Schakale und Araber (Jackals and Arabs)

　

Jackals and Arabs is a film directed by Jean-Marie Straub. It is ten minutes and 53 seconds long. Straub is a French-German film maker born in Alsace in 1933. With his companion, Danielle Huillet, he made a number of movies, all of them rigorously designed, exceedingly abstract and minimalist, and dense with ideas or ideological argument. (Straub and Huillet dedicated their mid-sixties film Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach to the "peace-loving people of North Vietnam".) Huillet died of cancer in 2006 but Straub continues to make films. Jackals and Arabs was produced in 2011.

Straub and Huillet’s films are almost impossible to see in the United States. Their first feature Nicht Versoehnt ("Not Reconciled"), based on a novel by Heinrich Boll, can be glimpsed, as through a mirror darkly, in a grainy version of the film posted on You-Tube. The film is subtitled and, although just barely visible, can be watched – it is about 43 minutes long and I have reviewed that movie in this blog. Die Chronik of Anna Magdalena Bach is available on DVD. I have a DVD of Straub and Huillet’s film version of Schoenberg’s opera, Moses und Aron – I ordered the film in 2012 and it didn’t arrive until 2015. The DVD is now out of circulation and unavailable. A couple of their short films can be seen on You-Tube. Straub has resisted the idea of distributing his work in the United States. At film festival a couple years ago, Straub declared that "there will never be enough terrorists so long as the United States of America exists." For the time being, Jackals and Arabs can be seen in a version that is very clear, even quite beautiful, on You-Tube – unfortunately the characters speak in German but with French subtitles. I have been unable to locate an English-subtitled version of the film. When I watched the film, I was its 37^th viewer. I was also it’s 38^th, 39^th, and 40^th viewer. My guess is that someone will discover this posting to You-Tube, undoubtedly a copyright infringement, and take the film down – therefore, if you want to see it (and I recommend this highly), you should access You-Tube and type into it Schakale und Araber Straub -- a search configured in this way will let you access the film.

Jackals and Arabs begins as a parable by Franz Kafka, first published in 1917 by Martin Buber in a periodical called Der Jude ("The Jew"). (The story was also published in the collection of tales entitled Der Landsarzt –"The Country Doctor" – a few years later.) The fable is only 2 ½ pages long but it contains universes. Kafka’s prose is perfectly clear and austere – each word is chosen for maximum resonance in the context of the story. Since the story is inexhaustible in its meanings, I won’t try to interpret it. With Kafka, the best approach is to resist interpretation and let the fable stand

on its own – it means what it says.

In the tale, an European from "the high north" is traveling with Arabs. The Arabs stop at an oasis for the night. A pack of jackals approaches the European as he prepares for sleep. The jackals are led by an old female ("the oldest of the jackals") and she speaks to the narrator, calling him Herr or "Lord". The jackal says that her people have waited for generations, from the time of the "mother of all jackals" for the arrival of this European to whom she is now speaking. She says that the jackals despise the Arabs because they kill animals for food but have no interest in carrion. By contrast, the jackals eat nothing but carrion and do this in the name of Reinheit ("Purity") –they’re feeding from carrion "purifies" the world, reducing corpses to their bones. The jackals would like to destroy the Arabs who are unclean and who’s impurity horrifies them. But they are afraid of assuming that guilt and the old female jackal says that "all the waters in the Nile" would not suffice to wash away the guilt of jackals if they sullied their paws by slaughtering the Arabs. Two young jackals seize the narrator’s clothing in their jaws and restrain him. The female jackal says that they have done this to "honor" the Lord. "We have only our jaws with which to accomplish things," the jackal tells the narrator. "But your hands are capable of all things." The jackal pleads with the narrator to "end the strife that has divided the world." She produces an old, rusty shears used in knitting and demands that her Lord cut the throats of the Arabs.

