And Now the Children of this Land...

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

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Hana Makhmalbaf’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame begins with archive footage of people worshipping at the base of the two giant sandstone Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, in existence there since the fifth century. Before 30 seconds has passed, a dynamite burst and thick, pummelling clouds of grey-black smoke announce the statues’ destruction by the Taliban in March 2001. The film that follows takes place in the space of this destruction and the statues’ absence. Its characters tread underfoot the dust of generations of prayers and dreams.

Buddha Collapsed out of Shame is the latest film made in areas of recent and present conflict– Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan; films such as Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, Marzieh Meshkini’s Stray Dogs, Siddiq Barmak’s Osama – in which children take the leading roles. The concentration on their lives is crucial; by showing their present experiences and the extent of their betrayal by adults in their lives, they reveal the depth of the wounds – in their bodies and in the very language they have been taught to use – that they will take into our shared future.


Refugees

Turtles can Fly was filmed in and around a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan in the weeks leading up to and during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As in Ghobadi’s debut feature The Time for Drunken Horses, his concentration is on the lives and relationships between children; adults are peripheral figures. This begets an atmosphere of raw immediacy, sometimes on the edge of chaos, that takes you into the heart, the confusion and even the humour of the place. In particular he follows ‘Satellite’ – an adolescent fixer named after the satellite dishes he arranges for surrounding villages so that inhabitants can get news of the impending war, and who also organises gangs of children for their daily work of clearing landmines from villagers’ fields. To begin with, he resells the mines for a few dinars; later, with war imminent, the mines are swapped for machine guns for the villagers. He also strikes up a relationship with a family of three refugee children – a boy who has lost his arms through a landmine and who has the gift of prophecy, his troubled young sister Agrin and the blind infant for whom they care.

There are scenes in this film that will silence you: the blind toddler wandering through a minefield, or crying for its father among the spent shells of a weapons dump; the same child standing in the rain and touching the barbed wire at the edge of his refugee camp; the orphaned girl tying the child to a rock; the child’s armless uncle defusing a land mine with his teeth.

Ghobadi said he intended to make a different film, ‘a movie in the city about adults’, but when he ‘saw so many children with such desperation, these children without limbs, he could not deny their cry’. He says that, ‘this film is not about children. It's about these young people who have become adults prematurely, who have never had a childhood.’ Agrin is one such girl. Her childhood ended with the murder of her parents and her rape by Saddam’s soldiers. Their barbarity is channelled through her blank stare; the stare of a young girl who understands everything only too well.

Turtles Can Fly shows the resilience and ingenuity that go hand in hand with the mental and physical ruination of children’s lives. Though rooted entirely in a certain place at a certain time, the film is also allegorical. These are the world’s forgotten children, the children of some mined borderland, caught up in the wreckage of violent history; here, elsewhere, time and again.


War Orphans

The children in Marzieh Meshkini’s Stray Dogs, filmed in Kabul in 2003, are not forgotten, but their presence is a nuisance to the authorities. The film is based on a true story that Meshkini came across when she was in Afghanistan with Samira Makhmalbaf, scouting for locations and actors for Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon. While in a prison in Kabul, Meshkini encountered a number of children whom she initially took to be prisoners. She subsequently learned that they spent the nights there with their mothers as they had nowhere else to go, and were then released onto the streets for the day. It is around this situation that Meshkini based her film.

With their Talib father in prison, Gol Ghotai and her brother Zahed have to fend for themselves. Their mother had married again after his five year absence so that she could feed her starving children; she is also now in prison, for being ‘a whore’. The children sleep with her during the night, and by day, join the thousands of others who make a living by rummaging through the rubbish dumps on the banks of the river, looking for something, anything, to sell. (In the very first scene we see Gol Ghotai pick up a book from a heap of rubbish through which she is rifling. I’ve found a book – should we sell it or burn it?’ she asks Zahed.) Then, after they have been told they can no longer stay with their mother as 'night prisoners', they try to commit a robbery so they can be arrested and sent to prison too.

Everything about the children’s world is upside-down, as if a new and terrible logic has taken hold. Adults generally play no constructive roles in the film. They are shown as the guardians of doorways – jailing, locking and, mostly, refusing entry, though sometimes giving grudging access. The only time that adult men engage in communal action is to organise a fight between vicious dogs (an unscripted event incorporated into the final film). These are children who are part of a generation of war orphans, even though their parents are still alive.

When Gol Ghotai goes to visit her mother in prison she has to knock on the massive padlocked metal doors. The ring that serves as both handle and door knocker is larger than her own head. She can just about reach it, knocks it, and then again when she receives no answer. She is a symbol of young defiance, refusing to accept unsatisfactory answers and continuing to question those in authority. She is resilient, resourceful and has the look of justice in her eyes. At the time of filming, she was 7 years old.


The Stoning Game

Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, scripted by Marzieh Meshkini and filmed by her then 18 year-old daughter, Hana Makhmalbaf, shows the effects of this poisoning of a generation’s actions and – most destructively – words.

