There aren't a lot of trees on display in Byamsuren Davaa's Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005), a gentle film about a family of nomads in Mongolia. The Batchuluums live in an elegant-looking yurt on windy, completely barren grasslands several hours trip by motorcycle from the nearest town. They herd sheep and goats and own a couple of cows from which they get milk to make some kind of white tubular cheese. The film has a very simple, if classical, plot: a little girl finds a small dog, takes it home, and encounters her father's disapproval at harboring the animal (he thinks the dog has somehow been corrupted by wolves and is a menace to his flock of sheep -- this notion is just dumb, but its par for the course for the adults in this picture.) The little girl hides the dog from her parents. There are a few minor adventures and, then, the family leaves its campground, possibly to depart for the city -- the old nomadic ways of life are passing away. The dog, abandoned at the family's former campsite, proves his mettle by saving a child and is rewarded by being made a permanent part of the family. In the last shot, the nomads trudge into the sunset while a truck drives by them, blasting out bullhorn admonitions to vote. The film is 93 minutes long, very carefully observed, and spectacularly shot -- the nomads on their tough little ponies are tiny figures in an enormous landscape of stormy purplish skies, endless rolling prairies wet with shallow lakes and where rivers flow in stony, tube-like valleys; you can see forever and there are big greyish mountains with rocky summits sprawled against the horizon. The inside of the yurt is a riot of color, intricate red and yellow decorations painted on cabinets, glazed ceramic buddhas, and a sort of family altar sporting a snapshot of the Dalai Lama, some lamps in which to burn oil, and pictures of relatives all arrayed against a colorful fabric background. Against the vast indifference of nature, human life is regarded as the most precious of all things -- an old lady pours rice over a needle and says that re-birth as a human being is as rare as a speck of rice balancing on the point of that needle. The little girl's mother asks her seven-year old daughter to bite her own palm, an impossible act, and, then, says that there are some things that are as near to you as your own hands but that can't be accomplished -- as Mick Jagger reminds us: "You can't always get what you want." During a thunderstorm in which the little girl has sought shelter with her grandmother, the old woman tells her the story of the yellow dog, put to death in a cave, so that another girl could overcome her illness and live. In the opening shot, at twilight, the shadowy figure of a herdsman and child carry a dead dog onto the top of a high hill and, when the father puts the dog's tail under its head, he says that "perhaps, the dog will be reborn as a human with a pigtail." The dog, Zochor (it means something like "Spot") has a strange characteristic -- he seems narcoleptic and simply drops over asleep. The child speculates that the dog was a "lazybones" in his prior life and still shows evidence of this now. The child's mother tells her that only very small children can recall their previous lives -- this is why they say "surprising things." The sheep are threatened by wolves -- the "children of the night" howl impressively in the darkness -- and there are also hideous buzzards loitering around the flock that fight over scraps of carrion and circle overhead. A shot of a horrible-looking buzzard, all shaggy with black and dusty feathers, hopping like a figure from a nightmare toward a toddler is one of the most frightening images that I've seen in a long time. The movie is not acted so much as observed -- the filmmaker, a Mongolian woman who makes her home in Berlin, lived with the Batchulum family for six months, gaining their trust, before bringing her German crew out onto the steppe to shoot the film. Everything seems natural, unforced, and true.
This is the sort of film that I would like to praise, but, in fact, its not very good and somewhat tedious. The story is too slight to sustain the film and there are pointless, if disturbing, digressions. People will project onto the nomads aspirational qualities -- they are exemplars, for instance, of environmental virtue and show us how to live "lightly" on the earth. (They collect and burn dung for fuel, it seems, although they also have some modern technology -- the father drives a motorcycle over the trackless steppes and a wind turbine runs a generator that supplies power to brightly light their yurt. The little girl attends boarding school in the City and, when she stacks up patties of petrified cow dung while playing with her smaller sister, she say that she is mimicking a skyscraper where people live in "yurts piled one atop another" and even can "pee inside their houses." The dung collecting seems to be just a plot convention to get the little girl out of the encampment so that she can find the dog -- the nomads don't really seem to have much use for the stuff which the movie shows us is very hard to ignite.) The film traffics in the idea that the nomads are noble savages who show us how to live in accord with nature -- or, at least, some people who watch the movie apparently derive that message from it -- this was the argument made the TCM commentators on the film. But the simple fact is that the nomads seem to be extremely dim-witted and negligent and, when one pierces through the veneer of poetry, the plot seems to celebrate something very close to child abuse. In the middle of the film, Davaa kills time with an episode in which the seven-year-old girl is sent out onto the steppes on a pony to herd the flocks of sheep. The area in which the film takes place is about the size of Wyoming and much more empty and the little girl is given only one instruction: "keep the mountain peak in sight." Needless to say, she gets lost in the wilderness at nightfall when a deadly-looking thunderstorm is approaching. The film posits the wasteland as full of ravening wolves and nasty buzzards and there are some rather stupid seeming hunters who appear from time-to-time -- they are blasting away at wolves. In one scene during the sequence, the child peers over a cliff, looking down toward the river that is about 200 feet straight below her. It seems completely unreasonable to send a small child