a form of concentric undulation. And at the same time death itself opens up aspects of the past: on one side, in way of mourning, which in the memories of loved ones conjures up time past, and on the other, in a colorful series of manifold truths left by Hanzel’s presence on the face of the earth, among his fellow man. Diaz does not focus merely on the grieving family members and those closest to Hanzel, who with his death immerse in memory and self-interrogation looking for their share of the responsibility, an equally thorough investigation is also directed at the main suspects as well as the detective himself in whom the death of his countryman arouses a series of painful reminiscences of his own – obviously traumatic – past. Each protagonist Diaz introduces into the whole not only brings his individual “story” but is also the bearer of a certain period or (is the victim) of tragically events in the history of the Philippine people. “The story, its presence, is only a reason for memory and reflection. On the history Philippine people in the years covered by Batang West Side: it is hidden in the character – firstly as an individual, secondly as a collective memory/fiction -, who are projected into epically extended spaces if time in almost every scene; the memories as well as the speculations on the murder young man always – be the road ever so winding – lead (back) to the Philippines in time of the Marcos’ regime, which turned the riches nation of South Asia into the biggest poorhouse of the region, its only export goods now being people.” (Moller 2005: 6) First among the narrative strategies enabling the author to conjure the past and materialize it in the present is the elliptical loosening of logical connections of ordered time sequence, the connections of cause and effect, successions or the linear sequence of events. The basic stylistic approach with which Diaz subverts the established logocentric connections is retrospective reconstruction opening up time rifts and enabling a free transition between factual and remembered. But even in these transitions, in the modes of the reconstruction itself there reconstruction itself there is no inner logic, no causality. There are three predominant modes of reconstruction: sometimes it is parallel, when with the help of cross cutting, we at the same time follow the talked about events, but more often “classic” retrospection, wherein the reporting on an event melts into a visual reconstruction of the reported, and “anticipatory” retrospection, where the reported event is only later placed in the order of the whole, alternate. In between the pointed out narrative levels there sporadically intrude Mijarez’ dreams and occasional reminiscent flashbacks triggered by a certain situation in the present. These scenes of imaginariness have their counterpoint in film fragments the viewer shares in either directly – when protagonists watch the film on TV, or indirectly when - he is himself “addressed" as a firsthand witness or even as a “ camera-man” of the film within a film… Through the development of narration gradually the situations of unexpected or “ unexplained” transitions come to predominate in which the sequence of scenes is in complete “ accord” though the scene may be taking place on different time levels. Ever more often what is factual and what is reconstructed in memory seems to a kind of punctured whole conveying the coexistence of different levels of reality – physical and imaginary. And the more the laws of “logical” are undermined the deeper are the punctures through which the past comes flooding, the one that the authority is trying to redeem in order that through its “ active introspection” he contribute his share to the redemption of the Filipino soul 10 – according to “III. Thesis on the philosophy of history” by Walter Benjamin: “To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” (Benjamin 1940: 1) The viewer in this manifold yet extremely fragile composition – which is never in danger, though, due to its valuable bond being on one side, the author’s full responsibility and on the other, a strong emotional charge – gradually looses his firm footing. Due to such time “inconsistency” he is in a way struck floating in a time loop; yet it is exactly this subversion of a firm chronological support that makes him search more intensively for some other hold, which Diaz offers in the narrative’s emotional dimension. The viewer thus becomes more susceptible to the einfuhlung in the manifold film dimensions… By this we of course do not mean the aspects of a viewer’s identification, but have in mind the element of the “creative spirit of the audience” in the sense of Kiarostami’s “unfinished cinema”, believing in art as a possible – factor in “changing things” and presenting new ideas: “Art gives each artist and his audience the opportunity to have a more precise view of the truth concealed behind the pain and passion that ordinary people experience every day.” (Kiarostami 1995: 1)11 This principle not only directly corresponds to aspect of free creative activity (as a kind of a form resistance to the present), advocated by contemporary film thought headed by Gilles Deleuz, but it shares its conviction about the engaged viewer with the author of Batang West Side himself: “Give the audience real cinema so they can react and re-asses their lives, make them aware that they have choices and responsibilities.” (Diaz in conversation with Romulo) The reaction is actually possible only when a pledge is established between the film and the viewer which – as in any relationship – is based on trust. One of the key factors in attaining the viewer’s trust is the awareness of the free gaze:"…if people were allowed to see freely they would see truly” (Vaughan). The seeing itself is determined by far more than the eye can reach, for in it there is encompassed the whole of an individual’s experience, which the gaze of the filmmaker faces. The authentic gaze stimulates registers of seeing that are not subject to conventions of a certain mode of representation encoding the meaning of the images on screen, but are open to the awareness of the gaze itself; the gaze in which its representational aspect is accounted for in the “sum total” of the film act. Such cinematic authenticity, attainable only through the possibility of a confrontation as a fact of actuality, wherein the filmmaker’s gaze and the viewer’s seeing coincide, is the precondition of the free gaze. In it the fundamental time relations ritualize, wherein the need for impressions of reality declines while the need for impressions of presence intensifies. “What film archives, then is first and foremost a lot experience of time as presence, time as immersion. This experience of temporality is one, which was never necessarily lived, but emerges as the counter-dream of rationalization, its agnostic underside – full presence. Hence, time’s reality in the cinema is both that of continuity and rupture." (Doane 2004: 272)
Diaz takes great advantage of the awareness of the double nature of cinematic time in his treatment of the third, in the context of Batang West Side probably most important, aspect of time – history. With a characteristic time articulation the director strives towards such forms of “ conjuring the past”, or the presentation of its absence, as are not based only on narrative “digressions and subversions” but, as already mentioned, on opening passages through which history emerges in the narrative. Again we are not dealing here with a matrix, with a universal principle of “conjuring”, but there is once more at work here a heterogeneous series of ways of “activating the past”. Above all in Diaz’ treatment of history, it is almost never (but for the rare exceptions of dreams sequences, reminiscent flashbacks and film clips) a matter of direct representation or enactment of past facts and actions but merely of their transmission. When there is talk about a concrete individual experience of one involved in a historical event, Diaz most often uses the form of memory narration; when for example , the subject under consideration is the question of conflicting ideologies, the author metaphorically focuses on rival groups pushing shabu (crystal meth – specific “social” drug of the Philippines), religiously announcing their base “calling“ as the vision of a new prosperity for the Filipino man… The complex series of aspects of history actually shows that Batang West Side as a whole is the particular way of historical articulation; namely, the essential element of its structure are representations of the traumatic facts in Filipino history, as is also stressed by the author himself. 12 The characteristic of historical time in Diaz’ visual treatments is at first sight in an interesting harmony with Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical concept of historical time”. We have in mind his notion of the concept of history – from his prominent Theses on the Philosophy of History -, arising from the opposition to its evolutionist variant, based on the concept of progress, as a form of “progression through a homogenous, empty time” (Benjamin). “The ‘dialectical concept of historical time aimed not to preserve the past but to activate it. Benjamin’s theory of ‘dialectical images’ which flash up at the moment of danger was explicitly conceived as a historical pedagogy - a means of transmitting the past while drawing attention to the particular way in which the past is seen in the present.” (McQuire 1998: 178) The presupposition of the “moment of danger” in the context of Batang West Side refers to the treatment of certain parts in the film as the crucial scenes. These are on one side, the “intensified” situations in which the viewer’s interest is more strongly mobilized than in most others, on the other, the scenes wherein certain points of the story are meaning-wise and emotionally clarified. The example of the first, and by no means only, is in Batang West Side certainly the – already initially pointed out – sequence of Hanzel’s death.13 Aspects of the second can be seen, for example, in the representation of Mijarez’ reminiscence (late in the second half of the film), aroused by him touching the victims gun and culminating in a hallucination where it is him who fires the bullet into Hanzel’s brain. In this horrifying scene (the only one, despite the horrifying amount of violence in Batang West Side, we can consider in light of the definition of the so-called ultra violence), Diaz not only points out aspects of collective guilt when he shouts at us: “We killed Hanzel Harana”, but with his blasting the inner continuity of the scene – with which he throughout the film so patiently built the feeling of the presence (of time) – he also reveals the fundamental nature of his aesthetics and ethics: his aesth-et(h)ic stand, which he shares with the binding stand of permanent human responsibility: “We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them.” (Deleuze, Guattari) The individual enactments, or better yet the intrusions of the imaginary, as a kind of Proustian memoire involuntaire, are contrasted with a massive material of voluntary memories. On closer view, the persistent methodology thus offers another aspect in considering Diaz’ conception of history: not to ascribe to the crucial scene a privileged role but to, despite its greater intensity, consider it as equal to the others. We thus return to the initial presupposition that the structure of the film stands up on its own exactly because of its composition “imbalance"… In the imbalance of the relationship between the concrete and the imaginary we can sense an echo of the subtle nuancing of Benjamin’s