In the caves of Bamyan, 6 year-old Baktay, left in charge of her mother’s baby, tells Abbas, a child from the neighbouring cave, to read his alphabet quietly so as not to wake the sleeping infant. He responds by challenging the bright-eyed girl to read. This is not a challenge she can refuse, though she holds the proffered book upside-down as she recites the names of the pictures in its pages. Abbas then tells her a short, funny story: A man was sleeping under a tree. A walnut fell on his head. The man got up and said, ‘Lucky it wasn’t a pumpkin or I’d be dead!’. Baktay’s eyes are filled with rapt attention and she responds with words that would put a warm glow inside any teacher of whatever age. Read some more, she says, but Abbas only knows this one story, so she then says, will you take me to school?

This is where her problems start, as – showing the resourcefulness and innocent determination of the young – she embarks on an absurd runaround to find a notebook and pencil for class. For this, she needs twenty rupees. Abbas tells her to sell four eggs, which the shopkeeper then tells her to sell in the market, where she wanders the muddy streets and is ignored and refused. She follows a man to try and get money from him for the eggs he has jogged out of her hand, and she is reduced to sitting on a wall, next to a caged quail, holding out her remaining two eggs to passers-by. At one point she watches the hands of two men at a stall counting out thousands of rupees. What will you do with all that money?, she asks. The blacksmith tells her to swap eggs for bread which he will then buy, though to do this, foreshadowing her torment to come, she has to pass a vicious barking dog. Don’t eat me, I need to buy a notebook, she says. The smile in her eyes when eventually she exchanges the ten rupee note for the notebook is genuine, the yellow of the book’s cover reflecting the sunlight onto her face. The pen she needs was the two eggs broken in the marketplace, so she takes her mother’s lipstick to write with.

Abbas takes her to school – and is told to stand on one leg for being late. Baktay is told to go to the girl’s school across the river. In a show of guileless innocence, mistaken for impudence by the teacher, she keeps returning to the boys’ school, pressing the teacher for the story she wishes to hear. What do you want with a man sleeping under a tree? is the teacher’s only response, and he sends her on her way.

She is then ambushed, by a gang of boys pretending to be Taliban, using sticks for guns, ripping up her notebook to make paper warplanes. Hold your hands up they say, as they prod her with their sticks in front of the absent Buddha. Her initial look of amused consternation turns to fear when the boy’s leader says, you are a sinner, we’ll stone you, and commands his gang to collect ‘the Buddha’s toenails’. I won’t play the stoning game says Baktay. It’s not a game says the boy’s leader, following this with words that no child should ever know, let alone say with conviction; they are digging your grave.

Repent! You are a sinner! the boy commands, in words that are unhelpful when spoken by adults, but grotesque in the mouths of children. Let me go to school to learn funny stories says Baktay as she is lowered into her grave by the Taliban boys. Readying themselves to stone her, they hold rocks above their heads, their eyes aflame with spite and fevered hate. Though the children’s sticks are rifles, the grave is a grave, and the rocks are rocks. This is no game. Baktay is 6, the boys a little older.

Abbas, walking along the path, is then tricked into and trapped in a mud pit, where he is interrogated. The conversation between Abbas and the Talib boy recalls that between Winston Smith and O'Brien in the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984. What is crucial here, is that whatever answer Abbas or Smith gives, it will never be right. Questions here are a means of retaining power, not a way of eliciting information. As he stands there, covered from head to toe in yellow mud and muck, this perpetual learner, who speaks the alphabet wherever he goes, is reduced to stuttering out letters, not knowing the words that are required of him.

By the end, both Abbas and Baktay have died, symbolically, as a way out of their present troubles. Encircling Baktay where she falls are men winnowing grain. As they throw it to the wind, the air is filled with chaff from which they protect their eyes with the same brown paper bags that the Taliban boys put over young girls’ heads.

Of Buddha Collpased Out of Shame, Hana Makhmalbaf said, ‘Now the children of this land in their games fire at each other with wooden arms and play the stoning game with little girls and place mines under each other’s feet in humour.
How will these children who mock the game of war in childhood play with each other and the future of humanity?’

If we fail to see just what is happening to this generation of children, orphaned and traumatised by war and violence, and how their experiences and disaffection will transmute into future action, then God help us all.

A Lesson in Looks: Andrzej Munk's Passenger (1963)

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

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Director Andrzej Munk died in a car accident during the filming of Passenger,  his 1963 film about a chance postwar encounter on a liner between a former prisoner at Auschwitz and her female supervisor. Munk’s colleaugues then combined the existing film footage along with stills and narration to ‘present the questions he wished to pose’. Their preamble is worth quoting at length: ‘We have no intention of adding to what he did not say himself. We are not searching for solutions which might not have been his, nor seeking to conclude the plots which his death left unresolved. We merely wish to present what was filmed, with all the gaps and reticence, in an attempt to grasp whatever is alive and significant.’

