The Man from Laramie

Anthony Mann's 1955 Western, The Man from Laramie, reminds us that films of this sort were once A-list entertainments with complicated and highly literate scripts.  Agon was important in the masculine, hyper-competitive fifties and The Man from Laramie teams with conflict of various kinds -- it has more characters clashing violently with one another than Antigone.  Indeed, just about everyone on-screen clashes with everyone else and the film is crammed with fistfights, shoot-outs, and violent declarations of anger or love or despair -- these speeches inflected with some of the passion of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams.  Jimmy Stewart is a teamster plotting murderous revenge on the man who sold Winchester repeater rifles to the local Apaches -- this weapon's deal has resulted in the death of his brother.  A loyal ranch hand clashes violently with the son of his employer, both men vying for the love of the patriarch of a ranch so large that "you can ride for three days in any direction without leaving" the property.  A matronly female rancher contends with the ranch patriarch -- ostensibly the quarrel is over rustled steers and ranch boundaries, but, actually, arises from thwarted love.  When Jimmy Stewart shoots the big ranch owner's son in the hand in one of the film's many gunfights, he is captured and his own hand shot off at point-blank range -- Jimmy Stewart, who suffers as beautifully and perpetually as Christ, howls with pain and his beautiful eyes roll like those of a martyr as he swoons during his torture.  Accused of killing the ranch-owner's son, Jimmy Stewart stands his ground with his long gun as the old man charges him on horseback, firing his revolver wildly because he has gone blind.  An ineffectual sheriff challenges everyone ineffectually and, lurking around the edges of the action, but unseen until the final five minutes, are the ultimate antagonists, the angry and ferocious Apache warriors who threaten the whole community with destruction.  (The main plot in the film involves the sale of repeater rifles to the Apaches, a story-line that seems related to the Rosenberg trial -- Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for providing atomic secrets to the Communists; the characters in The Man from Laramie are defined in relationship to their willingness to supply the frontier equivalent of the atom bomb, the Winchester rifles, to the savage and implacable foe.)  We tend to forget how morally complex Westerns became in the 1950's -- The Man from Laramie is startling in that the villain killed at the end of the film was not a bad guy at the outset and was gradually backed into his evil deeds; accordingly, the death of this villain can't be interpreted as a kind of triumph -- the viewer is forced to recall that the bad guy killed at the climax was originally a good man, indeed, a hero in the narrative secondary in virtue only to the saint-like Jimmy Stewart.  Accordingly, the film plays as a sort of highly understated tragedy.  Furthermore, the director doesn't install any explicit speeches in the film to remind us that the character killed in the end was originally virtuous, courageous, and, even, noble -- we are expected to have attended with sufficient care to the plot to grasp that the outcome is tragic and can't be construed as a happy ending.  When the movie ends, the viewer is left with a number of troubling questions that can't be simply resolved. 

The Man from Laramie is handsomely shot in New Mexico.  One of the primary sets seems to be the pueblo at Taos.  The Indians and the landscapes are all authentic-looking and the interiors are beautifully designed.  The film reminds us that Hollywood's racism, particularly as it relates to Native Americans, was never monolithic or simple-minded -- the Apaches are portrayed as sympathetic, a curmudgeonly but loyal old man says proudly that he had an Apache mother, and the ranch-owner asserts that he has no problem with the Indians because he has treated them fairly, lets them hunt on his land, and has paid them for the property that he took from their tribe. (The film also takes great care to distinguish the Pueblo Indians, seen attending church in a handsome adobe chapel for the marauding Apaches.)  When the Apaches finally appear at the very end of the movie, of course, they are visualized as terrifying, the Other with guns and arrows -- when they surround and cut down the heroic cowboy who has become a villain, they blast him off his horse with a half-dozen shots from a Winchester, but, then, administer the coup de grace with an arrow thumping into the dying man's spine.  The acting is stylized and theatrical but uniformly excellent -- Donald Crisp, who played battling Burroughs in Broken Blossoms for D.W. Griffith in 1919, acts the part of the ranch owner with great and dignified authority:  he seems to embody not only the history of West, but the history of American cinema in his appearance in this film.  The landscapes are beautiful but appropriately stark -- we see vast badlands where a single rider, with obvious difficulty, picks his way across the stony waste; the scenes shot at the ranch houses luxuriate with the light and immense steppe-like distances of the open range -- we see cattle grazing, scattered across a half-dozen miles.  And there is a jagged mountain, with extraordinarily steep sides, that becomes as much a character in the film as any of the players -- at the end of the movie, you half-expect to see the mountain given credit since it is so prominent in the film's last hour.  The mountain has yellow crumbling cliffs and has to be approached on horseback via serpentine 45 degree uphill switchbacks and at the top of the peak, in a cool forest of pinon pine that you can almost smell -- I sensed the distinctive odor of the west:  warm pine sap oozing from trees in the high sierra in the cool shade -- there is a splendid view of what looks like all of the world. 

Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom is a glossy TV series available on TNT, an amoral spectacle that traffics in the excesses it pretends to denounce.  The show is based on a similarly titled Australian movie about a family of criminals ruled by a fierce, viciously manipulative matriarch.  In the American series, Ellen Barkin plays the matriarch, called "Smurf" by her adoring sons.  Barkin's asymmetrical smirk and black expressionless pinpoint eyes give her a vaguely reptilian appearance -- although she professes love for all, calls her grown boys "sweetie," and, often, smooches with them, her affection seems cold, strategic, the caress of a cobra.  Barkin has aged and her features seem taut, possibly immobilized by plastic surgery, and she shows a lot of her Betty Boop figure in the series -- the characters live in some surfside California suburb (possibly Long Beach or Venice) and they spend a lot of time at the beach or poolside in skimpy bathing suits.  Smurf is a grotesque caricature of a kind of mother that everyone has encountered:  she purchases the affection of her children with lavish gifts and controls her boys with in a way that is clearly incestuous -- each of Smurf's four sons seems to think that he is her special lover and that she is romantically inclined toward him:  this is her mechanism of control.  Smurf is also an "enabler" par excellence -- she smokes dope with her boys, one of whom is severely addicted to various drugs, provides a constant supply of booze, purchases extravagant and dangerous entertainment for the boys (they go surfing all the time, ride their skateboards with dangerous abandon, skydive and engage in paint-gun duels), and vets their girlfriends for sexual inventiveness.  When the boys misbehave, she withholds her favors.  Although all four of her sons have their own picturesque seaside pads, they spend the majority of their time hanging out in Smurf's luxurious compound, lounging around her pool with half-naked hussies, and getting loaded.  Needless to say, none of the boy's girlfriends can hold a candle to Smurf for seductiveness and, when one of the women defies her, she casually terrorizes her rival by kidnapping the woman's baby.  At the heart of all this depravity is the family enterprise:  the four boys comprise a criminal gang, apparently specializing in high-end burglary.   The engine that runs the show's plot are the various crimes that the Smurf plans and that her boys commit -- in the first episode, an assault on a expensive jewelry store leads to one of the boys being shot and a security guard dying.  This crime is too impressive to go without notice and the merchandise (mostly watches) is too hot to be fenced -- Smurf orders the watches melted down, although her grandson gives one of the stolen items to his girlfriend, probably a dire mistake.  The injured son's wound festers and he has to be taken to Tijuana for surgery -- a plot turn that reveals that the oldest boy, Bas, who is married, has a Mexican girlfriend with whom he engages in photogenic sex.  One of the boys, a handsome surfer dude, is gay, although he conceals this fact from his mother.  When a member of the family stumbles into a public toilet where that son is getting a blow-job from his boyfriend, the surfer turns on his lover and beats him to a pulp to preserve the fiction that he is straight.  The fourth son, who may not be Smurf's biological progeny, is nicknamed Pope.  Pope has just been released from a three-year term in prison and is obviously damaged goods -- he scowls at everyone, sits motionlessly for hours, and takes out his aggressions by smashing things up in the backyard with a sledge hammer.  Pope is a very scary and volatile character, the most remarkable in the ensemble, and he provides a sinister edge to proceedings that might otherwise be a little too rich and generously endowed in pandering to wish fulfillment fantasies of the viewers.  This carousing all looks like a lot of fun but Pope is lurking at the edges of the action and you have the sense that he is a ticking time bomb about to blow-up. 

The audience enters the subculture of this family through the eyes of a naïf. Smurf's grandson, Jay, literally provides us with access to the narrative -- we first see him expressionless, sitting on a couch, next to his heroin-addicted mother who happens to be dead from an overdose.  After his mother's death, he wanders over to Smurf's compound where everyone is half-naked, drinking bloody Mary's and smoking dope, a crowd of bikini-clad girls in the swimming pool.  Needless to say, he is seduced by Smurf's charm and the generosity of his uncles and becomes involved in the criminal activities of the family.  As the plot develops, Jay proves to be a weak spot in the family's unity -- he is not as fanatically devoted to Smurf as his hapless uncles and there is a kindly teacher at his high school who has taken an interest in him, indeed, apparently to an inordinate degree since the young woman invites him to encounters that only be called dates and lets him kiss her.  (In an ugly, but realistic plot turn, we learn that Jay's teacher is herself a drug addict who has been turned into a snitch by a relentless female detective and that she is, in fact, using the boy to provide information to the cops.)  Jay has a girlfriend and the scene in which Smurf puts on her pearls and entertains the girlfriend's ultra-straight family at her compound is both hilarious and frightening -- Smurf's charm approaches the level of the monstrous:  the girl has been sleeping over at the house with Jay and the dinner party's objective is to persuade her parents that this has been innocent, is okay, and should be allowed to continue.  Smurf succeeds with this project, in fact, too well -- her oldest son decides that he will use this opportunity to convert the girl's father, a blustery miles glorioso army officer, to the family's criminal enterprises.  The main plot line is supported by dozen of so subplots, all of them reasonably compelling, and it is clear that the writers and makers of this series intend to continue into future seasons -- each episode plants the seed for another couple of subplots to be developed in the future:  the family's back story, in particular, is unclear and we don't know why Smurf's boys, with the exception of the two furry surfer dudes, all look so different.  Of course, they have different fathers and my suspicion is that one or two of them may be adopted.  (I have known families of this general kind and they always have people living in their household without blood affiliation, but being "fostered" to use a term from old Norse and Icelandic sagas -- that is living with the family on the basis of some alliance or in recompense for some obscure indebtedness.)  I suspect that these elements of the narrative will be developed in future episodes -- as it is, there are a number of mystifying elements in the plot that await clarification.  With its proliferating subplots and expanding inventory of characters, the show resembles The Sopranos -- in fact, a comparison can be made between Tony Soprano's ghastly charm and Smurf's apparently endless capacity to manipulate people.  I suspect that the film tends toward the same central irony:  a group of people proclaim family to be the ultimate value, but, in the end, must act together to murder a member of the very family that they assert to be so important.