different between two premises in V. and VI. Philosophically historical theses. In the fifth Benjamin says: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." The sixth begins: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’" (Ranke). "It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." (Benjamin 1940:2) In this duality, which of course does not presuppose difference but an important complementing, we can sense also the key “values” of Diaz’ treatment of history. Diaz succeeds in merging Benjamin’s presupposition of the evasiveness of the image of the past and its irretrievability, threatening to disappear every time it “is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns’, with his awareness that “in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (Benjamin). The key means allowing for such a merging is a network of “parallel presents” erasing the transitions between different narrative levels. This network is also a net Diaz’ camera not only uses on the look-out for the present in which the image of the past will be recognized as one of its own concerns, but with the strengthening of the role of “individuals’ presents” in the film – when the focus on the events after Hanzel’s death predominate over the reconstruction of this – the center of gravity shifts towards the hear and now, towards presence as such. But this does not mean a subversion of historical perspective – quite the opposite. It is only through the tension of presence, in which the moments of danger (or crucial scenes) are not pointed out but considered equal to the rest in the entire complex structure of “conjuring the past” – saturated “only’ with duration, emptiness or feeling of loneliness, loss and suffering -, that another, perhaps the most committed gaze can open up. It is a gaze most uncompromising in the sense that the author does not hesitate to0 treat the present – which finally prevails on the diegetic as well as narrative level of the film – and with it himself as the actual stage where the past generations of his people “retroactively resolve their deadlocks” (Zizek). This is a conception that is as a reflection of Benjamin’s “dialectical notion of historical epoch" exposed by Slavoj Zizek in his paper The Fragile Absolute. In sharpening the opposition to the naïve evolutionist approach to historical development Zizek puts forward a thesis that the presupposition. “That the present redeems the past itself”, is not only a historically relativistic assertion, but that a characterization of a past era always encompasses also our present stance. “What we are claiming is something much more radical: what the proper historical stance (as opposed to historicism) ‘relativizes’ is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself – our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past. In other words, it is not only – as Foucault liked to emphasize, in a Nietzschean mode – that every history of the past is ultimately the ‘ontology the present’, that we always perceive our past within the horizon of our present preoccupations, that in dealing with the past we are in effect dealing with the ghost of the past whose resuscitation enables us to confront our present dilemmas. It is also that we, the ‘actual’ present historical agents, have to conceive of ourselves as the materialization of the ghost of past generations, as the stage in which these past generations retroactively resolve their deadlocks.” (Zizek 2000: 90 – 91)
The pragmatic reality allowing Diaz’ specific film structure in Batang West Side, where both his “proper historical stance”, as well as his “aesthetic stand” comes to its full expression, is diaspora. Its socio-cultural determinations are in the present context not important so much because of its characteristic of being “a nation in miniature” but above all because of the “concentrated” form of the identification manifold from which Diaz picks out only those nuances he needs for the desires result. Therefore it would be difficult to call Batang West Side a diasporic film. Even if we refer to the monumental research on “exilic and diasporas filmmaking”, An Accented Cinema by Hamida Naficy, we can see that Batang West Side can be placed somewhere between both conceptions, for it moves away from the strictness of both definitions. 14. Even though Lav Diaz himself has an individual diasporic experience, having for quite some time (between the years 1992 and 1996) lived and worked in the USA, we cannot declare him a “diasporic filmmaker". Namely, all his films, except Batang West Side, are labeled Filipino and he presents himself as a Filipino artist on a committed mission to “redeem the Filipino soul”. “To seek the truth, to cast doubt and, ultimately, to redeem the soul are the goals of Diaz’s art and he manages this in particularly spectacular fashion in his fourth film Batang West Side.” (Romulo) Therefore, in the present constellation, it is above all the marginal status of the Filipino (or any other) diaspora and the pure fact of the dislocation of Filipino that are of key importance to us. Both refer in a metaphorical sense to his “historical fate”; they represent both the authentic historical state of a Filipino man’s permanent struggle for his identity and integrity as well as his present unenviable reality. Marginality, a specific “state of being” not only of diasporic communities but any kind of minatory group (fundamentally defined by a difference in race, nationality, religion, sex, disease, age, culture, politics, ideology,… because of which their basic freedoms are under treat), is constituted above all as the place of resistance. In it the struggle against the dominant ideological practices and the (self) awareness of the need for a – retroactive- consolidation of one’s own identity is of the same importance as the resistance towards concrete oppression and oppressors. “Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sign, marking condition of our pain and deprivation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our baring. It is there in that space of collective despair that resistance towards as concrete oppression and oppressors. Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sing, marking the condition of our pain and depreciation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagination is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost. Truly the mind that resists colonization struggles for freedom and expression. That struggle may not even begin with the colonize; it may begin within one’s segregated colonized community and family.” (Hooks 191:342) The gradation of social actress in Batang West Side – form an individual, family and household community to (symbolically) the whole nation proves that Diaz is well aware of the different levels of oppression and reification. But still the emphasis that at the end is shifted to the individual and the regaining of his lost identity as a form of self-identification is the historical key to solving the “difficult” questions posed by Batang West Side. That is why the fact of dislocation a form of identification through absence, lack, representation... is of great importance to Diaz as a filmmaker. And that is why the essential “recognitions” take place as film – acts – a form of the film within the film.15 On one hand, there are the documentaries of Taga Timog – a documentary filmmaker Mijarez looked upon unfavorable during the investigation, but whom he befriend after leaving the police force – on the fate of Filipino women driven abroad by the need to secure their children’s existence in the homeland (also the story of Hanzel’s mother). On the other, there is Mijarez’ self-exposure before the objective of the I film camera obviously inspired exactly by the watching of the mentioned documentaries. Mijarez’ confession, which h reveals his “historic” identify of a denunciate, regime’s deep penetration agent, torturer, rapist and executor who had with the help of a plastic operation changed his identity after coming to the USA, speaks of a “concealed fact of is past” accompanied by consents film as the truth exposing medium thereby bringing a concrete film act into accord with his enlightened convictions: “I want the audience to see the truth and to discover their truths by experiencing the realities that I am presenting or re-presenting. I respect the audience’s capacity to understand, think, be open to a broader view of life, embrace different milieus, cultures, new principles and philosophies; or at another extreme, to confront them, create an atmosphere of discourse, introspection and criticism; or at yet another, to be simply immersed in what they are watching.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee) Respect that Diaz points out here – the respect towards the viewer as well as the main subject of his film investigation: the Filipino man – is one of the basic conditions keeping the whole together before the viewer’s gaze. Especially in the case of such monumental and extensive work. And it is exactly the immense respectfulness reflecting even in the smallest detail t hat proves that the complex structure of his film venture, we have throughout considered above all in view of its social engagement and its dialogue with the current film trends, is not a work of a cold, analytical, calculating mind. Its standing-up-on-its-own is due mostly to Diaz’ refined feeling for “telling a story” and setting the mood. Every sequence of Batang West Side, the structure of every frame, the conception of every film gaze… prove that Lav Diaz is in his essence an insightful “storyteller” and above all an unsurpassable poet. But in his poetic vision Diaz, despite his commitment to history, acts from an oppositional stand towards “the totalizing quest of meaning” (Minh-ha) rooted in the established conception of poetry as a fulfillment of historical narration: “Poetry improves on historical narration because it creates order and thereby reveals meaning, which seems to remain hidden in ordinary lives.” (Barnouw) Diaz’ poetics on the contrary, is in is wager on presence and in its surrendering to disorder and the principles of self-positing identified as the poetry of ordinary life. This is, among other things, in accord with the binding presupposition of Vlado Skafar (Slovene director and film activist), who discovers universality exactly in ordinariness: "If you seriously devote your attention of the ordinary man, you always come to know how exceptionless he is. It is herein that universality lies.” And so in light of the poetry of the ordinary, echoing the profoundest of experience, Diaz’ famous principle of an active comprehension of the world: “Read poetry, man!” receives in Batang West Side its visual counterpart, “Watch poetry, man!.
Notes:
1. In an (as yet unpublished) interview by Erwin Romulo Lav Diaz thus described the development of the script:”… I initially wrote a story that deals with the struggle and guilt of a mother and the death of her son whom she brought to America. Then it grew and grew until I made it into a Diaspore of Filipinos living abroad – the struggle of our countrymen detached from their homeland while at the same time using as a backdrop the Filipino struggle as a whole. The ore than 300 years of Spanish colonization wherein our ancient culture was erased, the 100 years of American intervention that further confused our culture, the 4 years of Japanese rape during World War II and the 20 years of Marcos terrorism were the things I wanted to tackler in one unified work. That was the vision: even if you had individual characters struggling with their individual lives, you can still see the while Filipino struggle from the very start.”