The gaps and reticence are important, as the film’s real subject is the apparent void of memory, both personal and collective, that allows a man or woman to distance themselves from the past and re-present it as they would prefer. The gap between Munk’s intentions and the resulting film collage, reconstructed by others, is thus fitting for the processes that are the film’s subject. Completed films are too often reduced to the intentions of the director, or are written away in a phrase or a sentence; Passenger, an incomplete, fragmentary mix of fact and fiction, defies singular ownership and cannot be further reduced.

‘the life of the camp family’

The lengths to which Liza, an overseer at the Auschwitz stores, goes to justify her past to her husband, are incredible. ‘I had nothing to do with the prisoners, only their things,’ she says. She needs an assistant and chooses Marta from a courtyard inspection. ‘It was a pleasure to watch her change back to a normal girl,’ she says. Jealousy comes when Liza discovers Marta’s lover is also in the camp. ‘She had what I lacked,’ she says. When Tadeusz and Marta have the temerity to show their love for each other, Liza is uncertain of how to act. ‘I, an SS overseer, was as powerless as she was,’ she says. When Marta writes a note to her lover, Liza at first refuses to believe that she could have betrayed her trust. ‘She wanted to destroy me, I had to defend myself,’ she says.

We should thank her for being honest in her lies, and revealing the limitless contortions of self-deception.

poplars

Concentration camp scenes in Passenger were filmed during a month at Auschwitz. It is immediately established as a place of ending with its railway tracks leading into a building and its piles of emptied suitcases in the fog. Simplicity of presentation is paramount here and the camera follows the geometry of the place. A horizontal tracking shot takes in a long, low building and four vents; a pan upwards then shows a smoking, flaring chimney.

We return to this place later, as Liza watches through a barbed-wire fence as nurses lead children and babies into the camp, and an officer casually receives a delivery of poison, pulls on a gas mask and gloves and pours the contents of the canister down a vent, the children’s voices bubbling away in the background. Behind Liza the poplars lean in the wind; before her the smoke from the chimney casts cloud shadows on the ground. It is a sunny, blowy day. The scene recalls the mundane unreality of Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, and this theme is later referred to by the filmmakers in their narration: ‘in the vague, unreal background, people die, silently, casually, anonymously, as others perform their duty.’ Then Marta addresses Liza, and Liza, slightly discomposed for a short time, turns away from the scene and to her.

looks

Passenger gives a valuable lesson in looks. In essence, people in Passenger regard each other in three ways. The first way is in a look that assumes power. It is the weasel-eyed look that Liza wears as she struts around the muddy camp in her boots. The countering look of the prisoners sometimes shows fear, it sometimes pleads, but more often it is defiant. (‘Anna, lift your head up!’ says Marta to a naked prisoner, an example past whom other prisoners are made to march.) Both are closed, tight looks that cannot risk giving anything away.

The second look is that of love. It occurs at the four moments that Marta and Tadeusz are shown together. It is a look that hides nothing from the other. When Marta first sees Tadeusz looking at her, she covers her shorn head with her scarf. Even this act reveals more than it hides, and we know that Tadeusz, though his face is half-hidden by a glare of light on the window pane, is gazing at her with the tenderness that is at the heart of love. In Marta’s note to Tadeusz, she writes, ‘It’s good that you exist.’ This is the unspoken message of all their looks between each other. At one point he sketches her and her eyes are alive with the joy of being seen.

The third look hardly features in the film, yet it is the most chilling, against which the look of power is banal. It is the look of polite dissimulation that we can imagine Liza wears for her husband and the other passengers on the cruise ship. It is a look of blankness that renders people unfathomable, and that can hide even atrocities. It is a look that will only break when it has to, to say such words as, ‘I wasn’t a prisoner, I was an overseer,’ to a husband. It is a look that you can encounter any day, and anywhere. 

Et Alors? Michael Haneke's Hidden (2005)

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

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Someone is sending videotapes to Georges and Anne Laurent. Nothing significant happens in these tapes but they announce that their house is being watched. The tapes then take on more personal significance for Georges and are accompanied by childish drawings that seem to refer to an unpleasant episode in his past, and his actions in finding out who is sending the parcels are clouded by this past as well as his own troubled conscience.

One of the most impressive aspects of Hidden is how it marries the personal with the symbolic. Through his story of a couple and their son, and the husband’s relation with Majid, an Algerian man he knew as a 6 year-old boy, and his son, he has fashioned a story that says much about current tensions over immigration and integration at large in European society today. In some ways the concentration on surveillance in the film, and the question of just who sent the tapes are red herrings. With this stripped away, what you are left with seems to have grown from the potent 5 minute confrontation between a young Arab, Anne Laurent (again) and an older man in the metro near the end of Code Unknown. That scene also features three of the same actors – Juliette Binoche, and Maurice Bénichou and Walid Afkir, who play Majid and his son respectively in Hidden.