Upon watching Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Marlene Dietrich is reported to have mourned the transformation of the beast into the handsome, if conventional-looking, prince with the words "Bring me back my beautiful beast."  Animal Kingdom contains hints that it will provide a backstory, probably something maudlin about child abuse, to explain Smurf's motivations and psychology.  (There is scene in which Smurf, ever the shapeshifter, sexually seduces a female photographer, apparently, to secure information about a surfer shown in one of her pictures -- it seems that Smurf is prosecuting some kind of enigmatic revenge, but this is unclear in the first six episodes of the show that I have seen.)  Providing a backstory for Smurf is wholly unnecessary and will be destructive to the series.  Smurf is a sacred monster, a powerful, charismatic and frightening being -- the power of the show is that we all recognize the character as an alarming, archetype of a one sort of maternal love.  To provide her with a childhood and sentimental reasons for her smothering and feral attachment to her sons is an exercise in puerile psychologizing that will, I'm afraid, seriously weaken the show.  No one tells us about Lady Macbeth's childhood and we don't need to be privy to secrets of Smurf's soul -- it's enough for us to watch her machinations. 

Film Essay -- Manuel Gomes' Tabu

Notes on Miguel Gomes’ Tabu


　

　
Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese film maker, born in Lisbon in 1972. He is a product of the Lisbon film school. Apparently, Gomes worked as a film critic, began making short movies, and progressed to feature-length films in the first decade of the new millennium. I don’t know anything about his personal life, although I gather he has a daughter, eight years old, from a dedication at the end of Arabian Nights (2015).

Gomes first feature film was The Face you Deserve (2007). The movie concerns a schoolteacher’s 30^th birthday on which he fantasizes interactions with seven children, all of them alter-egos. The movie is identified as a comedy and was, apparently, reasonably successful in Portugal but was not exported.

In 2008, Gomes directed Our Beloved Month of August. This film is a mixture of documentary and fiction. The picture concerns a director who travels to a provincial city to make a slasher/horror film. Funding evaporates and the director abandons the fiction film for a documentary about a music festival underway in the town. From the documentary, however, there gradually emerges a narrative involving two young girls, their families, and boyfriends – ultimately, the film becomes a kind of domestic melodrama, complete with a crowd-pleasing climax involving a forest fire. Widely successful in Europe, the film was shown in international film festivals and is highly regarded.

IMDB shows that Gomes appeared in, or directed, several short pictures, including a made-for-TV movie. I have seen some of them. One called Redemption purports to consist of private memoirs from several European leaders including Nikolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. This 26 minute film is very powerful and suggests that Gomes’ true metier may be short, highly poetic films of this sort.

Tabu was released in 2012. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie was widely acclaimed. It was exported to the world – in the Twin Cities, the picture was shown three or four times at the Walker Art Center but had no broader release except for some New York and California art-houses. Tabu was presented at both the Toronto and New York International Film Festivals and there are interesting interviews with Gomes made at those venues and available on You-Tube.

Gomes followed Tabu with the wildly ambitious, six hour film Arabian Nights (2015). The film is nothing less than an attempt to capture the essence of Portuguese society in the throes of economic recession through a series of documentary, parable, and fiction sequences all knit together as tales told by Schezerahad over a thousand-and-one nights. Most critics regard this film as an extraordinary, if, sometimes, baffling accomplishment. I am less sanguine about the picture. Despite some remarkable passages, the trilogy of films can not be made to cohere and, in fact, seems to slip off topic to the extent that, at the end of the last picture, the viewer has no idea what the film is about or why it was made – the 6 and ½ hour movie ends with a ninety minute documentary about songbirds, a chaffinch competition held in a poor part of Lisbon; although some critics have heroically tried to develop a theory that unifies the trilogies disparate elements, their efforts, in my view, are completely futile and unconvincing. At heart, Gomes is a surrealist – this is, at once, his strength and weakness: his imagination is fantastically fertile and he invents incredible images and situations, but these inventions seem to exist, in large part, to outrage or bewilder the audience.

Gomes’ pictures are generally constructed as individual narrative sequences that stand apart from one another. The task for the viewer is to discover how the individual narratives fit together and what they mean collectively. For instance, The Face you Deserve begins with sober journalism – a documentary-like study of a teacher and his associates, students and friends. The second-half of the film is more freely constructed and seems to be a daydream experienced by the protagonist. In Our Beloved Month of August, half the film involves the ill-fated effort to shoot the slasher picture and the collapse of that project; the film’s second part is a joyous, semi-documentary account of a music festival in the town where the film crew is stranded that slowly evolves into a melodram. Tabu and Arabian Nights follows this pattern.