2. Although the above quotation – as well as the motto of this article and most of Diaz’ thoughts that follow-comes from an interview Brandon Wee made with Lav Diaz for Senses of Cinema on the presentation of his latest film, a more-than-ten-hour-long epopee Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino, 2004), his discussion seems equally relevant to the film under consideration in this article. One side, because it lucidly recapitulates in a consider form the thoughts from some of his previous talks (e.g., with Erwin Romulo or Alex Tioseco for Indiefilipino.com), and on the other – and above all – because of the fact that this time Diaz asserts his creative credo and his “aesthetic stand”, as he puts it, in an almost manifesto fashion.
3. The following description of the making of Batang West Side as Diaz’ “first fulfilled work”, can be read as a particular kind of articulation of the free creative activity principle; “... it’s the first work that I was able to push for what I wanted to do – my vision, the length, and the kind of aesthetic. I threw away all the theories and I just did it very organically. Especially during the shoots, we are not using lights and we’re just pushing thins. And then during the post-production I didn’t go for the warp factor editing, like doing fast cuts, no, no way. We just keep putting things together and the work just showed itself. It’s like a canvas; it just grew and grew and grew, and came out that way. I couldn’t do anything anymore, that’s the work, that’s it.” (Diaz in conversation with Tioseco)
4. In Diaz’ case the definitions of a cinematic image go hand in hand with the concept of “pectoral possibility”: “There is pictorial possibility that has nothing to do with physical possibility and that endows the most acrobatic posture with the sense of balance on the other hand, many works that claim to be art do not stand up for an instant. Standing up alone dos not mean having a top and a bottom or being upright (for even houses are drunk and askew); it is only the act by which the compound of created sensation is preserved in itself.” (Deleuze, Guattari 1994; 164)
5. “I avoid close-ups when treating the character I create in my films. I prefer long and oftentimes static takes, just like stasis – long, long takes in real time. My philosophy is I do not want to manipulate the audience’s emotions.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee)
6. In his radical investigation of the renewal processes of new world cinema, inspired by the oeuvre of Abbas Kiarostami, Jeanb-Luc Nancy assign the principle of “mobilizing the gaze” a privileged place of key changes in “cinema becoming the art of looking”: It is not matter of passivity much less of captivity; it is a matter of tuning in with a look so that we too may do the looking. Our gaze is not captive, and if it is captivated it is because it is required, mobilized. This cannot occur without a certain pressure acting as an obligation: capturing images is clearly an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the world.” (Nancy 2001: 16)
7. Besides the already mentioned “kinship” to actuality we cannot ignore a surprising “agreement” between some of Diaz’ self-analysis and the reflections of Chinese director Wang Bing who is, with his nine-hour debut – dealing with the horrifying effects of the demise of heavy metal industry and the uncertain fate of thousand of workers in Northeast China – Tiexi District: West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu,2003), an author of a similar monumental film venture as Batang West Side and Evolution of a Filipino Family. “In Evolution, I am capturing real time. I am trying to experience what these people are experiencing. They walk. I must experience their walk. I must experience their boredom and sorrows. I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind’s existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee).
“What I discovered is that the search for truth is always characterized by a certain revelation. The revelation. The revelation is that truth is not something you can search for. Truth is something already out there, repeated by people every day./…/ And that constitute a life cycle. And that life cycle is what I mean by a certain speed and rhythm. Once you’re in that cycle, you’re with them [people]. And then you don’t feel time passing slowly, but you feel time just passing, and time passing on both sides.’ (Wang 2003: 24-26)
”The concept of real time seems to be ubiquitous at the moment – used primarily to convey a sense of the capabilities of new media, of new computer technologies with specific and distinctive relation to temporality. These relations hinge on the concept of “instantaneity’. Television news anchors frequently exhort their viewers to keep up with the news in real time by visiting the station’s or network’s website. ‘Real time’ here connotes immediacy, continuity, an intolerance for delay, and most of all, a certain solidity associated with the guarantee of the real. It would seem that only remaining residence of the real, in an age of simulation, the virtual, and the artificial, is the time.” (Doane 2004: 264)
9. "Why is the real no longer a matter of being there, but of being then? And why is it so crucial that ‘then is in fact a ‘now’ ? Such an erasure of memory and history would be the zero degree of the logic of innovation, a form of commodification in which the commodity itself, always already out of date, would be superfluous." (Done 2004: 281)
10. The psychoanalytical methods of “active introspection”, which Mijarez’s psychiatrist explains to him, is in fact very close to Diaz’ own film “introspection”: "I believe a man will be stronger emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually if he analyzes his memories. He acquires what I call ‘active introspection; Like an exorcism. We are possessed by dreams and memories and we have to confront them so there is a cleansing within."
11. ’’I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films. It belongs to the members of that audience and corresponds to their world… If art succeeds in changing things and proposing new ideas, it can only do so via the creativity of the people we are addressing – each individual member of the audience.” (Kiarostami 1995: 1)
12. "I want Filipino to treasure and embrace history, to examine it no matter what one’s ideology is. We must learn to grasp the significance of these events. We must have a historical perspective if we want to be able to move forward progressively as a people and as a nation.’’ (Diaz in conversation with Wee) cf. also note 1.
13. ’’What happened to Hanzel is the same thing that is happening to the Philippines. Everything has no direction. The efforts of our heroes have gone to waste.” This tragic insight of Hanzel’s grandfather is in accord with some of the key interpretations of Batang West Side. “The specific identity of the murderer ceases to be the key question in the film and Hanzel’s death becomes a powerful metaphor for the attack on the Filipino soul. “ (Ramani) "The investigation, undertaken by a Filipino detective is then used as a bold metaphor to mount an admonishing attack on the collective Filipino anima when the dead man’s family is introduced and its unflattering history unveiled." (Wee)
14. “People in diaspaora, moreover maintained a long termed sense of ethnic consciousness and distinctiveness, which is consolidated by the periodic hostility of either the original home or the host societies towards them. However, unlike the exiles whose identity entails a vertical and primary relationship with their homeland, diasporic consciousness is horizontal and multisided, involving not only the homeland but also the compatriot communities elsewhere. As a result, plurality, multiplicity, and hybridist are structured in dominance among the diasporans, while among the political exiles, binarism and duality rule.” (Naficy 2001 : 145)
15. At the same time all other forms of film reference perform their “historical role”, : Batch ’81 (Mike de Leon, 1982), which we see on TV, and the posters from movies on the fate of Filipino women signed by the giants of Filipino cinema Lino Brocka, Mike de Loen, Ishmael Bernal. “If photographs, films or video tapes do preserve a past, it is t he trace of a past which was never simply present, but was always already heterogenous, discontinuous and forking: a time which reversed (deferred) some portion of its ‘being-present’ for unspecified future.” (McQuire 1998:173)
BIBILIOGRPAHY:
* Benjamin, Walter. (1940). On the Concept of History, Avaiable also at: http:/web.tiscali.it/walterbenjamin
* Diaz, Lav. 2004. The Decade of Living Dangerously: A Chronicle from Lav Diaz. Interview by Wee, Brandon, Senses of Cinema, (Melbourne), Issue no. 34, January – March.
Available at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/congents/0534/lav_diaz.html
* Diaz, Lav. 2003. An Interview with Lav Diaz. Inerview by Tioseco, Alexis. Indiefilipino.com, (Manila), December 18th. Available at: http:/film.indiefilipino.com/
* Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
* Doane, Mary Ann. 2004. (De) realizing Cinematic Time. In Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, eds. Egoyan, Arom, Balfour, Ian. Cambridge (etc): MIT Press, pp. 259-283.
* Hooks, Bell. 1990, Marginality as sit of resistance. In Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Ferguson, Russel (et al.). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge (etc): MIT Press, p. 341-343.
* Jameson, Frederic. 1980. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso.
* Kiarostami, Abbas. 1995. An Unfinished Cinema. (Pamphlet written for the Centenary of Cinema, December 1995, and distributed on Odeon Theater, Paris.) Available also at: http://207.136.67.23/film/articles/an_unfinished_cinema.htm
* Kolker, Robert Philip. 2001. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. (Online Edition). Available at: http://otal.umd.edu/-rkolker/AlgeringEye/
* McQuire, Scott. 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory. Time and Space in the Age of the Cinema. London: SAGE Publications.
* Moller, Olaf. 2005. “Spomin na Filipine “(Memories of the Philippines”). Kinoplus, (Ljubljana), februar, p. 6.
* Naficy, Hamid. 2001 An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press.
* Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami. Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert Publisher.
* Ramani, Vinita. 2003. “Batang West Side”. Available at: http://www.filmsasia.net/gpage74.html
* Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1994. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Austin: Unv. Of Texas Press.
* Wang, Bing. 2003. Rust, Remants, Rails: Wang Bing’s Epic Vision of China. Interview by Kraicer, Shelly. Cinema-Scope, (Toronto), Issue no. 16, Fall, pp. 21-26.
* Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London, New Yorks: Verso.
