three pieces on three films

On Ben Rivers’ I Know Where I’m Going

There’s that one Borges story about the map in the unnamed empire, where every point perfectly corresponds to where it is intended to represent at a 1:1 ratio. The map stretches across the entire empire, until later generations realize it to be useless. All that is left of the map are tattered ruins of the map in the desert. It is all that remains of the field that was once geography.

Images of roads lead us through Ben Rivers’ I Know Where I’m Going, as we pass through snow-capped mountains, forests submerged in night, and fields of fog. These roads write our ultimately ephemeral maps. Like the map of the unnamed empire, it will cease to be. Rivers never questions, but immediately accepts the imminent demise of human civilization. A voiceover of a man, presumably a scientist, believes we will all be gone in the next few centuries. But the Earth will remain. His main question: will there be evidence of our presence, not over the following thousands of years, but the hundreds of million to come.

The answer can be found buried in the strata of the Earth. The voice predicts a few cities, maybe three or four in the world, will sink into the strata and become fossilized, rising eons later for future researchers (of what kind is obviously uncertain) to discover. As Rivers guides us through landscapes, we see gorgeous shots of a nature that will not remain, in a film that also reminds you that it itself, like everything else we know, will cease to be, sooner than is comfortably fathomable.

There are few on-screen figures in I Know Where I’m Going. The first, a lumberjack in a red flannel, we see briefly alongside shots of trees being cut down. Rivers frames him ambiguously, making it difficult to blame the man for the trees falling down, though he is nevertheless present to witness a reason for the downfall of man. The next man seems to be the scientist speaking to us, though he’s masked by something similar to a beekeepers’ suit, and his gesticulations and movements while speaking never quite match the audio. The effect is unnerving, a reminder of how artificially the society around us has been constructed, how powerless we are to change anything, even if it seems slightly off. 

The voiceover questions why humans don’t view themselves like other species, when analyzing how we affect our environment. Rivers continues this line of questioning, taking us to meet two men living on the outskirts of society. One questions why humans are trying to do anything, why we care how gravity works, suggesting we leave it all alone. He’s probably right, but it’s too late now, and society doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Maybe late capitalism will give us all the answers: why gravity works, whether the big bang theory happened, the ability to accelerate particles faster than the speed of light. There will be many consolation prizes on the road to oblivion. I wonder how much of it will be buried in the strata. 




Filmmaking in the Face of Fascism


Last week India removed/amended/abrogated (take your pick of a facile verb here) Article 370 of their Constitution which granted special rights to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in a nation that is led by Hindu Nationalist PM Narendra Modi and has the same growing right-wing authoritative problem that is present across the globe today. To enact this amendment, the government completely cut off outside communications to and from the state – no television, no internet, government phones available in a few places. With the flow of information completely shut down, the media was able to spin the news however they wanted to the rest of the nation. Reports of protests were suppressed and denied, and everyone seems to be going on with their day-to-day lives. It was surprising, shocking, but not that different than the concentration camps spread across the U.S. and the aggressively xenophobic policies are pushed further and further by the Trump administration on a daily basis. I don’t know what’s going to stop it – clearly this isn’t – and that feeling of resignation, that things would continue to become worse and worse was difficult to grapple with.

Lav Diaz’s Season of the Devil takes place during the early years of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, a regime which resulted in over 3,000 extra judicial killings, 35,000 tortures, and 70,000 incarcerations. Diaz, born in 1958, would have been 14 when Marcos rose to power; 19, when in 1977 Marcos issued power to paramilitary groups that allowed fascism to fully take root and terrorize the lives of Filipinos. Diaz did not make his first film in which he had full creative control until 2004, when he released Evolution of a Filipino Family, shot entirely on DV. I was drawn to Season of the Devil to learn about filmmaking in the face of fascism. Even today, the Duterte regime has weaponized the masses in a fascist war on drugs that has resulted in many extrajudicial killings. I hoped to learn something about how to cope with fascist movements from watching Diaz’s work. Instead, I was introduced to his extraordinary style, which wields duration to showcase the pain and suffering that fascism brings in a pointed message to the current government of the Philippines, as well as a warning exposing the horrors that human beings constantly commit towards one another.

Season of the Devil is a grueling watch, over four hours long, largely composed of static shots that refuse to cut away from the action. Diaz’s camera holds you in the present moment, experiencing how time elongates itself in moments of horror. Soldiers menace over villagers, wielding the presence of their uniforms and machine-guns as they gloat about rape and murder, forcing us to bear witness to the infliction of collective pain. The story follows a doctor who leaves her husband, a poet, to work as a doctor in a remote village in the Philippines that is under the control of oppressive, violent fascists. There is little spoken dialogue. Instead, the lines are sung, forming a haunting, beautiful a capella musical that allows us to grasp for some semblance of humanity in the horrors Diaz calls us to bear witness to.

Early in the film, I was searching for something beautiful, a moment of peace. I quickly learned that this would not be that type of film, yet there was still a single shot that I clung to, of a boy throwing paper airplanes. It was the type of shot that I would normally love, beautifully framed, showcasing the erratic flights of each paper plane, forcing the audience to be patient and watch the action unfold. Despite this shot being only 20 minutes into the film, it had already been preceded with the slow murder of a student by paramilitary forces, the image of his blood slowly leaking onto the ground resonates just as deeply now as those paper planes.