Little is published concerning Gomes personal life or background. Interviews show a swarthy handsome man (he often acts in his own films) with an intense demeanor. Gomes speaks in a soft voice in excellent English. He appears impatient with interviews and swings his right foot, draped over his left leg, nervously while speaking. There is are two very funny shots of him in Arabian Nights – in one shot, he is buried up to his neck in sand as punishment for fleeing the film set; someone puts a cigarette in his mouth that he morosely smokes. In the other shot, Gomes is standing under a ferris wheel dressed as a seedy Baghdad sultan – he has a ratty looking turban, seems unshaved, and is smoking in that image as well.

1. Saudade is a term for a state of mind said to characterize the Portuguese. Saudade is an untranslatable word – it means something like melancholy combined with nostalgia for a lost, half-imaginary happiness. Saudade is the mood associated with many Portuguese fados or folk songs. In political terms, Saudade is associated the Portuguese nostaglia for the lost paradise of that nation’s empire – that is, the lost colonies in Cape Verde and Mozambique.
2. While making Our Beloved Month of August, Gomes encountered some older musicians who had been famous for their performances in Mozambique. In Africa, these musicians performed their own music and covers of Beatles and Phil Spector tunes. The men performed wearing white suits and their records were famous in the Portuguese colonies. This band was part of the inspiration for Tabu.
3. Another inspiration for Tabu was story that Gomes was told about a strange relationship between an older woman and her housekeeper, a woman from Cape Verde. Gomes heard this story from a family member who attributed the events told to some neighbors. The story involved mysterious events attributed to the witchcraft or voodoo of the African maid, a person thought to be a powerful witch.
4. The original title of the film was Aurora, that is, the picture was named after the old woman whose story is recounted in the second half of the film. The Romanian film maker, Cristii Puliuu, had just released a movie named Aurora and, so, Gomes changed the movie’s name to Tabu.
5. One of the financiers for the film is ZDF (Zum Deutschen Fernsehen – German TV). The money-men at ZDF demanded that Gomes shoot the African sequences in color 35 millimeter. "Africa is beautiful," the Germans said, "and you need to capture that beauty in your film." Gomes said no. He told the Germans he wanted the film to look like the old Tarzan productions with Johnny Weismueller – "those films are beautiful, are they not?" Gomes asked. The Germans reluctantly agreed with this argument.
6. The first half of the film is shot on black 35 millimeter stock in the pillar-box ratio used in silent films like Tabu by Murnau and Metropolis. The second half of the film preserves the silent aspect pillar box ratio, but is shot on 16 millimeter stock – this is intended to give the second half of the movie a "dreamy," slightly "out of focus" look.
7. The second part of the film was shot on location on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Typically, Gomes does not use professional actors or actresses. He just had crew members play roles in the narrative. "I made it look like a period film," Gomes says, referring to the fact that the film is set in the sixties, "by having the men grow moustaches."
8. Gomes says that the film is about those things that are fading away, becoming lost, dying and extinct. Thus, the film involves Aurora’s death, the lost Portuguese colony in Mozambique (with a nod to the lost colony in Cape Verde), as well as black and white film stock. Gomes has commented on the difficulty of acquiring black and white film stock on which to shoot the movie – "everything is made digitally today," Gomes says, "without film at all." The other obvious aspect of the film is that it celebrates a "kind of film that has been extinguished," Gomes says – that is, silent film. The kind of film that no longer exists, Gomes characterizes as "the youth of cinema – the film that does not exist any more". In that context, he refers to John Ford movies like Mogambo (another picture set in the jungle), Howard Hawks, and, of course, F. W. Murnau’s movies.
9. Murnau’s Tabu is a "greatly underestimated film," Gomes proclaims. It is "at once the most controlled and most open of all films." Murnau was a director who obsessively controlled his films down to the slightest detail. And, yet, on Tabu (1930), Murnau worked with the documentary film director Robert Flaherty and used native people in Tahiti for his actors. Accordingly, Gomes sees Tabu as a paradigm of a film that is both tightly controlled and disciplined, but also improvisatory – it is part documentary, part fiction, and, like Gomes, pictures uses amateur actors. Gomes indicates that he values films that are, at once, tightly designed and structured but, also, open to improvisation and that use non-professional actors.
10. About ten years ago, I noticed something unusual. In the Lutheran hymnal, new songs appeared identified as originating the Taize Community. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is swift to adopt ecumenical stances and anxious to broaden its lily-white constituency into other colors and ethnicities. For that reason, there are a number of hymns from Mexico, South America and Africa now printed beside the tunes written by Bach, Luther and Isaac Watts. I assumed that the Taize Community was some peculiar group of Protestant Africans or Lutheran Hondurans. In fact, the Taize Community is an ecumenical monastic order headquartered in south France at Taize. The order was founded by Roger Schuetz, a Swiss Lutheran, in 1940 and, now, has adherents around the world. Schuetz was the son of a Swiss pastor, born in 1915. He was inspired by stories about his maternal grandmother opening her home to war refugees during the Great War. When World War II erupted, Schuetz, with his sister, opened a "safe house" for people displaced by the war a few kilometers beyond the "zone of demarcation" – that is, the border between Vichy and Free France. Schuetz used the house for smuggling Jews out of Vichy France, an activity that was discovered by the Gestapo with the result that Brother Roger, as he was now known, had to flee back into neutral Switzerland – he spent the balance of the war at Geneva, returning to Taize, France in 1944 in the wake of the Allied advance into that country. After the war, Brother Roger continued to gather disciples at Taize, where he founded an ecumenical and celibate monastic order combining Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Taize Community grew, particularly as a result of its youth programs and has become one of the largest religious movements in Europe. In 2005, there were 100 monks at Taize and the village was an important pilgrimage site. Brother Roger was stabbed to death in 2005 by a mentally ill Roumanian woman – he was ninety years old.