Ekran Magazine, Slovenia, 2005
“Cognition, like culture, is organic, where meaning can flow without imposing manipulative forces or elements. Humankind’s capacity to grasp meaning is organic, too. Cinema can create this culture. But the real power of cinema comes when there is honesty in the work. You can use or discard all the theories, philosophies and verities that have sprung out of this great modern art but I believe that its greatest value will be that of honesty. And qualifying honesty must always be on the level of responsibility. The search for the truth must always go hand in hand with responsibility.”
-- Lav Diaz
A deserted night street, covered with a few inches of dirty snow, showered with the cold light of the street lamps…; and there at the very bottom of this image a human figure arises from afar, wandering in its long and slow arriving past the patient eye of the camera… This scene, so saturated with loneliness and emptiness that it hurts to the bone, represents not only the initial but also the most frequently used image Filipino director Lav Diaz confronts us with in his in-depth and extensive investigation into the unenviable reality of his people’s diaspora in the North American Jersey City: Batang West Side (2002). The film, which aroused the interested film public with its epic structure and monumental design, starts out as a classic whodunit - with a body found lying on the pavement if West Side Avenue and a detective handling the case in a committed and meticulous manner. The victim of an unknown perpetrator is Hanzel Harana (Yul Servo), a barely 21-year-old Filipino immigrant who had but two years before come to stay with his mother in “the promised land”. The detective is his countryman, Juan Mijarez (Joel Torre), who is not in the least left indifferent by the suffering, the lack of perspective and the tragic fate of his kinsmen. The death of this young man, in a deserted street late at night with no credible witnesses, turns out to be a complex, Rashomon case, whose investigation is with every new actor ever more removed from the rules of the genre and is slowly turning into a complex psycho-sociological drama with the main –symbolic - protagonist becoming the Filipino man himself.1 Namely, in his fourth feature film, Lav Diaz concentrates above all on the question of the (lost) identity of the Filipino man. He is our contemporary, placed in the now, which spares but the few wealthiest people in the world, and in a diasporal environmental, in a kind of paradigmatic community where its inhabitants' basic identity problems crystallize in a concentrated form. Namely, an individual abroad is never only a bearer of the subjective social role but is always also a representatives of his people. Through the investigation procedure, we, together with Mijarez come to meet with Hanzel’s family members living in the USA; with his mother (Gloria Diaz), his grandfather (Ruben Tizon) and – only by the way – his father, who comes utterly distort from the Philippines only to collect his son’s body. Besides the mourning, frustrated representatives of the divided family, the detective’s interrogations introduce us to Hanzel’s girlfriend, his closest friends and a number of individuals, be they Hanzel’s acquaintances and allies or his enemies – the key suspects of the case. The colourful collection of actors and companions of the tragical death soon proves to be a precisely conceived matrix of typical characters by which Diaz carefully sets up a paradigmatical structure of Filipino society as a whole. The selected protagonists, their relationship and their role and positioning in the unfolding of this complex narration bear evidence that nothing is left to chance and that the director exercises control over the extensive subject-matter of the five-hour film narration with incredible ease, certainly and confidence in himself and the medium of his expression. In this narration, Diaz’ subjective auteur vision comes to its full expression alongside his unflinching belief that an endeavour to restore the severed link between man and world is the precondition of creativity and the overcoming of the manipulative nature of the film medium itself: “…in creation, you will have a thousand and one options that represent the truths of your process assuming you, the maker, are the one who makes the decision. It is a process that would culminate in an eventual dynamic between the film and the viewer, and the viewer and the world. And if you believe that your work can truly be elevated in an aesthetic domain and that it can sustain itself, then its potential for meaning is vast and limitless so that it would be complete.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee).2 In his awareness of a film’s self-existence, Diaz comes very close to those conceptions in modern discussions of creativity that assign to a work of art a privileged place of the only thing in the world that sustains (itself): “[Art] preserves and is preserved in itself (quid juris?), although actually it last no longer than its support and matrials – stone, canvas, chemical colour, and so on (quid facti?). /…/ The work of art is being of sensations and nothing else: it exists in itself.” (Deleuze, Guattari 1994: 163-64) In Diaz’ case the aspect of self positing is at the same time a principle of an entirely concrete creative process – by letting the shot scenes come alive in all their greatness, a film rises above its subject-matter, is established as a whole and stands up on its own – independently and necessarily: “I couldn’t do anything anymore, that’s the work, that’s it.” (Diaz)3 The feeling of the necessity of the sequence of events is the driving force of the inner dynamics of Batang West Side, where the nature of police work itself reveal a network of relation running much deeper and entangled more fatally than it first appears in view of the seeming outer pragmatic looseness. In such a consonant composition the only “ dissonant element” of the film seems to be Mijares’ – accidental – meeting with a documentary filmmaker who, with his camera , is on the lookout for the truth of the Filipino people’s life in diaspora. “The camera will catch plenty of stories. Some even true, I hope”, is his motto in decisively opposing the detective’s initial aversion, which at the end of the film – when two meet again and at first glance surprisingly bond – bring us to the revelation of one of the key enigmas of the film. But the aforementioned tight composition, based on Diaz’ efforts to search for truth according to the valuation criteria of an artist’s honesty and his unflinching responsibility for man and world, is of the kind that is not supported by “ the laws of physics” or – in our case – by the normative controls of the established ways of film production. It is held together by the inner means supporting the work of art and that binding notion of “the ultimate cinema” , put forward by Diaz’ great role model Andrey Tarkovsky: “I see chronicle as the ultimate cinema; for me it is not a way of filming but a way of reconstructing, of reconstructing life.” (Tarkovsky 1994: 64-65)4 And in accordance with life itself the basic conception of Batang West Side – its need to reconstruct the life of the murdered young man – is permeated by the tragic determinations of death and bitter memory. Its key sound dimension is therefore a collection of cries, sighs, shivers, (self)-accusations and whispers…, its predominant emotional dimension is a combination of the feeling of grief, fear, loss, desperation and solitude… its elementary spatiality is a claustrophobic series of ghetto streets and temporary housing suffocating one even in the case of a lavish rich suburb villa… its central temporary is the momentariness of the opening letting the past emerge – both recent ( the last two years of Hanzel’s life ) and, above all, the time of Martial Law as one of the most traumatic periods of Filipino history. The various dimensions of Diaz’ accomplished narration continuously flow into each other in a permanent ellipsis and, at the same time, a constant – narrative superimposition. Ellipsis, as the actual characteristic narrative method of Batang West Side, as well as double exposure (which does not figure directly but as a specific form of double encoding, giving expression to the dramatical function specifying the essential determiners of Diaz’ narration: the coexistence of two levels of reality – concrete physical and imaginary, non-material) is a figure that besides its primary narrative function always conveys also the heterogeneity of film time.
This pervasion of time can be clearly seen already in the prologue of Batang West Side – the starting ten-minute exposition ending with a murder of a young Filipino as the initial plot set-up… “I grew without a father. I have a father, but my memories of him are all from when I was only seven years old. His image remains incomplete in me save for the rare picture my mother kept and for brief memories of him taking care of me. When I was seven, he left. My mother wept for a long time waiting, than looking for him. It almost drove her mad.”
These are words in the off field underlying the introductory sequence of the film, in which from the depth of the frame, along a deserted night street, an at first barely noticeable figure of a staggering, evidently “absent” young man slowly approaches. In the scene, filmed as a patient long take in full shot, which is one of the most typical ways Diaz shoots exteriors, we follow the protagonist – in whom we shall recognize Hanzel Harana, a soon-to-be victim and subject of a police investigation up to the immediate vicinity of the spot, about to become the place of his death. A cross cut takes us to a dream-like, breath-taking black and white scene in the Filipino countryside where grief consumes both a child and his desperate mother as well as a grown up man sobbing on the shoulders of a young man, collecting his falling teeth into his hand…Cutting back to a man dozing off in a parked car and the sound of a far off shot waking him, reveals that it was him we have just seen in the dream – i.e., detective Juan Mijarez, who obviously dozed off while on a stake-out. Mijarez diligently writes down his dreams and then checks whether his nightmare ( teeth falling out in a dream supposedly fortell death) harmed anyone. He calls the hospital where his mother is lying, connected to machines keeping her alive. Learning she is fine, he calls his wife, who he lives separate from and has not called in two years, to check on his two sons. Before leaving the stake-out scene, he receive a message from his partner about a murdered Filipino youth on West Side Avenue. When he arrives at the scene of the crime, he recognizes the victim Hanzel, whom he did not know personally but who was familiar to him from the indispensable “ inventory” of the streets. ( “I’m familiar with Hanzel Harana. I always see him at West Side Avenue. One time I bumped into him,” the detective recalls in inner monologue.) It is exactly this inner monologue as a particular kind of voice-over – providing to be a standard method of Diaz’ introspection – and the visual reconstruction of the moment when the policeman and the young man bump into each other that give the whole its specific meaning of a crucial scene. Not only because of the fact that this is the only scene in the entire film in which Diaz, as an emphasis, uses both slow-motion and replay at the same time, but also because it introduces the principle of retrospective reconstruction as the key narrative strategy of Batang West Side. It is clear now that the introductory monologue did not speak of Hanzel’s childhood (though his situation was exactly the same save him growing up without his mother), that it was detective Mijarez stressing his father’s absence and it is therefore he who at the very beginning proves to be the central (individual) protagonist of the film. It becomes clear also that the shot waking Mijarez from his nightmare meant the moment of Hanzel’s death. “Dissonance” between the visual and acoustic dimension of the scenes, on the one side, and on the other, the stressing of elements explicitly talking about the nature of film time – the sound of the shot for example has the function of a kind of acousmatic quilting point – are factors indicating that the passing between different time levels is the basic stylistic bravura of Batang West Side. At the same time the images of the sketched prologue material acquire a characteristic saturation with meaning, at first coming off more or less as one-dimensional, because of their of their ascetic visualization, but in the – subsequent or retroactive – contextualization within the whole, they reveal all their multiplicity of meaning. Such a complex structure, with all its registers of multiplicity, coming to its full the very first few moments, is a sign of an ambitious aesthetic conception giving itself over to organicity wherein the key emphasis crystallizes through aspects of temporality.