At the heart of the film is the fundamental question of communication. In so many of George’s exchanges, this is what is lacking. When he visits Majid to confront him about the tapes, Majid is hurt that he uses ‘vous’ with him. ‘Why do you talk like we’re strangers?’ he says. Georges threatens him, to which Majid responds that beating him ‘wouldn’t leave you any wiser about me’. Like the scene with the cyclist outside the police station, it is symbolic of how the bourgeoisie regard ‘others’ in their midst and also of the blind spot a nation’s people can develop to people who are not like them – immigrants in HLM housing for example – but who have spent decades, or even generations in the country. It’s no coincidence that Georges works in the media. It also leads to the question that if you are one of the overlooked or politely ignored, just how do you penetrate the gates, the doors and the walls of books that block your way?

There are two filmic relations to Hidden that may not be readily apparent. The first (that came to me in an uncharitable moment after the film didn’t live up to the extraordinary hype it had received) was that in some ways it was a 21^st century update of Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, though at least in Hidden the characters get to eat. Quite a lot in fact, as meals punctuate the film. Watching it a second time, the comparison didn’t seem so extraordinary, there is a certain element of satire in its approach to the comfortable, and rather unpleasant, central couple (the latest adoption of Haneke’s ‘Georges & Anne Laurent’ personas). After Georges has been caught lying about the visit to Majid’s flat for example, Auteuil and Binoche bicker like a comedy double-act with their little glances and facial tics. Some of the other characters are little more than caricatures too – Georges’ boss for one, the loud pseud at the book launch who drops Baudrillard’s name into a casual conversation for another. Also, the film has been labelled, rather misleadingly, a ‘whodunnit’. It resembles more the shaggy-dog story that is told by a guest at the dinner-party. Oh, and then there’s the filming of the house that takes place from ‘Rue des Iris’.

The second film it calls to mind is Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which resonates with the footage from the second tape of the Laurents’ house. The wind through the hedge outside their house sounds much like the wind in the park in Blow-Up. Both are outwardly peaceful, calm scenes that conceal sinister happenings. Much like the enlarging of the photographs in Blow-Up too, we are forced into scanning the video footage and the film for clues, looking for an answer, and, in Hidden at least, missing the bigger picture.

Small details are effective. When Georges leaves Majid’s flat we see him leaving the room and shutting the door behind him. With the camera on Majid, Haneke cuts before we hear the door shutting. Allowing the camera to remain on Majid with the hollow sound that follows the shutting of the door would have confirmed his loneliness. Instead it cuts and the film preserves its – and Majid’s – inscrutability. It also sets up the replay of the scene that soon follows.

A number of scenes take place in doorways, which seems significant in a film that questions equal access and treatment in a society. The Laurents’ house has three layers of protection – gate, door and, inside the house the walls of books (that surround a tv). None are protection against past injustice or a bad conscience – though the books may muffle it for a while. It’s why the scene where Majid’s son goes into George’s workplace feels like such an edgily invigorating incursion. The doorway scenes find their match in the language used, especially between Georges and Anne, whose conversation is littered with ‘comment cela?’ and ‘et alors?’, phrases encouraging the other to tell more, reveal more, to go a little further into the explanations found behind the doors of conscience or deception.

For all the obfuscation about the film, Haneke in fact states the problem quite clearly. If recognition of equal worth between all members of a society (egalité, fraternité) is not given, and with that an equal validity to people’s stories and heritage, then in that space is born disaffection and violence.

A String of Prayer Beads For the Eyes: Artur Aristakisyan's Palms (1993)

(an essay and poem written for the booklet of Second Run's DVD release of the film)

A powerfully original but disconcerting Russian film, filmed entirely among the community of beggars and outsiders in Aristakisyan’s home town of Kishinev. I recall having to write this in beautiful June weather when I really just wanted to be outside in the garden. Alas, it was not to be, and for a few days I had to reluctantly draw the curtains against the sun and immerse myself in Aristakisyan’s world, as revealed through a greenish-hued check disc. At a point the piece stalled for a while and I needed another input. That day, in a much-missed junk shop in Kington not unknown for serendipitous finds (for me at least), I came across a copy of Jeremy Sandford's Down and Out in Britain, a book I'd not seen before and which I've not come across since, which was exactly what was required. Thank you.

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Palms

A blind, begging boy has been told by his parents, also blind, that everyone in the world is in fact blind. 'Not a single person can see himself,' they have said. So when the boy is ignored by people, he waits patiently, realising that they may not yet be aware of his presence. Of the many images in Palms that imprint themselves on your mind, this one, of a world populated entirely with blind people living off each other’s charity, is at its heart. 


Proximity

Perhaps surprisingly for a film populated almost entirely with beggars, Palms has nothing to do with charity. Its real subject is proximity. In its relentless depiction of life at the margins and with its discomfiting jabs of authenticity, it is an affront to personal space. Why should this be so?