But an Arab has been listing to this "charade" all the time. He announces that the jackals are always trying to induce Europeans to take the shears and murder the Arabs. Wherever there are Arabs, there are jackals and the jackals have plotted to get someone to murder the Arabs from time immemorial – the "shears are always with them," the Arab says. The Arab, then, calls for four men to drag forth a dead camel. The camel is already rotting. The jackals are unable to restrain themselves and swarm over the camel, ripping the flesh from its bones. The Arab has a whip that he uses "Gesetzmaessig" – that is, in "accord with the law" – and the jackals present their snouts to be flogged. The Arab says his people love the jackals. They are wunderbare Tiere ("wonderful animals"), the Arab tells the narrator.


‘Du hast recht, Herr," sagte er, ‘wir lassen sie bei ihren Beruf; auch ist es Zeit aufzubrechen. Gesehen has du sie. Wunderbare Tieren, nicht wahr? Und wie sie uns hassen!’
("You’re right, sir," the Arab said. "We’ll leave them to their calling – in any event, it’s time to break camp. You’ve seen them. Wonderful beasts, don’t you agree? And how they hate us.")

The complex of meanings contained within this wunderbar story are clear, but confound one another, and any interpretation of the tale will end in indeterminacy. The jackals act like hyenas and, it seems that Kafka, may have conflated the two canids – but jackals are associated with Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, and probably participate in that realm in some way. The jackals, with their obsession with purity, seem to be associated with the Jews. But the jackals define their purity by eating that which is ritually unclean, carrion. The jackals despise the Arabs for their arrogance and the fact that they kill animals to eat them – at one point, the jackal notes that she is appalled by the cry of the Hammel ("mutton") being slaughtered. The jackals consider the Arabs unclean, an alien Volk into which they have been "hurled" (verstossen). From their perspective, the Arabs regard the jackals with contempt but claim to love them – they beat the jackals for following their vocation (Beruf) and eating the dead camel – the law requires that Arabs beat the jackals. The narrator, a European from the "high north", has some of the character of the Hunter Gracchus, an uncanny figure from the woods of Germany, who is both alive and dead at the same time. From time immemorial, the jackals have tempted the European interlopers in the desert to murder the Arabs on their behalf, an effort that the Arabs regard with contempt. Each European entering the desert wilderness is elected to the status of Messiah or Lord, the person who has the power to deliver the tribe of jackals from their humiliating status as animals despised by the Arabs. But these messiahs are false and unable to save the race of the jackals, although they have yearned for a messiah for generations – "we have been waiting an infinite time for you; my mother waited and her mother and all of their mothers, all the way back to the mother of all jackals."

Straub’s film made from this material is memorable and exquisitely precise. The movie uses three voices: a woman who kneels submissively on the floor and recites the words of the "oldest of the jackals", an offscreen male voice that speaks the part of the narrator and, finally, a standing man who plays the role of the Arab. The film begins with white representing the desert and, then, continues with 10 shots showing the woman playing the jackal and the Arab. One shot is a close-up of the shears. The eleven images comprising the film are interspersed with blackness, sequences of no image at all during which the narrator speaks his part. In most cases, the narrator’s words accompany a black shot or, rather, a few seconds during which no image is projected – in the version that I saw, of course, French subtitles appear at the base of the black screen, but this would not be the way the shot would look in the original film (without subtitles). In some cases, the narrator’s colloquy with the "oldest of the jackals" is short and, therefore, occurs as an off-screen voice speaking while we see the woman enacting the jackal’s role.