As mentioned before, one of the fundamental aesthetic elements of Diaz' film articulation is the long take, i.e. , the sequence shot, and the specifically, as he himself points out, the long take in real time.5 Between its two most common variants, the stationary or quasi – stationary long take and its mobile counterpart, the author favours the first. This is quite understandable if we take as a presupposition that it is principles of the first that give the director an opportunity for “integrity and patient intensity of his gaze” (Le Fanu). These are precious elements of liberating that gaze, embellishing Diaz’ endevours for an authentically cinematic image – such as abides in the binding principle of Andrey Tarkovsky: “The image becomes authentically cinematic when (among other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even with in each separate frame.” (Tarkosvsky 1994: 68) With the patient arranging of everyday scenes in their basic time/space determinations – as a kind of observation “of life’s facts within times, organized according to the pattern of life itself" (Tarkovsky) – the author takes up a committed task of according the viewer’ s film experience to the immediate experience of his own ordinariness. In putting everything on the presence of time as the fundamental “tension“ of the shot, steadily persisting in its slow pace, putting forward the feeling of duration even when the “narrative logic” of a whodunit would dictate a dynamical build up of the visual pyrotechnics of lightening montage cuts, a specific relationship with the viewer is being established. Submitting to duration, necessary in order to establish the tension of the gaze that in his artistic integrity Diaz strives for, is a (pre)condition for opening up the viewer’ s perception – for his letting the filmmaker captivate him with his gaze. Such a mobilizing of the gaze – attainable through different film techniques – is intensified with the stylistics of long takes mostly when this is a means of those aspect of essentialization that reflect in a tendency towards presence as such.6 With the strict intensification of screen existence in the scenes of the simple moments of everyday life (where narrative time is usually prolonged and diegetic nullified), the reactualization of the interest in the ordinaries of life comes to its full expression, wherein the merely apparent banality of man’s everyday experience deservedly comes under a detailed investigation… His conscious and uncompromising focus on life in its immediacy places Diaz in a constructive dialogue with some important stands of contemporary film art. On one side, he comes close to elements of contemporary minimalism, which carefully exposing the social emptiness of a common man’s everyday and focusing on the here and now, reveals above all aspect of individual desolation – the consequences of catastrophic social “ development “. With redirecting its interest to immediate experience, minimalist art comes to clear stands on the nature of reality. Its essentialization is reflected in its apparent simplicity, as a result of a strict focus – the elimination of all superfluous factors. It is a process of careful distillation and concentration wherein “a sort of crystallized abundance” ( Motte ) is expressed. Minimalist art is not simplified and obscured but it actively transforms the very center of current values: “it locates profound experience in ordinary experience”. ( Serota, Francis ) In view of the correspondence between Diaz’ creative efforts and certain minimalist elements, we cannot talk about his visual asceticism as a reductionism or nihilism, on the contrary, it can be considered as a principle of substantialization bringing to its full expression above all the in–depth interest in presence as such. With it artistic activity turns again towards the questions of perception, which means there also comes to a reconsideration of the subject. On the side, a resonance of the current new realistic initiatives all over the globe, most notably perhaps the creative approaches of French new realism, can be sensed in Diaz’ coming close to the throb of reality. The most prominent place in French new realism belong to the so called realism of proximity (“un reel de proximate”), reflecting above all in the “documentary style of the observation” ( Powrie ) and in the thought–through selection of a film’s subject matter: individuals or social groups the director knows thoroughly. The film treatment itself is not an indirect rendition of an imagined experience, but rather the reality of an individual being endangered by the “achievements” of brutal capitalism coincides with the activity of the author who is himself often explicitly engaged in identifying and actualizing the pressing problems of socio–cultural reality. The characteristic new realistic elements of Batang West Side can be considered in view of the Brechtian conception of realism as an uncompromising “probing of reality”, originating from a need for the reconstruction of phenomena, penetrating the mere surface of things as a kind of speculum allowing us to probe the world. In doing this, it takes no notice of the set rules, “clichés” of opinion; Brechtian "…idea of realism is not a purely artistic and formal category, but rather governs the relationship of the work of art to reality itself categorizing particular stance towards it.” ( Jameson 1980: 205). At the same time the radical rejection or even undermining of conventionality presents an obvious manifestation of progressive film. Progressive in the context of a definition by Robert Philip Kolker, who stresses it is all about “…cinema that invites emotional response and intellectual participation, that is committed to history and politics and an examination of culture, that asks for the commitment of its audience; a cinema that offers ways to change, if not the world, at least the way we see it.” (Kolker 2001: 2) This illumination gives a wider contextualization and with it an “outer” argumentation to the director’s statement, which we dare take as a universal “programme declaration”, as his creative credo, wherein he decidedly emphasizes: “…that the foundation of a truthful work should be honesty and responsibility. My struggle lies here: my so–called verite or aesthetic stand”. (Diaz in conversation with Wee).7 Even in view of Diaz’ exciting concurrence with the most actual of present times it is by no means surprising that in his “programme guidelines”, there echo many principles from renowned chapters in film history, e.g., the postulate of “the artist’s responsibility” as conceived by Andrey Tarkovsky in the homonymous chapter in Sculpting in Time, where he emphasize that: “…the more he [the artist] aspires to a realistic account, the greatest his responsibility for what he makes.” (Tarkovsky 1994: 184) In line with the committed correspondence to certain characteristics of contemporary film searchings, defined above all by the awareness of the mutual responsibility of us all in the world and to the world – which is the precondition of an active partaking in the shaping of its structure – we can consider Diaz’ conception and expression of film time also as an opposition to certain tendencies in the “modernizing” conception of temporality caused by a massive progress in new media technologies. It is exactly the specifics of the long take with reference to the question of real time aesthetics that have been decisively ritualized due to the concord with some of the important current discussions raising the question s of change in the treatment of the real (time) conditioned by new technologies.8 The notion of real time, moving first from cinematic perception of continuity to the TV conception of “liveness”, had culminated in the computer time of instantaneity, and is now through digitalization coming back to film in the universal form of special effects. In the unconstrained process of technological progress, in which the question of reality moves right along the temporal axis, the insistence on articulating time such as is made possible by the long take is perceived as a kind of an opposition praxis. It is a form of resistance to the present which, placing everything on the presence of time ( in pure form ), opposes the new–technology tendencies towards “an erasure of memory and history”.9 It is exactly history and memory (as we have already mentioned and will see later on) that are among the key factors of Diaz’ artistic enlightenment project; his organic tendency towards the redemption of the Filipino soul, accurately captured in the form of his binding principle: “…I formulated my thesis that true cinema can redeem the Filipino soul.”