on horseback out into this kind of vast and dangerous terrain and, of course, almost immediately the little kid gets lost and finds herself in peril. At the climax of the film, the nomad family comprised of mom and dad and the three children, the smallest a toddler who seems to be about two years old, depart from their camp. They travel about five miles, crossing over a big bridge on the river, before they discover that they have left behind the little boy. How exactly do you leave a child behind in a howling wasteland full of predatory animals? It's not as if the nomads have a lot of people to supervise -- there are only three children and, yet, incredibly they leave the baby behind. This pattern of carelessness suggests that the members of the nomad family are either negligent to an extraordinary degree or fools. When the little girl gets lost on the prairie, mom has to ride about ten miles to find her -- leaving behind a four-year old and the little boy in the yurt, a place full of all sorts of household hazards including electrical connections, matches, and candles. (Dad has gone to town to trade some sheep skins for a ladle, a flashlight, and a mechanical battery-operated toy dog; later, the wife, distracted when another kid goes missing, leaves the plastic ladle in her heated propane-fired wok and the thing gets melted down). The last shot exemplifies what is wrong with the movie: in an elegiac image, the family trudges along toward the horizon, all of their possessions loaded on three wagons drawn by their oxen. About forty feet to the side of the path that they are taking is a fairly well-maintained dirt road. Immediately, the alert viewer asks: "Why aren't the nomads using the road as opposed to dragging their gear through the open prairie?" A truck comes over the horizon, someone bellowing through a loudspeaker that the people should vote. So we assume that the nomads have moved aside, perhaps, to allow the truck to pass -- although the truck isn't really visible throughout the first part of the shot. After the truck has driven out of the frame, we expect the nomads to move onto the road -- certainly, this would be an easier path to follow. But the film here seems to be making some kind of symbolic point at the expense of its characters -- they are taking the "other way", that is eschewing the modern road for the path through the pathless steppe. A herdsman appears (who is he? where was he hiding?) and drives the flock of sheep and goats forward and, quite sensibly, the herd uses the road -- it's easier to walk there. But, in the distance, the nomads are stubbornly plowing their way through the deep grass. The effect is that we conclude that the hapless nomads are dumber than their animals -- the sheep and goats know enough to walk on the road, why not the humans?
I wanted to admire this film for its grit and interesting ethnography. But the pattern of egregious carelessness and stupidity shown by the film's principal characters, once recognized, makes this impossible for me. If a human re-birth is so rare and if our lives are so ineffably precious, then why don't the nomads take better care of their children?
Turner Classic Movies showed this rare film, a German-Mongolian co-production, as part of its Tuesday night series Women Make Film -- a collection of movies directed by women, almost all of which are unknown to me. The films are accompanied by a documentary by Mark Cousins (narrated by Tilda Swinton) in which film clips showing various aspects of movie-making are presented -- all of the clips come from movies directed by women. Cousins' descriptions of the film clips exemplifying such topics as framing, staging, camera movement, composition and so on, are superficial but the footage that he presents come from interesting films that aren't generally available. Cousins has the name of the Soviet director Kira Muratova tattooed on his arm and she is a particular hero to him. (I've seen a couple of pictures by Muratova and her work is really extraordinary -- I hope that the series will provide access to some of her films, movies that are close to impossible to access.) Cousins tells you everything about the film techniques that he highlights except what is worth knowing -- that is, how a particular effect creates a particular mood or system of meanings that is relevant to the movie in which the effect is used. For instance, he shows us elaborate dollying and tracking shots, praising their virtuosity but wholly neglects to explain why the director implemented these complex and intricate maneuvers in the first place. That said, the show is fascinating because it introduces viewers to foreign films that are obscure and, yet, have interest -- from the evidence on display, India and Iran have produced many interesting women directors as has the old Soviet Union. The films of these women deserve closer study. There is always a thrill about encountering, as it were, an undiscovered country in movies by directors who were apparently prolific but whose films haven't been shown in the United States. (American female directors are represented by some silent film makers, such as Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber, as well as Elaine May and Barbara Loden together with some noisy garbage directed by Katherine Bigelow the auteur of such things as The Hurt Locker and Point Break.) Cousins' documentary is gimmicky -- it's posited as a road movie with interpolated and pointless images shot through the dashboard of a moving car (the scene shifts from mountains to deserts to rainforests) serving as punctuation. But it's educational in the best sense -- he introduces us to films and directors hitherto unknown to most viewers. Furthermore, the Cousins' documentary series is accompanied by some of the films referenced in each episode. This is how the Cave of the Yellow Dog made its way onto prime-time TV as well as even more exotic and mysterious fare. (I was vaguely aware of the director of the Cave; she won an award, a Silver Bear, I think at the Berlin Film Festival, for a movie called The Story of the Weeping Camel, also about Mongolian herdsmen.) In any event, Cousins' documentary series is painless and worth watching with a pencil to note directors and films that he recommends and it is presented with some of the films praised in the series, most of which are extremely rare and little-known.
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