11. The Taize Community European meeting, held annually, took place in Lisbon between 28 December 2004 and 1 January 2005 – according to its website, Taize annual meetings always straddle the end of the year. The subject of the meeting was "The Urgency of Peace" and it was attended by 120 youth leaders, including many from Poland (there is a large Taize community in Poznan) and Eastern Europe. Near the beginning of the film, we see the protagonist of the first part of the picture, the kind and gentle Pilar, waiting at the airport for the Polish girl who is supposed to stay at her house. At Taize meetings, the participants live with families in the host country.
12. An important tradition in European literature is the novella, a literary form longer than a short story but more compact than a novel. Many famous European novellas employ the narrative device of a frame story. In the frame story, a character, often speaking in the first person, encounters an unusual person. This person seems afflicted in some way and has been marked by great passion or suffering. The protagonist of the frame story is usually a gentle and kind person, a representative of the ideal reader. The protagonist asks the person encountered what has happened to them and the balance of the novella consists of the story recounted by that person. Innumerable novellas in the German tradition take this form; two of the greatest practitioners of this kind of narrative are the Swiss writer, Adalbert Stifter, and the north German, Theodor Storm. Sometimes, the novella narrative is a document, or a series of documents – for instance, a diary or a group of letters discovered by the protagonist. I mention this tradition because the outstanding exemplar of this kind of writing in the last quarter century is another German, albeit an expatriate, W. G. Sebald. (We read Sebald’s book The Emigrants in our group). Sebald, in turn, seems to have been an enormous influence on Gomes. The shape of Tabu seems derived from Sebald’s narrative techniques – in Sebald’s books, a first-person protagonist goes somewhere, entering a eerie depopulated and devastated landscape. In that landscape, the narrator encounters a person characterized by a terrible melancholy, disabling depression that sometimes leads to suicide. The narrator gradually learns the person’s story and discovers the causes for the melancholy, the vast sadness embodied both in the wounded individual encountered but, also, in the abandoned and ruinous landscape. One of the pleasures of reading Sebald’s texts, sprinkled as they are with black and white photographs that supposedly document the events described (but that could be really about anything), is piecing together the thematic and historical relationships between the frame-story and the narrative. A novella constructed in this way is literally resonant – that is, the themes and events in the frame story resonate with, and give meaning to, the narrative enclosed by the frame and, of course, vice-versa, the frame deepens and complicates the narrative embedded within it. In Tabu, current history frames the colonial past and there are numerous cross-references between Lisbon’s present and the events narrated by Gian Luca Ventura. In the movie theater, Pilar and her gentleman admirer hear Ronnie Spector’s "Be My Baby", a song played by the rock and roll combo in Mozambique forty years earlier; Gian Luca Ventura tells his story in an atrium decorated with tropical plants, a place something like the Rainforest Café; in a deserted mall, we see a child’s ride shaped like a crocodile, referring us to the baby crocodile whose escape triggers the fatal love affair. (Novellas in German are said to feature a turning point called a "Falcon" after a famous story by Goethe – the "Falcon" is the unerhoerte Begebenheit ("unheard-of event") that generates the story. Following this pattern, the escape of the baby crocodile, an unusual event, gives occasion to the forbidden romance that is the subject of the second half of the film.) Pilar’s rejection of her gentleman admirer’s romantic pleas resonates against the romantic diction of Ventura’s narration and Aurora’s submission to her handsome lover. Gomes insures that the viewer enjoy a complex and intriguing set of cross-references between the frame and African romance – even small details contribute to this cross-indexed system: for instance, recall that Aurora’s father lost a fortune gambling, an addiction that seems to afflict Aurora as well, at least in her dotage. Ultimately, Gomes’ point is simple but profound – Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: "the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past." Present-day Lisbon bears the traces of Portugal’s colonial past – the colonial past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Thus, Tabu insists upon establishing an extensive set of connections that weave together Lisbon’s present-day mystery and melancholy with the savage and intensely romantic past of Portugal’s lost colonial empire.
12. An interesting aspect of Tabu is the fact that, in many ways, modern day Lisbon is more exotic, enigmatic, and inexplicable than Africa. The tea-plantation in Mozambique presents a coherent space, organized around the steep, brooding thumb of Mount Tabu. Locations are efficiently depicted by establishing shots that show us where the characters are located – indeed, the adjacency of locations is central: the escape of the baby crocodile onto the property occupied by Ventura and his band-mates is a crucial element of the narrative. Africa is bright and sunny. By contrast, Lisbon is murky with rain and mist. Locations are uncertain, even, baffling. During the old Aurora’s first long monologue, a speech in which we detect the onset of her dementia, both actresses seems to be on some kind of turntable rotating in a circle in the casino – this curious effect is never naturalized, never explained. Transitions in Lisbon are made without warning – the most remarkable effect of this