Part of the answer comes in a quote from John Berger’s essay Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, in which, considering the current omnipresence and elusiveness of images, he describes the system outside of which the people in Palms exist. What are depicted, he says, “used to be called physical appearances because they belonged to solid bodies. Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system’s mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.”1

In contrast to these fugitive appearances, there is no doubt that in Palms we are in the company of solid bodies, maimed and damaged bodies even, not seeking our attention or intervention, utterly indifferent to us at our safe distance, yet completely present. They feed no appetite, create no wealth, yet still they stubbornly exist, heavy with the affront of parasitic life.

One of the usual lures of cinema is the attraction of journeying in safety to places and with people you would not otherwise meet. Palms presents you with no seductive journeys. It does not care about you and it does not indulge you. It leaves you with nowhere to go except back on yourself, making you keenly aware of your own reaction – your disgust, your righteousness, your shame, the boundaries of your love. Watching Palms, you are no longer the centre of the world. How can you incorporate this place and its people? At times, the film even looks like it comes from another century. The flashes of modern clothing and accessories – a leather jacket, a handbag, a pushchair – belonging to people in the streets, seem incongruous.

In his words, with Palms, Aristakisyan presents a film of outsiders objectionable to the system. What makes them so? An answer comes at the beginning of Part Two with the epileptics, of whom he says that they 'proved to be objectionable because they didn’t need to go anywhere. They were at the border between worlds and could see clearly.' It is this lack of need, this appetite only for necessities, that is objectionable.


The System

The system will engulf everything that has sense.

In Palms, 'the system' outside of which the beggars live remains undefined. This is unimportant; political system, social system, system of mercantile totalitarianism, whatever name you care to supply makes no difference. When you are outside of it, the terms are meaningless. The only thing worth knowing is the essential fact that power, wherever it is found, 'starts to ferment, like wine'. Always.

Palms is a confrontational film. It may even provoke fear in some, a fear of  losing control, or of losing position. If the defining characteristic of the system is its appetite for more, the refraction of this appetite is through advertising, all of which is predicated on the promise of control and the seduction of choice, sometimes even the control of chance. Living through a time saturated with such messages, to lose choice is something that cannot be countenanced. This, especially, appears unendurable. This is why the image of the blind boy begging in a blind world, with all of its people entirely reliant on charity, is central. This is the system’s nightmare.

In Aristakisyan’s second film, A Place on Earth, set in a hippie commune in Moscow, many of Palms’ themes are developed to their extreme. The commune’s members have turned against all accepted social hierarchies and codes of separation. There are no longer boundaries between human and animal, adults and children, desire and disease, squalor and food, free love and obligation, your own body and your body’s ownership by others. Of that film, Aristakisyan has said that it 'reveals our worst fears: it shows the scariest version of what might happen to us.' The comment applies equally to Palms.


When Jeremy Sandford, the writer of Cathy Come Home, spent time with those out of the reach of the welfare state in Britain at the end of the 1960s, he wrote in his introduction to the account of his experiences, Down and Out in Britain, that 'I sometimes had the fancy that perhaps the rest of my life was only an illusion – that those things I prized, friends, children, a home, were just a dream from which I would awaken back to the reality of a narrow dosshouse dormitory.' The country and the decade are different but his experience of fear is recognisable. Palms makes you keenly aware of all the frail, and ever more virtual ties of modern existence.


Words

My son, it’s true that I want you to become a beggar. I, your father, wish you to become a beggar, because I love you my son.

There are many words in Palms, remorseless words that follow logic into the abyss. Aristakisyan’s first address to his unborn son takes place over a black screen, putting us in his son’s position, in the womb. By implication, what follows is an address to us too. His words, an attempt to understand how to save his unborn son’s spirit, are profoundly disquieting, for they intimate how we too can save ourselves from spiritual ruination. 'Either a man lives in the spirit or in the system, and thereby becomes its agent,' he says. The options are terrifyingly limited: have nothing to do with power, beg, go out of your mind. Everything else is compromise. The only thing you may claim to own is your virginity. 'Unite your destitution with your virginity. It’s all that I can advise you,' the unborn son is told. 'Destitution will protect you from the system, and virginity from fornication with the system.'

Aristakisyan recognises however that even his language is tainted by the system, dooming his speech to collusion. There is no getting outside of it. What other options are open, he asks – to learn the language of birds? When he addresses the man who hides in his basement, nicknamed 'Pithecanthropus' by those at the hospital from where he escaped, he tells him, 'you’ll start speaking later on, when people have used up all the combinations of words and will eat their tongues...you’ll speak when people will lose the gift of speech out of shame.' The man stares out at us, a rebuke to words used meaninglessly, as if they have no value, and do not refer to people, or things.