Though we assigned to the long take in real time a primary place in the aesthetic conception by which Diaz establishes inner continuity and quality of a particular scene – “For it is the continuous time, the real time in the long take which allows for the possibility of contingency, the unforeseen, the unexpected, in the cinema.” (Doane) – we must point out that Batang West Side is in a chronological sense a most non-continuous and non-linear work. The present of its diegesis is suspended through out with longer or shorter time jumps (as indicated by the above description of the key points of the points of the prologue). The central narrative line of the police investigation into Hanzel’s death – representing the temporal anchor of diegetic present – is subject to constant digressions with which Diaz explores the possibility of accessing the truth about the young man’s life. This is then also supposed to help reveal the truth about his death. The story of a short-lived “diasporal experience” of the young Filipino man comes to life in a certain narrative stratification of different time levels taking place parallel to the investigation into his death. The dispersed fragments of truth thus return to their original moment in a form of concentric undulation. And at the same time death itself opens up aspects of the past: on one side, in way of mourning, which in the memories of loved ones conjures up time past, and on the other, in a colorful series of manifold truths left by Hanzel’s presence on the face of the earth, among his fellow man. Diaz does not focus merely on the grieving family members and those closest to Hanzel, who with his death immerse in memory and self-interrogation looking for their share of the responsibility, an equally thorough investigation is also directed at the main suspects as well as the detective himself in whom the death of his countryman arouses a series of painful reminiscences of his own – obviously traumatic – past. Each protagonist Diaz introduces into the whole not only brings his individual “story” but is also the bearer of a certain period or (is the victim) of tragically events in the history of the Philippine people. “The story, its presence, is only a reason for memory and reflection. On the history Philippine people in the years covered by Batang West Side: it is hidden in the character – firstly as an individual, secondly as a collective memory/fiction -, who are projected into epically extended spaces if time in almost every scene; the memories as well as the speculations on the murder young man always – be the road ever so winding – lead (back) to the Philippines in time of the Marcos’ regime, which turned the riches nation of South Asia into the biggest poorhouse of the region, its only export goods now being people.” (Moller 2005: 6) First among the narrative strategies enabling the author to conjure the past and materialize it in the present is the elliptical loosening of logical connections of ordered time sequence, the connections of cause and effect, successions or the linear sequence of events. The basic stylistic approach with which Diaz subverts the established logocentric connections is retrospective reconstruction opening up time rifts and enabling a free transition between factual and remembered. But even in these transitions, in the modes of the reconstruction itself there reconstruction itself there is no inner logic, no causality. There are three predominant modes of reconstruction: sometimes it is parallel, when with the help of cross cutting, we at the same time follow the talked about events, but more often “classic” retrospection, wherein the reporting on an event melts into a visual reconstruction of the reported, and “anticipatory” retrospection, where the reported event is only later placed in the order of the whole, alternate. In between the pointed out narrative levels there sporadically intrude Mijarez’ dreams and occasional reminiscent flashbacks triggered by a certain situation in the present. These scenes of imaginariness have their counterpoint in film fragments the viewer shares in either directly – when protagonists watch the film on TV, or indirectly when - he is himself “addressed" as a firsthand witness or even as a “ camera-man” of the film within a film… Through the development of narration gradually the situations of unexpected or “ unexplained” transitions come to predominate in which the sequence of scenes is in complete “ accord” though the scene may be taking place on different time levels. Ever more often what is factual and what is reconstructed in memory seems to a kind of punctured whole conveying the coexistence of different levels of reality – physical and imaginary. And the more the laws of “logical” are undermined the deeper are the punctures through which the past comes flooding, the one that the authority is trying to redeem in order that through its “ active introspection” he contribute his share to the redemption of the Filipino soul 10 – according to “III. Thesis on the philosophy of history” by Walter Benjamin: “To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” (Benjamin 1940: 1) The viewer in this manifold yet extremely fragile composition – which is never in danger, though, due to its valuable bond being on one side, the author’s full responsibility and on the other, a strong emotional charge – gradually looses his firm footing. Due to such time “inconsistency” he is in a way struck floating in a time loop; yet it is exactly this subversion of a firm chronological support that makes him search more intensively for some other hold, which Diaz offers in the narrative’s emotional dimension. The viewer thus becomes more susceptible to the einfuhlung in the manifold film dimensions… By this we of course do not mean the aspects of a viewer’s identification, but have in mind the element of the “creative spirit of the audience” in the sense of Kiarostami’s “unfinished cinema”, believing in art as a possible – factor in “changing things” and presenting new ideas: “Art gives each artist and his audience the opportunity to have a more precise view of the truth concealed behind the pain and passion that ordinary people experience every day.” (Kiarostami 1995: 1)11 This principle not only directly corresponds to aspect of free creative activity (as a kind of a form resistance to the present), advocated by contemporary film thought headed by Gilles Deleuz, but it shares its conviction about the engaged viewer with the author of Batang West Side himself: “Give the audience real cinema so they can react and re-asses their lives, make them aware that they have choices and responsibilities.” (Diaz in conversation with Romulo) The reaction is actually possible only when a pledge is established between the film and the viewer which – as in any relationship – is based on trust. One of the key factors in attaining the viewer’s trust is the awareness of the free gaze:"…if people were allowed to see freely they would see truly” (Vaughan). The seeing itself is determined by far more than the eye can reach, for in it there is encompassed the whole of an individual’s experience, which the gaze of the filmmaker faces. The authentic gaze stimulates registers of seeing that are not subject to conventions of a certain mode of representation encoding the meaning of the images on screen, but are open to the awareness of the gaze itself; the gaze in which its representational aspect is accounted for in the “sum total” of the film act. Such cinematic authenticity, attainable only through the possibility of a confrontation as a fact of actuality, wherein the filmmaker’s gaze and the viewer’s seeing coincide, is the precondition of the free gaze. In it the fundamental time relations ritualize, wherein the need for impressions of reality declines while the need for impressions of presence intensifies. “What film archives, then is first and foremost a lot experience of time as presence, time as immersion. This experience of temporality is one, which was never necessarily lived, but emerges as the counter-dream of rationalization, its agnostic underside – full presence. Hence, time’s reality in the cinema is both that of continuity and rupture." (Doane 2004: 272)
Diaz takes great advantage of the awareness of the double nature of cinematic time in his treatment of the third, in the context of Batang West Side probably most important, aspect of time – history. With a characteristic time articulation the director strives towards such forms of “ conjuring the past”, or the presentation of its absence, as are not based only on narrative “digressions and subversions” but, as already mentioned, on opening passages through which history emerges in the narrative. Again we are not dealing here with a matrix, with a universal principle of “conjuring”, but there is once more at work here a heterogeneous series of ways of “activating the past”. Above all in Diaz’ treatment of history, it is almost never (but for the rare exceptions of dreams sequences, reminiscent flashbacks and film clips) a matter of direct representation or enactment of past facts and actions but merely of their transmission. When there is talk about a concrete individual experience of one involved in a historical event, Diaz most often uses the form of memory narration; when for example , the subject under consideration is the question of conflicting ideologies, the author metaphorically focuses on rival groups pushing shabu (crystal meth – specific “social” drug of the Philippines), religiously announcing their base “calling“ as the vision of a new prosperity for the Filipino man… The complex series of aspects of history actually shows that Batang West Side as a whole is the particular way of historical articulation; namely, the essential element of its structure are representations of the traumatic facts in Filipino history, as is also stressed by the author himself. 12 The characteristic of historical time in Diaz’ visual treatments is at first sight in an interesting harmony with Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical concept of historical time”. We have in mind his notion of the concept of history – from his prominent Theses on the Philosophy of History -, arising from the opposition to its evolutionist variant, based on the concept of progress, as a form of “progression through a homogenous, empty time” (Benjamin). “The ‘dialectical concept of historical time aimed not to preserve the past but to activate it. Benjamin’s theory of ‘dialectical images’ which flash up at the moment of danger was explicitly conceived as a historical pedagogy - a means of transmitting the past while drawing attention to the particular way in which the past is seen in the present.” (McQuire 1998: 178) The presupposition of the “moment of danger” in the context of Batang West Side refers to the treatment of certain parts in the film as the crucial scenes. These are on one side, the “intensified” situations in which the viewer’s interest is more strongly mobilized than in most others, on the other, the scenes wherein certain points of the story are meaning-wise and emotionally clarified. The example of the first, and by no means only, is in Batang West Side certainly the – already initially pointed out – sequence of Hanzel’s death.13 Aspects of the second can be seen, for example, in the representation of Mijarez’ reminiscence (late in the second half of the film), aroused by him touching the victims gun and culminating in a hallucination where it is him who fires the bullet into Hanzel’s brain. In this horrifying scene (the only one, despite the horrifying amount of violence in Batang West Side, we can consider in light of the definition of the so-called ultra violence), Diaz not only points out aspects of collective guilt when he shouts at us: “We killed Hanzel Harana”, but with his blasting the inner continuity of the scene – with which he throughout the film so patiently built the feeling of the presence (of time) – he also reveals the fundamental nature of his aesthetics and ethics: his aesth-et(h)ic stand, which he shares with the binding stand of permanent human responsibility: “We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them.” (Deleuze, Guattari) The individual enactments, or better yet the intrusions of the imaginary, as a kind of