sort is the scene in which we are suddenly in some sort of subterranean tunnel: Pilar and her suitor wear miner’s helmets with carbide lamps. The tour-guide makes a suggestion that is hard to interpret, something about burying a large number of corpses that engenders an inexplicable outburst from Pilar’s gentleman admirer. Where does this scene occur? What is it about? Why are the protagonists suddenly deep underground? This episode is completely disorienting, but implies that Lisbon is a city of dreadful night, perhaps, even a kind of Hades, a realm of the dead and dying. Voodoo is thought to be at work in modern-day Lisbon. Santa, the black housekeeper from Cape Verde, is possibly a witch. In one shot, we see caricatured silhouette figures of black women, a kind of decorative wall-hanging in Aurora’s apartment and, of course, a reference to the colonial past. Later, Santa is shot in silhouette, a similarly pitch-black form hovering over the pale and vulnerable Aurora. Lisbon seems strangely deserted, a city of empty parks and vacant cemeteries. Pilar, a kindly liberal, supports all kinds of good causes – despite her Catholic piety, she is also probably a Taize community member. But the good causes that Pilar supports are incomprehensible – in one scene, Pilar protests genocide and chants the completely enigmatic phrase in English "Shame ONU" – does this mean, something called ONU should be ashamed or is she saying "shame on you"? In another scene, Pilar is lectured by a cigarette-smoking female professor – the woman speaks in dense jargon and her side-kick berates Pilar for handing her a marker that is the wrong color. What is this all about? In Gomes’ vision, the colonial past is more luminous, vivid, and explicable than the rain-sodden foggy present.
13. Gomes’ Tabu asserts a puzzling relationship between the personal and the political. Aurora kills a man who is attempting to intervene in her adulterous relationship with Gian-Luce Ventura – the dead man is one of Ventura’s band-mates. Aurora’s husband removes the body and blames the killing on native rebels – indeed, Tabu suggests that the Portuguese Colonial War (1964 to 1975) began as a result of an obscure love-affair on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Aurora’s adultery, accordingly, has consequences far beyond those that are personal to her – in fact, her affair seems to trigger a destructive 11 year conflict with a dire effect on Portugal. I am uncertain as to whether this cause-and-effect relationship is rooted in some kind of reality or intended to be allegorical or, merely, a surrealist joke.
14. Portugal was ruled by a weak and moribund king until the 1908. At that time, King Carlos I and his young son, the heir to the throne, were killed by assassins in Lisbon in a spectacular regicide – the Queen fought the assailants with a bouquet of roses that she was holding. A short-lived republic was instituted. The late 20's there was civil unrest and, ultimately, a military junta seized power ending Portugal’s so-called First Republic. The Second Republic, also called the Nova Estado was led by a dictator, Antonio Salazar, a conservative "para-fascist." Salazar steered a third course between Communism and Fascism – his government was, more or less, neutral in World War II (although he gave covert support to the Allies by allowing the International Red Cross to operate out of Portugal). Salazar’s regime mirrors Franco’s Spain – Salazar was pro-Catholic and highly conservative. The motto of his State as Deus, Patrie, Familie, an obvious rebuke to the French Revolution’s slogan: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. "We are against all forms of internationalism," Salazar declared. Salazar’s emphasis internationally was on retaining Portugal’s colonies. Indeed, Portugal was one of the last countries in the world to relinquish its once mighty colonial empire. Beginning in 1964, the Portuguese military fought doomed campaigns against guerilla insurgencies in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea. These wars were so unpopular that over a million of Portugal’s young people fled the country to work in Europe or the Americas in order to avoid conscription in these nightmarish Guerra de Ultramar. Salazar had a stroke in 1968 and was without a successor. Chaos ensued and, in 1974, the Portuguese military again seized power in the so-called Carnation Revolution. The army promptly abandoned its wars in Africa and the independence of Portugal’s remaining colonies rapidly followed – for instance, Angola and Mozambique were declared independent in 1975.
14. In classical surrealism, effects are achieved by the creation of chimera – that is, combinations of images, words, or ideas that do not seem to belong together. The most famous statement of this doctrine derives from the proto-surrealist Comte de Lautreamont’s statement that his poetic practice was akin "to the chance meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine." Andre Breton wrote that surrealism should liberate the subconscious by dream analysis in which "one could combine, inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." The French surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy called for the "juxtaposition of two, more or less distant realities... that achieve emotional power" by being combined. According to this dicta, Gomes seems to me to be primarily a surrealist. Whereas a surrealist poet might create his effects by linking incongruous words together, or surrealist film makers might yoke together in one frame a dead donkey and piano (Bunuel and Dali in Un Chien Andalou), Gomes operates by juxtaposing narratives and entire sequences of film that are rooted in wholly different realities. His objective, I think, is to create a surrealistic chimera, an uncanny effect that destabilizes our assessment of the two narrative realities presented. In Tabu, Gomes creates occasional surrealistic effects in the style of Bunuel and Dali – for instance, the image of the ghost in long gown with the alligator in the opening scenes of the film. In general, however, Gomes relies upon the vivid contrast between the scenes in present-day Lisbon and colonial Mozambique to create surrealist effects – he exploits the contrast between frame-story and colonial narrative to destabilize both aspects of the film. Lisbon seems vacant, ghost-like, empty, uncanny in light of Portugal’s colonial and imperialist past; similarly, Mozambique seems unreal when compared with modern-day Portugal.