Salvation

If we are reluctant to journey in the film, what hope is there then of salvation? The usual channels are closed to us. We are not comforted with visions of redemptive beauty. At the end of Chapter I, Bedding and Clothing, the district in which Palms was filmed is shown. It could have been depicted so that the points of reflected light on the ground were made to glisten, to represent hope or promise. They don’t. They look like litter.

In Chapter II, Life on a Swamp, there is a scene of a boy drinking from a plate as water flows next to him. This is not the picturesque poverty that sells diaries and calendars. The water is rain overflowing from a gutter that feeds the swamp on which he lives.

We become aware of the urge to transmute images to beauty, or at least something that can be understood in the context of art or cinematic history. With relief we note the scenes of ruined houses and courtyards that resemble daguerreotypes brought back by 19th century travellers, a still-life of a plate of apples, a woman carrying a man down a road that previews a similar situation in Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son, a depiction of a man with doves and a candle emerging from the darkness that calls to mind the chiaroscuro lighting, and maybe even the subject matter, of a Caravaggio painting. These are moments of relief and reassurance that our aesthetics are still in place.

This is to confuse the picturesque with necessity. The houses are condemned, the apples are for sale, the ragman needs to get down the street. There is nothing here to support our world.


Bodies

The system privileges physical and psychological renewal and reinvention; it even hijacks people’s bodies, making them understandable only in terms of comparison. In Palms, it is confronted by people who wear their stories – of rejection, failure, suffering, indifference, acceptance, dogged resistance – on their bodies instead of erasing them. Such bodies are unsightly to the system. They are the bodies of people just stubbornly there, claiming nothing more than the territory that they inhabit.

There are so many stories here: a woman who lies on the ground for forty years after being deserted, a man who sleeps with doves, a woman who carries the head of her failed executioner in her belongings, a man so taunted that he bit through his veins, a woman who leaves out food and drink for her dead husband who visits during the night, a man who wishes his unborn son to be a beggar. All of these stories are hidden, almost completely, behind nothing more than the palms of beggars. Palms opens our ears.

Watching Palms, I have the curious sensation that it is an artefact of a destroyed civilisation – its epitaph perhaps, or a memento mori that went unheeded.


Palms

When his mother bathed him
the wooden trough was whole.
When he pushed himself from eight storeys
the trough broke
and his body now lives between his birth and failed death.
This is a film for beggars.

The blind boy believes that everyone in the world is blind,
so when a person seems to ignore him, he waits
understanding that they may not yet be aware of his presence.
This is a film for the blind.

People with money see an eighth skin on beggars,
a skin of bandages, rags and dirt,
which is a convenient disguise for both.
This is a film for the cold.

A man hides in a basement
and only comes out on Sundays
so he won’t be taken away
by those he has escaped.
This is a film for fugitives.

Another man lives in a hill of rubbish
so bloated that passers-by
must push him through his gate.
His fence just holds it all in.
This is a film for hoarders.

Among the pigeons and doves of the city
are those that took food and love from the attic man
and they now keep his memory.
This is a film for the dead.

Beggars, the blind, the cold
fugitives, hoarders and the dead.
We are all watching now
from beneath our clothing
from among the scraps and waste of our lives,
unwilling to lose our tongues
and unable to find our silence.

The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1969)

 (written for MovieMail in 2006)

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It’s unsurprising to learn that director Juraj Herz studied puppetry with his exact contemporary and friend Jan Švankmajer; it comes out in a certain way of viewing and orchestrating people, of using parts of their bodies to represent the whole and of seeing opportunities for playful transition when other filmmakers might find barriers to representation.

In The Cremator, the puppet-master – and the cremator of the title – is one Karl Kopfrkingl. Indeed, in one of the first scenes he is shown orchestrating a social event, dictating who should sit where, what drink should be served, and – with heavy irony and as part of the film’s very blackest of humour – telling people not to smoke. He is beguilingly mild-mannered, a soft-spoken teetotaller who views his work at the crematorium as a benign service, freeing people’s souls for reincarnation, his passion for his work fed by a fascination with Tibet and its burial customs. He’s also an oily, manipulative, grotesque monster, almost terrifyingly bland and composed, and whose smiling mouth never quite matches the calculation or, sometimes, the fear in his eyes.

Kopfrkingl is also a suggestible character, whose profession puts him in a position of great usefulness to the occupying force in the country. Initially non-committal to their presence, his devotion to the cause grows as the prospects of his advancement, along with its promise of access to an exclusive brothel (blondes only), and his own self-delusion increases. His are the actions of a blessed reincarnator, not a mundane stoker. When he gets to the point of saying that he is doing what he does to prevent people’s future suffering in the new ‘higher moral code’ that will be brought about by his masters, then his delusions are almost complete. Of course, devotion to a cause requires self-sacrifice. There’s no place for ‘inferior blood’ in the new order of things, and when it is suggested to him that his own dear wife of nineteen years has half Jewish blood, and that consequently his children are also similarly tainted, then the form of his terrible sacrifice becomes clear.