Proustian memoire involuntaire, are contrasted with a massive material of voluntary memories. On closer view, the persistent methodology thus offers another aspect in considering Diaz’ conception of history: not to ascribe to the crucial scene a privileged role but to, despite its greater intensity, consider it as equal to the others. We thus return to the initial presupposition that the structure of the film stands up on its own exactly because of its composition “imbalance"… In the imbalance of the relationship between the concrete and the imaginary we can sense an echo of the subtle nuancing of Benjamin’s different between two premises in V. and VI. Philosophically historical theses. In the fifth Benjamin says: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again." The sixth begins: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’" (Ranke). "It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." (Benjamin 1940:2) In this duality, which of course does not presuppose difference but an important complementing, we can sense also the key “values” of Diaz’ treatment of history. Diaz succeeds in merging Benjamin’s presupposition of the evasiveness of the image of the past and its irretrievability, threatening to disappear every time it “is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns’, with his awareness that “in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (Benjamin). The key means allowing for such a merging is a network of “parallel presents” erasing the transitions between different narrative levels. This network is also a net Diaz’ camera not only uses on the look-out for the present in which the image of the past will be recognized as one of its own concerns, but with the strengthening of the role of “individuals’ presents” in the film – when the focus on the events after Hanzel’s death predominate over the reconstruction of this – the center of gravity shifts towards the hear and now, towards presence as such. But this does not mean a subversion of historical perspective – quite the opposite. It is only through the tension of presence, in which the moments of danger (or crucial scenes) are not pointed out but considered equal to the rest in the entire complex structure of “conjuring the past” – saturated “only’ with duration, emptiness or feeling of loneliness, loss and suffering -, that another, perhaps the most committed gaze can open up. It is a gaze most uncompromising in the sense that the author does not hesitate to0 treat the present – which finally prevails on the diegetic as well as narrative level of the film – and with it himself as the actual stage where the past generations of his people “retroactively resolve their deadlocks” (Zizek). This is a conception that is as a reflection of Benjamin’s “dialectical notion of historical epoch" exposed by Slavoj Zizek in his paper The Fragile Absolute. In sharpening the opposition to the naïve evolutionist approach to historical development Zizek puts forward a thesis that the presupposition. “That the present redeems the past itself”, is not only a historically relativistic assertion, but that a characterization of a past era always encompasses also our present stance. “What we are claiming is something much more radical: what the proper historical stance (as opposed to historicism) ‘relativizes’ is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself – our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past. In other words, it is not only – as Foucault liked to emphasize, in a Nietzschean mode – that every history of the past is ultimately the ‘ontology the present’, that we always perceive our past within the horizon of our present preoccupations, that in dealing with the past we are in effect dealing with the ghost of the past whose resuscitation enables us to confront our present dilemmas. It is also that we, the ‘actual’ present historical agents, have to conceive of ourselves as the materialization of the ghost of past generations, as the stage in which these past generations retroactively resolve their deadlocks.” (Zizek 2000: 90 – 91)
The pragmatic reality allowing Diaz’ specific film structure in Batang West Side, where both his “proper historical stance”, as well as his “aesthetic stand” comes to its full expression, is diaspora. Its socio-cultural determinations are in the present context not important so much because of its characteristic of being “a nation in miniature” but above all because of the “concentrated” form of the identification manifold from which Diaz picks out only those nuances he needs for the desires result. Therefore it would be difficult to call Batang West Side a diasporic film. Even if we refer to the monumental research on “exilic and diasporas filmmaking”, An Accented Cinema by Hamida Naficy, we can see that Batang West Side can be placed somewhere between both conceptions, for it moves away from the strictness of both definitions. 14. Even though Lav Diaz himself has an individual diasporic experience, having for quite some time (between the years 1992 and 1996) lived and worked in the USA, we cannot declare him a “diasporic filmmaker". Namely, all his films, except Batang West Side, are labeled Filipino and he presents himself as a Filipino artist on a committed mission to “redeem the Filipino soul”. “To seek the truth, to cast doubt and, ultimately, to redeem the soul are the goals of Diaz’s art and he manages this in particularly spectacular fashion in his fourth film Batang West Side.” (Romulo) Therefore, in the present constellation, it is above all the marginal status of the Filipino (or any other) diaspora and the pure fact of the dislocation of Filipino that are of key importance to us. Both refer in a metaphorical sense to his “historical fate”; they represent both the authentic historical state of a Filipino man’s permanent struggle for his identity and integrity as well as his present unenviable reality. Marginality, a specific “state of being” not only of diasporic communities but any kind of minatory group (fundamentally defined by a difference in race, nationality, religion, sex, disease, age, culture, politics, ideology,… because of which their basic freedoms are under treat), is constituted above all as the place of resistance. In it the struggle against the dominant ideological practices and the (self) awareness of the need for a – retroactive- consolidation of one’s own identity is of the same importance as the resistance towards concrete oppression and oppressors. “Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sign, marking condition of our pain and deprivation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our baring. It is there in that space of collective despair that resistance towards as concrete oppression and oppressors. Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sing, marking the condition of our pain and depreciation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagination is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost. Truly the mind that resists colonization struggles for freedom and expression. That struggle may not even begin with the colonize; it may begin within one’s segregated colonized community and family.” (Hooks 191:342) The gradation of social actress in Batang West Side – form an individual, family and household community to (symbolically) the whole nation proves that Diaz is well aware of the different levels of oppression and reification. But still the emphasis that at the end is shifted to the individual and the regaining of his lost identity as a form of self-identification is the historical key to solving the “difficult” questions posed by Batang West Side. That is why the fact of dislocation a form of identification through absence, lack, representation... is of great importance to Diaz as a filmmaker. And that is why the essential “recognitions” take place as film – acts – a form of the film within the film.15 On one hand, there are the documentaries of Taga Timog – a documentary filmmaker Mijarez looked upon unfavorable during the investigation, but whom he befriend after leaving the police force – on the fate of Filipino women driven abroad by the need to secure their children’s existence in the homeland (also the story of Hanzel’s mother). On the other, there is Mijarez’ self-exposure before the objective of the I film camera obviously inspired exactly by the watching of the mentioned documentaries. Mijarez’ confession, which h reveals his “historic” identify of a denunciate, regime’s deep penetration agent, torturer, rapist and executor who had with the help of a plastic operation changed his identity after coming to the USA, speaks of a “concealed fact of is past” accompanied by consents film as the truth exposing medium thereby bringing a concrete film act into accord with his enlightened convictions: “I want the audience to see the truth and to discover their truths by experiencing the realities that I am presenting or re-presenting. I respect the audience’s capacity to understand, think, be open to a broader view of life, embrace different milieus, cultures, new principles and philosophies; or at another extreme, to confront them, create an atmosphere of discourse, introspection and criticism; or at yet another, to be simply immersed in what they are watching.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee) Respect that Diaz points out here – the respect towards the viewer as well as the main subject of his film investigation: the Filipino man – is one of the basic conditions keeping the whole together before the viewer’s gaze. Especially in the case of such monumental and extensive work. And it is exactly the immense respectfulness reflecting even in the smallest detail t hat proves that the complex structure of his film venture, we have throughout considered above all in view of its social engagement and its dialogue with the current film trends, is not a work of a cold, analytical, calculating mind. Its standing-up-on-its-own is due mostly to Diaz’ refined feeling for “telling a story” and setting the mood. Every sequence of Batang West Side, the structure of every frame, the conception of every film gaze… prove that Lav Diaz is in his essence an insightful “storyteller” and above all an unsurpassable poet. But in his poetic vision Diaz, despite his commitment to history, acts from an oppositional stand towards “the totalizing quest of meaning” (Minh-ha) rooted in the established conception of poetry as a fulfillment of historical narration: “Poetry improves on historical narration because it creates order and thereby reveals meaning, which seems to remain hidden in ordinary lives.” (Barnouw) Diaz’ poetics on the contrary, is in is wager on presence and in its surrendering to disorder and the principles of self-positing identified as the poetry of ordinary life. This is, among other things, in accord with the binding presupposition of Vlado Skafar (Slovene director and film activist), who discovers universality exactly in ordinariness: "If you seriously devote your attention of the ordinary man, you always come to know how exceptionless he is. It is herein that universality lies.” And so in light of the poetry of the ordinary, echoing the profoundest of experience, Diaz’ famous principle of an active comprehension of the world: “Read poetry, man!” receives in Batang West Side its visual counterpart, “Watch poetry, man!.
Notes:
1. In an (as yet unpublished) interview by Erwin Romulo Lav Diaz thus described the development of the script:”… I initially wrote a story that deals with the struggle and guilt of a mother and the death of her son whom she brought to America. Then it grew and grew until I made it into a Diaspore of Filipinos living abroad – the struggle of our countrymen detached from their homeland while at the same time using as a backdrop the Filipino struggle as a whole. The ore than 300 years of Spanish colonization wherein our ancient culture was erased, the 100 years of American intervention that further confused our culture, the 4 years of Japanese rape during World War II and the 20 years of Marcos terrorism were the things I wanted to tackler in one unified work. That was the vision: even if you had individual characters struggling with their individual lives, you can still see the while Filipino struggle from the very start.”