Straub eliminates the interpolated narrative in Kafka’s fable and provides only the words as spoken by the tale’s teller, the jackal, and the Arab. The part of the story in which narration is most important involves the paragraph in which the Arab feeds the dead camel to the jackals. This part of the story is filled with violent motion as the jackals tear apart the dead camel: "they had forgotten the Arab, forgotten their hate, everything was extinguished by the strong stench from the corpse which enchanted them." Kafka’s tone changes in this paragraph to a self-consciously literary style – the text weaves variations on the German world ausloeschen, that is, "to extinguish" and there is an elaborate simile of Homeric dimensions. Straub doesn’t see any need to film any of this – he clearly thinks the point is established by the words spoken by the three participants in the conversation and so Kafka’s climax, the jackal’s frenzy around the dead camel, is simply omitted. Most probably, Straub’s elimination of this aspect of the story arises in the context of his rigorous practice – some things can be filmed and other things can not be successfully reduced to images. Surprisingly, the most pictorial part of Kafka’s fable, the point at which the writer actually makes a pen-portrait, is the element of the tale that is most incommensurate with Straub’s austere, if vivid, approach to the text.

At the outset of the film, the screen is bright white – it’s a kind of "no-image" that will correlate to the black empty screen interpolated into the story when the narrator speaks. We hear a frenzy of violin and, then, a soprano singing words in German. A black title on the white screen labels this GYORGY KURTAG – and, thus, we understand that we are listening to a recording of Kurtag’s Opus 24, Kafka Fragments, forty short pieces of solo violin and soprano. In fact, the recording that we hear was made in 2008 (soprano: Julianne Banse; violinL Andras Keller) and the fragment recorded is from Part 4, section 7: "Again and again, banished far away, banished far away / Mountains, deserts, broad land provided for wandering" – these words, referencing Wueste, that is, deserts set the scene for the encounter between the narrator and the jackal in the oasis. The desert is a place that is "no place" as signified by the blinding white, empty screen.

At first, the woman playing the jackal is shot from halfway across the room – she kneels demurely and has her head down; she is posed in front of a window that opens out onto a renaissance or baroque facade apparently across the street. Initially, the jackal appears in a sequence of five shots, each of them separated by a black screen marking the narrator’s words spoken to the jackal. The shots showing the jackal are taken from different distances and, in some of them, the jackal tilts her head to the side to signify that she is directing her words to the other jackals, or, at least, referencing them – the tiny movements in the woman’s head are all orchestrated with the utmost precision to conform to the text that she is speaking. The woman recites the text earnestly, a bit like a person reading scripture from the pulpit. The sixth shot of the woman reverts to the initial camera placement – we see the jackal half-way across the room. In this shot, the woman suddenly displays the shears or rusty scissors – her quick motion, displaying the shears in front of her is shocking in context: we had no idea that she has concealed the weapon. The next shot, a very quick one, is also shocking: a hand sets the shears on the floor and, then, a boot steps down heavily on them, pushing the scissors out of the frame – the alarming aspect of this image is that the shears slid heavily across the floor gouges the wood and leaves an imprint. Within the austere context of Straub’s film, this shot is as violent as a battle between transformers in a Michael Bay movie – the image literally takes away your breath. We next see the Arab standing in front of a different window than that affording the backdrop to the jackal – behind him we can see through a floor-to-ceiling louvered door, another renaissance or baroque facade: perhaps, it is a townhouse in Paris. The Arab stands upright and has a halo of frizzy hair around his somewhat coarse features. He speaks German with an elaborate effort to enunciate, to articulate, and floridly rolls his "r" sounds – his German sounds very different from the words spoken by the jackal or the narrator. The Arab looks big, holds one arm tucked against his body, and seems to be very powerful. There is a black screen interpolation when the narrator speaks to the Arab and, then, the film’s final shot is a close-up of the Arab’s face – he is looking fixedly to the side, apparently to where the jackal has been sitting.

Here is the remarkable aspect of this film: on first viewing, nothing seems to be happening. People are speaking in sing-song voices from static positions in a nondescript Parisian house. On second viewing, the woman seems to somehow embody a jackal and Arab’s presence is uncanny. On third and fourth viewing, I am unable to see the woman as anything but a wise and elderly jackal. This is an astonishing transformation, a metamorphosis or Verwandlung as strange, in a way, as that which Gregor Samsa suffered.