It takes a second watch to really bring out this shocking film’s careful plotting and planning, and also just how riddled with jokes it is – though these belong to some little-visited netherworld of humour. It is perhaps most chilling in showing just who it is that has it in them to commit atrocities – not just the ranter or the leader, but the civil servant, the quietly-spoken family man, the loving husband.

The playful transitions that I mentioned earlier are most apparent in the slightly disconcerting elisions that take place as one scene melds into another. The more they happen, the more apposite they appear, reinforcing Kopfrkingl’s thinking of how easy, natural and right it is to pass from one state of being to another. From life to death is really no more than picking out a particle from a cup, or removing dust from the surface of a picture, or covering over someone’s name. Likewise this is a fascinating film of pretence, of the unsaid and the implied. Words said often hide the thoughts behind them. In one striking moment, an invitation extended to Kopfrkingl to join ‘the party’ is quite literally overlaid with the connotations of sexual privilege that have been bubbling around in Kopfrkingl’s mind since the beginning.

Zdeněk Liška’s score is eminently fitting, with his musical counterpoints situated somewhere between fairground and liturgical themes. This is not a musical accompaniment for souls in transit to reincarnation though, rather it’s the ironic comment on an absurd, melancholy and tragic game. Watch out too for the opening credits sequence which is Švankmajer-esque in all but name, with its tearing of heads and its tumble and pile of cut-out bodies.

Late in the film, Kopfrkingl is shown against a background of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. As he is driven off at the end of the film, the reincarnated Buddha on the way to the throne in Lhasa, and having seemingly eluded his own attendant death, he leaves the Garden, and moves across the panel into ‘Hell’, though his mind by now is filled with the glory of another Bosch painting – the ‘Ascent to the Empyrean’.

David Holzman's Diary (Jim McBride, 1967)

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

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Truth is Beauty 

David Holzman’s Diary is both spoof documentary and satire – and a funny one at that, but doesn’t really feel like either. This is a testament to how well judged the tone of the film is, trading its apparent lack of guile against the more sinister impulses that surface with Holzman’s character. The innocence makes the troubling scenes more uncomfortable, the darker elements colour the more apparently mundane exchanges. It’s also a credit to the acting ability of L.M Kit Carson. To act in front of a camera as if you’re not acting is quite a trick, and he pulls it off, aiding the sensation of his character’s reality going awry.

It was a film concocted by director Jim McBride, cameraman Michael Wadleigh (later the director and cameraman of the film of Woodstock) and L.M Kit Carson, who plays the character of David Holzman. Its purpose, by way of ‘noted French wit’ Jean-Luc Godard, was to explore the idea of ‘filming truth’. In the film, Holzman is taken with the noble folly that by recording a video diary he can somehow reveal ‘the mystery of things’, his life’s hidden patterns and signifance. Well, in a way he does exactly this, but only to prove the adage that you should be careful what you wish for.

The film is also a fascinating time capsule, and when Wadleigh glides the camera through the streets of New York’s Upper West Side, recording its life and people - the delivery boys on bicycles, the people hanging out on their stoops, the sofas and mattresses on the street, a conversation with a street goddess, you sense that the film is in these moments coming near to fulfilling Holzman’s ambition.

One of the reasons Holzman starts filming is because he has received an A1 classification from the draft board. The news that fades in and out of the background soundtrack talks of the times: ‘more than 300 negro and white citizens of Newark have joined in a peace crusade’, ‘Pentagon sources say US forces in Vietnam will be strengthened by at least 80,000 men in the next year’. It is a mood that informs McBride’s accompanying film on the Second Run DVD, My Girlfriend’s Wedding, in which his then girlfriend talks of her reasons behind marrying a Yippie to get a green card. She has travelled to America to join the revolution. He marries just to ‘do something irreverent’.

Truth is conditional on its means of representation

The ‘truth’ revealed in David Holzman’s diary is conditional on the portable recording equipment he uses to capture it, in this case an Eclair MPR 16mm camera (‘she weighs about 18lb’), an Angenieux 9.5-95mm zoom lens, a Nagra tape recorder and a Lavelier microphone. Holzman describes them as ‘all of his friends’. Except they’re not. The camera becomes the dark side of Vertov’s all-seeing Kino-Eye, addictive, craving novelty, sensation and ultimately, humiliation. Television is nothing to it, the small screen provides small fare, hardly even an hors d’oeuvre, and the camera’s appetite can devour a whole evening of tv in a minute. No, what it requires instead is the red meat of prowling and intrusion, the thrill of illicit power, of voyeurism and knowing more about its subject than the subject knows of himself. By the end of the film, after peering into a woman’s life through a window across the street and stalking a woman in the subway (a relentless and profoundly discomforting scene by the by), Holzman is reduced to shouting at the camera ‘what the fuck do you want?’. The camera says nothing of course, just sits there recording, but by now it is a thinking machine, enjoying Holzman’s discomfort while at the same time assuming a rather hurt demeanour. ‘I’m sorry’ says Holzman.