The student was not shot to death, but clubbed in the head as soldiers rode past on a motorcycle. The threat of the fascists’ machine-guns looms in silence for much of the film. It isn’t until another horrific sequence much later in the film that we see and hear gunshots, as they kill a widow with the bravery to oppose them. They are the ones responsible for the death of her husband and her son. They shoot her dead and burn her in her house and the camera does not allow us to look away. It is harsh, brutal filmmaking that reenacts the past, treading almost into a hybrid mode of production, as the lines between reality and history are blurred.

The film ends with the poet, grappling with the disappearance of his wife by the paramilitary forces because she was serving the village as a doctor. After overcoming a period languishing in drunken self-despair, he makes his way out to the village. Like the widow, he opposes them. He is captured and tortured, until he tells them that he will kill himself if they tell him what happens to his wife. They take him to where she is buried, graphically, gleefully tell him the horrors they committed, give him a pistol, and walk away. He sobs in anguish, falling into the dirt above his wife’s body. After holding us, forcing us to experience the pain of the poet, Diaz cuts to black. The film ends. Is there anything after this?

On Akerman’s News From Home   

The film opens with silence – the title cards are a white font on a blue background that minimally credit those that worked on the film. Then – a frame of an empty street that hangs and hangs as nothing happens. Until a car slowly passes by. Slowly, glacially even (though I suppose with the glacier melts going on that won’t be as solid an adverb anymore) people enter the frame, walking in the distance, inching towards the camera. After about a minute, there is a cut to a second shot, static like the first, shot down the side of a street, showing cars driving by infrequently. It isn’t until the third shot begins, more than three and a half minutes into the film, that we hear the narration of the first letter, written by Akerman’s mother, read by Akerman.

            And then comes the period of silence, of reflection. The fourth, fifth, and sixth shots of the film feature no narration, just shots of the city as on-lookers occasionally glance at Akerman’s camera. They provide a period to reflect on the sound-images imparted through the epistolary narration. The seventh shot of the film, begins about 10 minutes into the film and the voiceover comes in again. This time, it competes against the noise of the city, of the cars driving past, though this illustrates disjunction as well, as the film was shot without sync sound – Akerman added in the noises of the city afterwards, layering, obscuring, altering, and most importantly authoring her mother’s words, synthesizing her world into an essay, an argument. The pattern of sound-images and silence repeats throughout the film.

            As this repetition occurs, Akerman’s visual language changes as well. She progresses from static shots to slow ninety-degree pans, before introducing shots that track out of the side of a car. There is a sense of momentum being gained, of the slow gain of energy. The shots out of the car shift in direction towards the end as Akerman turns the camera from the side to the back. The camera continually moves away from its images, yet the cars behind Akerman continue to move towards the camera, refusing to let it escape the city, until the final shot of the film.

            The gorgeous final take of News From Home is eleven minutes long. It is a slow drift out to sea from the New York Harbor, on a gray hazy day. Birds follow the ship out to sea, chasing Akerman’s camera instead of cars. Yet they only fly so far before they have to dip down and away from the camera, into the water. This take grants the viewer the experience of pure time, of eleven minutes of reflection, of escape from the stifling city, of a sense of movement towards something else.

News From Home illustrates how the epistolary essay film argument functions, and it is in the epistolary that disjunction is emphatically noticeable. The letters that form the voiceover of the film’s soundscape are written not by Akerman, but by her mother. Akerman is reading words that are not hers, authoring them into an essay film that provides a layer of disjunction that is furthered because of the temporality of the letters. The letters were written between the 1971 and 1973, yet the visual images were shot in 1976, and the narration would’ve been done at this time as well. Furthermore, the chronology within the letters is ambiguous; it is difficult to tell whether the letters are being read in the order they were received. The direct references to time made in the letters, such as Akerman’s mother commenting on the seasons, further the disjunction of the epistolary narration. And the narration is read in French, and is subtitled on the screen in English, providing a visual image that supports the soundscape, the impact of which cannot be understated. The unsubtitled and the subtitled screens are two fundamentally different images, with two different meanings. These subtitles, and the source of language reveals a fundamental difference in how language affects the filmic medium. There are few examples of the English language sounding especially poetic, perhaps the narration to Derek Jarman’s Blue, or the meanderings of Jonas Mekas in As I Was Moving Ahead… and Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania. But imagine viewing, listening to a dubbed version Tarkovsky’s The Mirror – it wouldn’t just be fundamentally different, it’d be sonically inferior. Only Akerman could’ve read her mother’s words for them to render this sort of impact on the viewer.  

            The soundscape of the film outside of the voiceover also helps to create a cinema of disjunction. Akerman utilizes long periods of silence juxtaposed with periods where the noise of the city overtakes the voiceover, rendering it inaudible. The film encapsulates the noise of the city that can drown out all else. The audio is also structured in such a way to provide periods of reflection in between the delivery of sound-images. After a period with a lot of noise comes a period of silence, and at the end of the film, the final take provides a long duration with minimal noise to reflect on the images of the entire film.

            I saw this film for the first time on a February day that feels like forever ago now, but it is a testament to the underlying visual language of film that moves things forward. Akerman strips everything back, making every cut, every pan, every track, every on-screen motion gain so much more meaning because of the rigorously composed, confined space it operates within. What results is an extremely moving meditation that captures the poetics of the quotidian communications between children growing into adults and their mothers, between the self and the city, and the minutiae of being alone, depressed, lonely, trying to salvage something from isolation and despair.