14. The inhabitants of the apartment tower in Lisbon appear once more in Gomes’ Arabian Nights. Indeed, the best episode in the loose and baggy Arabian Nights involves the reincarnation of a dog and a suicide pact in the apartment complex.

Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is a three-part film directed by the Portuguese auteur, Miguel Gomes.  The work is comprised of three movies, each longer than two hours -- the complete film screens at about 6 1/2 hours.  Gomes' ambition is to show the effects of the great recession as experienced in Portugal -- in effect, the movie is about economic hardship.  That said, Gomes is a witty director and the films are full of surreal touches that lighten the mood.  Furthermore, poverty in Portugal is so picturesque that it is hard sometimes to remain in the dour mood that most of the content requires. 

The first film is entitled The Restless One.  The first twenty minutes introduces the plight of the director faced with this unprepossessing material.  Gomes mopes around a sidewalk café, a sullen-looking slacker similar to the figure that he portrayed, another ne-er-do-well director, in his 2008 Our Beloved Month of August.  Gomes is trying to make a picture about the recession comprised of interviews with laid-off dockworkers intercut with a documentary about a beekeeper hoping to exterminate an invasive species of hornets that are ravaging the local bee population.  Gomes suspects a metaphoric connection between the topics but can't quite figure out what it would be -- in fact, the problem is that the invasive hornet subject has an unpleasantly xenophobic edge that Gomes, I think, can't quite assimilate:  are the hornets workers from third-world countries stealing jobs from the Portuguese or (more disturbing) are the hornets to be equated to Portuguese expatriates working in places like Germany, driven from their homes by the economic downturn.  Gomes can't make sense of the footage that he has exposed:  images of men with torches setting hornet nests on fire and disconsolate shipyard workers standing among empty docks.  So, he tries to literally run away -- we see him walk away from the café and, then, flee at top speed down the street.  Gomes is captured, buried to the neck, in sand and forced to repent his responsibility.  Thus, twenty-five minutes into the film, the title is projected Arabian Nights and the nature of the project announced:  Gomes will make a number of short films, stories after the manner of the tales told Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights.  The project is introduced with some frippery about the Virgins of Baghdad and images of a morose-looking camel.  Then, the first story is narrated:  The Story of the Men with Hard-Ons.  This tale is weak, something about finance ministers who are afflicted with priapism by beturbaned Moor -- it isn't funny or sexually explicit and I couldn't figure out what Gomes meant with the tale.  A little better is the second story:  a tale of love and jealousy set in the picturesque mountains featured in Our Beloved Month of August -- the segment is called The Story of the Cockerel and involves a rooster that crows too early in the morning and is condemned by neighbors for waking everyone up too soon.  This sequence involves some magical realism -- a local Judge in his robes interrogates the cockerel and the beast responds that his crows are a warning cry intended to alert all men to an imminent calamity.  The three lovers are firefighters of the kind that are shown in Our Beloved Month of August -- they patrol the mountains in their brilliantly scarlet engine, the equivalent, it seems, of the rooster, fighting fires that one of the lovers has set out of jealousy at the affair between the other two.  (The lovers are played by pre-pubescent girls who communicate in telegraphic text-messages, another whimsical invention by Gomes that goes nowhere and, even, seems a little creepy.)  The final episode in the film involves a story enclosing three tales nested inside -- a civic booster and swimming coach in a seaside village promotes an annual event called "The Swim of the Magnificents".   This is a kind of "polar bear" plunge of the sort known in many Northern countries -- local people plunge into icy water on January 1, generally as a fundraiser for a charity.  The swimming coach has a bad heart and the opening scene is set in the belly of a whale where a white-coated doctor is supervising an angiogram on the man.  Later, we see the whale from the outside, a disconsolate and battered hulk on the grey beach -- it explodes when people try to approach it, leaving hunks of bloody blubber everywhere as well as a forlorn-looking disgorged mermaid.  The tales nested within the story involve lengthy narrative "talking head" accounts, of how the economic recession has blasted the lives of three of the "magnificents" participating in the plunge.  Most of the surreal aspects of the film, at least in the first part, feel staged and arbitrary and the acting, such as it is, has an amateurish quality -- the documentary elements of the film are more impressive, but they don't really match the Byzantine narratives in which they are embedded.