Truth may not necessarily set you free

As Holzman finds out, if you’re going to submit yourself to the impartial and implacable scrutiny of the camera, you better be prepared for what it’s going to show about you. His friend Pepe derides his whole enterprise. In his speech, delivered from crotch height of the painted man in the Cuban-themed mural behind him, he tells him that his decisions have become aesthetical rather than moral, adding that by devoting himself to being recorded on camera he is actually withdrawing from life rather than engaging with it. ‘You’ve stopped living somehow’ he says.

Pitifully dependent on his need to record his life by the end of the film (though it is not mentioned a second time, the spectre of Vietnam provides a motivation for his actions), Holzman has been relieved of his means of doing so. It’s a nicely balanced impasse, though whether he can use the information he has learnt about himself through his project in any meaningful way is a moot point.

The Determination of Touch: Karoly Makk's Another Way (1982)

(written for MovieMail in 2006)

I wrote about this together with Karoly Makk's peerless 1971 film, Love, but I revised the text of that for a podcast I did in 2010 so I'll put that up separately.

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Another Way begins with the washing of Livia’s body. It is a baptism of sorts, and a motif that Makk also uses at the end of his 1971 film Love, when Luca washes her husband’s body after he has been released from prison. Both scenes mark the transition to a new stage of their respective lives, though in Livia’s case, it is certainly not one she would have chosen, paralysed and without her friend and lover, Eva.

The theme of washing and touching another person is central to both films and both feature brief but concentrated moments which are pivotal in this regard. In Love, the bedridden Mother is often shown with her hand outside the sheets, needing touch but resentful too that it can’t be her son who touches her: ‘When I die, only my son will touch my hand…if my son can’t hold my hand then I want to be alone.’ Scenes of contact are used sparingly and are all the more tender because of it. When Luca washes her mother-in-law’s hand, sponging it, holding it, towelling it dry, she prolongs the touch beyond the perfunctory needs. It is a brief but central moment to the film. It is a touch that neither prefers but because of the absence of János – one’s husband, the other’s son – it is all they have. It exemplifies just how thoroughly the politics of state repression have affected the most intimate moments of people’s lives.

The politicisation of touch is just as central in Another Way, which has at its heart a relationship between Livia and Eva, two journalists working for the same magazine. The scene that draws together the ambivalence at the core of their relationship occurs after Eva has left the magazine, unwilling to compromise or cut a controversial article, and returned to her mother’s house in the country. After an absence of months and unanswered letters, she is visited by Livia, who arrives with a small suitcase. Their relationship is still undefined – their mutual attraction was obvious in the city but Livia was unwilling to fully act upon her feelings. Now she has left her military husband to visit Eva, who has been working in the kitchen and whose hands are covered up to the wrist in sticky dough. Livia hesitates outside the house; Eva picks dough from her fingers. Then Eva looks up and smiles the most disarming, the most beautiful of smiles. Her eyes sparkling with tears and happiness she beckons Livia towards her with sticky fingers. The promise of touch between them is there but also its present impossibility, she is the predator, the sticky trap, but in the least predatory of environments, her mother’s kitchen. I would swap an awful lot of cinema for that one brief sequence.

Throughout the film there is an ambivalence about the way Eva is represented. The first we know of her is that she is dead. A bird of prey flying away from the scene of her death is an expression of her soul escaping the concerns of the earth but it is also sinister, a bird of prey, a heavy dark bird; wolves howl in the background. She is compared to a spider waiting in the corner of her web, and is often shown at the edges of scenes but she is also more nervous than predatory. The musical themes that accompany Eva and Livia’s affair also show this ambivalence; the melancholy sweetness of guitar music is contrasted with a nervy theme on a saxophone. All this is indicative of Makk’s interests as a director. He says, ‘I feel most at home with irresolvable or contradictory human relationships.’ The tragedy is that it seems Eva’s irresolvable fate has continued with her into death.

As with Love, there is a sureness of cinematic touch here, a feeling of rightness in the use of angles and editing. It’s in the simple things that could well pass by without notice; in Love, when János travels home after release on the tram, we look at him from above, watching him from the point of view of a standing passenger but also at an angle which, allied with the sound of the tram, gives a queasy feeling that we can well understand János is feeling. In Another Way, you need look no further than the scene already mentioned with Eva beckoning with her dough-covered hands. Livia moves forward and her face fills the screen for a few moments, allowing us to regard her as the face of a soon-to-be lover. Makk doesn’t overlook the small details either - witness the bird's wing chipping in the enamel bowl immediately after the opening credits.

These deft touches would be undercut if unsupported by good performances and mention needs to be made of just how good the acting is by the two Polish women who inhabit the lead parts, Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak and Grazyna Szapolowska (the latter familiar from Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love and No End). They are perfectly cast, and their relationship trembles with the uncertainty of life.