2. Although the above quotation – as well as the motto of this article and most of Diaz’ thoughts that follow-comes from an interview Brandon Wee made with Lav Diaz for Senses of Cinema on the presentation of his latest film, a more-than-ten-hour-long epopee Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino, 2004), his discussion seems equally relevant to the film under consideration in this article. One side, because it lucidly recapitulates in a consider form the thoughts from some of his previous talks (e.g., with Erwin Romulo or Alex Tioseco for Indiefilipino.com), and on the other – and above all – because of the fact that this time Diaz asserts his creative credo and his “aesthetic stand”, as he puts it, in an almost manifesto fashion.
3. The following description of the making of Batang West Side as Diaz’ “first fulfilled work”, can be read as a particular kind of articulation of the free creative activity principle; “... it’s the first work that I was able to push for what I wanted to do – my vision, the length, and the kind of aesthetic. I threw away all the theories and I just did it very organically. Especially during the shoots, we are not using lights and we’re just pushing thins. And then during the post-production I didn’t go for the warp factor editing, like doing fast cuts, no, no way. We just keep putting things together and the work just showed itself. It’s like a canvas; it just grew and grew and grew, and came out that way. I couldn’t do anything anymore, that’s the work, that’s it.” (Diaz in conversation with Tioseco)
4. In Diaz’ case the definitions of a cinematic image go hand in hand with the concept of “pectoral possibility”: “There is pictorial possibility that has nothing to do with physical possibility and that endows the most acrobatic posture with the sense of balance on the other hand, many works that claim to be art do not stand up for an instant. Standing up alone dos not mean having a top and a bottom or being upright (for even houses are drunk and askew); it is only the act by which the compound of created sensation is preserved in itself.” (Deleuze, Guattari 1994; 164)
5. “I avoid close-ups when treating the character I create in my films. I prefer long and oftentimes static takes, just like stasis – long, long takes in real time. My philosophy is I do not want to manipulate the audience’s emotions.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee)
6. In his radical investigation of the renewal processes of new world cinema, inspired by the oeuvre of Abbas Kiarostami, Jeanb-Luc Nancy assign the principle of “mobilizing the gaze” a privileged place of key changes in “cinema becoming the art of looking”: It is not matter of passivity much less of captivity; it is a matter of tuning in with a look so that we too may do the looking. Our gaze is not captive, and if it is captivated it is because it is required, mobilized. This cannot occur without a certain pressure acting as an obligation: capturing images is clearly an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the world.” (Nancy 2001: 16)
7. Besides the already mentioned “kinship” to actuality we cannot ignore a surprising “agreement” between some of Diaz’ self-analysis and the reflections of Chinese director Wang Bing who is, with his nine-hour debut – dealing with the horrifying effects of the demise of heavy metal industry and the uncertain fate of thousand of workers in Northeast China – Tiexi District: West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu,2003), an author of a similar monumental film venture as Batang West Side and Evolution of a Filipino Family. “In Evolution, I am capturing real time. I am trying to experience what these people are experiencing. They walk. I must experience their walk. I must experience their boredom and sorrows. I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind’s existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle.” (Diaz in conversation with Wee).
“What I discovered is that the search for truth is always characterized by a certain revelation. The revelation. The revelation is that truth is not something you can search for. Truth is something already out there, repeated by people every day./…/ And that constitute a life cycle. And that life cycle is what I mean by a certain speed and rhythm. Once you’re in that cycle, you’re with them [people]. And then you don’t feel time passing slowly, but you feel time just passing, and time passing on both sides.’ (Wang 2003: 24-26)
”The concept of real time seems to be ubiquitous at the moment – used primarily to convey a sense of the capabilities of new media, of new computer technologies with specific and distinctive relation to temporality. These relations hinge on the concept of “instantaneity’. Television news anchors frequently exhort their viewers to keep up with the news in real time by visiting the station’s or network’s website. ‘Real time’ here connotes immediacy, continuity, an intolerance for delay, and most of all, a certain solidity associated with the guarantee of the real. It would seem that only remaining residence of the real, in an age of simulation, the virtual, and the artificial, is the time.” (Doane 2004: 264)
9. "Why is the real no longer a matter of being there, but of being then? And why is it so crucial that ‘then is in fact a ‘now’ ? Such an erasure of memory and history would be the zero degree of the logic of innovation, a form of commodification in which the commodity itself, always already out of date, would be superfluous." (Done 2004: 281)
10. The psychoanalytical methods of “active introspection”, which Mijarez’s psychiatrist explains to him, is in fact very close to Diaz’ own film “introspection”: "I believe a man will be stronger emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually if he analyzes his memories. He acquires what I call ‘active introspection; Like an exorcism. We are possessed by dreams and memories and we have to confront them so there is a cleansing within."
11. ’’I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films. It belongs to the members of that audience and corresponds to their world… If art succeeds in changing things and proposing new ideas, it can only do so via the creativity of the people we are addressing – each individual member of the audience.” (Kiarostami 1995: 1)
12. "I want Filipino to treasure and embrace history, to examine it no matter what one’s ideology is. We must learn to grasp the significance of these events. We must have a historical perspective if we want to be able to move forward progressively as a people and as a nation.’’ (Diaz in conversation with Wee) cf. also note 1.
13. ’’What happened to Hanzel is the same thing that is happening to the Philippines. Everything has no direction. The efforts of our heroes have gone to waste.” This tragic insight of Hanzel’s grandfather is in accord with some of the key interpretations of Batang West Side. “The specific identity of the murderer ceases to be the key question in the film and Hanzel’s death becomes a powerful metaphor for the attack on the Filipino soul. “ (Ramani) "The investigation, undertaken by a Filipino detective is then used as a bold metaphor to mount an admonishing attack on the collective Filipino anima when the dead man’s family is introduced and its unflattering history unveiled." (Wee)
14. “People in diaspaora, moreover maintained a long termed sense of ethnic consciousness and distinctiveness, which is consolidated by the periodic hostility of either the original home or the host societies towards them. However, unlike the exiles whose identity entails a vertical and primary relationship with their homeland, diasporic consciousness is horizontal and multisided, involving not only the homeland but also the compatriot communities elsewhere. As a result, plurality, multiplicity, and hybridist are structured in dominance among the diasporans, while among the political exiles, binarism and duality rule.” (Naficy 2001 : 145)
15. At the same time all other forms of film reference perform their “historical role”, : Batch ’81 (Mike de Leon, 1982), which we see on TV, and the posters from movies on the fate of Filipino women signed by the giants of Filipino cinema Lino Brocka, Mike de Loen, Ishmael Bernal. “If photographs, films or video tapes do preserve a past, it is t he trace of a past which was never simply present, but was always already heterogenous, discontinuous and forking: a time which reversed (deferred) some portion of its ‘being-present’ for unspecified future.” (McQuire 1998:173)
BIBILIOGRPAHY:
* Benjamin, Walter. (1940). On the Concept of History, Avaiable also at: http:/web.tiscali.it/walterbenjamin
* Diaz, Lav. 2004. The Decade of Living Dangerously: A Chronicle from Lav Diaz. Interview by Wee, Brandon, Senses of Cinema, (Melbourne), Issue no. 34, January – March.
Available at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/congents/0534/lav_diaz.html
* Diaz, Lav. 2003. An Interview with Lav Diaz. Inerview by Tioseco, Alexis. Indiefilipino.com, (Manila), December 18th. Available at: http:/film.indiefilipino.com/
* Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
* Doane, Mary Ann. 2004. (De) realizing Cinematic Time. In Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, eds. Egoyan, Arom, Balfour, Ian. Cambridge (etc): MIT Press, pp. 259-283.
* Hooks, Bell. 1990, Marginality as sit of resistance. In Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Ferguson, Russel (et al.). New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge (etc): MIT Press, p. 341-343.
* Jameson, Frederic. 1980. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso.
* Kiarostami, Abbas. 1995. An Unfinished Cinema. (Pamphlet written for the Centenary of Cinema, December 1995, and distributed on Odeon Theater, Paris.) Available also at: http://207.136.67.23/film/articles/an_unfinished_cinema.htm
* Kolker, Robert Philip. 2001. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. (Online Edition). Available at: http://otal.umd.edu/-rkolker/AlgeringEye/
* McQuire, Scott. 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory. Time and Space in the Age of the Cinema. London: SAGE Publications.
* Moller, Olaf. 2005. “Spomin na Filipine “(Memories of the Philippines”). Kinoplus, (Ljubljana), februar, p. 6.
* Naficy, Hamid. 2001 An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press.
* Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami. Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert Publisher.
* Ramani, Vinita. 2003. “Batang West Side”. Available at: http://www.filmsasia.net/gpage74.html
* Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1994. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Austin: Unv. Of Texas Press.
* Wang, Bing. 2003. Rust, Remants, Rails: Wang Bing’s Epic Vision of China. Interview by Kraicer, Shelly. Cinema-Scope, (Toronto), Issue no. 16, Fall, pp. 21-26.
* Zizek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London, New Yorks: Verso.
Ekran Magazine, Slovenia, 2005
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