Each film in the trilogy begins with this title:  "The country was held hostage by a program of austerity by a government apparently devoid of social justice."  The title is necessary because the movies don't exactly illustrate this premise -- Gomes is cunning enough to know that anything that he shows will assume significance in light of his premise; in effect, the meanings of some of the episodes seem to be "accidental" -- scenes can be read as metaphoric of the economic situation but this is not intrinsic, or, even, necessary to what we see.  An example occurs in the second film, The Desolate One.  Between two episodes we are shown an interlude involving girl scouts at some kind of Baroque-era fortification.  The girls, enrolled in some self-confidence building "Outward Bound" program, are encouraged to descend a flimsy-looking rope bridge with the assurance that they are harnessed to the bridge and can not be injured.  Of course, one of the girls slips, the harness fails, and she drops out of sight -- probably, the best metaphor for how Gomes sees Portugal's economic safety net, but, of course, an accidental "objective correlative" and one that passes so quickly that we don't have time to think about it until the film has ended.  Three complicated stories occupy "The Desolate One".  The first involves a bandit named Sirmao "withot bowels" (sin tripas).  The section consists of beautiful landscapes that look like New Mexico with a scowling, bad hombre marching around in the wilderness.  There is no story and the tale ends pointlessly with the bad guy captured by authorities while eating beans for supper; the local populace comes out and cheers for him although Sirmao has killed several women.  (This section is plagued by a surrealist interlude in which three beautiful women go to Sirmao's ruinous lair and have sex with him while engaging in all girl version of Guy Maddin's indelible "Sissy Boy Slap" party -- I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and it seems to be nothing but self-indulgence on the part of the director.)  The second story takes place at night in an amphitheater where a judge is conducting a nightmare trial -- some of the defendants are a genie, five men in African masks who have committed various crimes of theft, a milk cow, 13 Chinese concubines, and an ancient olive tree.  The point of the story is that everyone is implicated in an elaborate web of theft and exploitation -- the trial has begun as a simple case of criminal conversion, a tenant hocking furniture in a furnished apartment to make ends meet, but ends with a cosmic indictment of mutual complicity and criminality that leaves the judge in tears.  Gomes hits his stride with the third story, an undeniably powerful neo-realist portrait of the inhabitants of an apartment block -- apparently, the same apartment building featured in the first section of Tabu.  A fluffy white dog appears, seemingly the reincarnation of a dog that one of the tenants previously owned.  The appealing little dog, Dixie, is described by Scheherazad as a "love machine and a forgetting machine."  The dog passes from owner to owner.  A man and woman who harbor the dog commit suicide after delivering the dog to a junkie and his girlfriend.  The junkie and his girlfriend bring the dog to the building's concierge, the spooky woman from Cape Verde accused of being a witch in Tabu.  Apparently, her friend was the owner of the original Dixie and, in the film's final scene, we see the little dog playing with the ghost of the earlier dog.  This would be purely whimsical except for the fact that when the current Dixie runs off-screen, the ghost dog rolls over onto her side, twitches a little, and seems to die.  This sequence is enlivened with a series of tiny vignettes about the inhabitants of the apartment block, sequences that are strangely moving and enigmatic -- something like the mysterious vignettes comprising Georges Perec's great jigsaw novel Life a User's Manual or a bit like the angelic-tour of Berlin in the first fifteen minutes of Wings of Desire.  This sequence is genuinely moving and, even, its surrealist images -- for instance, torrents of urine running down an elevator shaft -- contribute to the power of this sequence.  Gomes is an inveterate narrator -- he slips tiny narratives into the film's integument.  For instance, one sequence begins with a close-up of a bloody penis -- the man has just deflowered the Judge's daughter.  The girl calls the Judge, her mother, and says that she wants to make a cake for her boyfriend.  The Judge explains how to make the cake before taking the bench in the nightmare trial and warns:  "you could have the Black maid make the cake, but this will lead your man to think that he can get what he needs from her."  A half-hour later, we see a half-naked and voluptuous Black woman cooking a cake in a dark kitchen. 

The third film in the trilogy, The Enchanted One, reverts to the diffuse documentary style of the first installment.  The opening titles remind us that the film is about Portugal's economic malaise but Gomes seems to have, more or less, abandoned any pretense toward developing that subject.  Hermeneutic contortions are required to find any connection to that theme in much of the rest of the film -- by the third movie, there seems to me to be no connection at all, or, perhaps, a perverse negative relationship:  perhaps, the third film shows how people avoid considering the recession by devoting themselves to other pursuits:  the great economic recession seems present in the third film by its very absence.  In L'Age d'Or, Bunuel began his surrealist film with a short, and objective, documentary about the habits of scorpions -- this sequence immediately collided with a religious procession on a rocky shore, lovers grappling in the muck, and some fossilized religious figures.  Gomes follows this procedure at much greater length -- most of the third film is devoted to an objective cinema verite documentary abut raising chaffinches and a competition staged between the singing birds.  For about 90 minutes, Gomes introduces us to various unemployed men who trap the wild birds (illegally) and, then, raise them for the competitions.  This vocation seems always to have been a product of the slums.  Gomes shows us vintage footage of crumbling neighborhoods since replaced by high-rise projects where the chaffinch devotees were raised -- these neighborhoods are adjacent to the airport and, so, in many of the shots we see planes landing and taking off.  One of the chaffinch hobbyists is Vargas, the junkie from the Dixie episode in the previous film and, I believe, it is his bird that dies in the competition.  Truth to tell, Gomes isn't very accomplished as a documentary film maker, or better put, is unconcerned about ordinary narrative -- he doesn't gin up any suspense about the competition, never really establishes its rules, and, for most of the documentary, we can't tell exactly what is happening:  groups of hoodlums stand around small cages covered in white muslin and, unseen, the birds sing -- the competition doesn't have any visual flair:  it seems to be conducted in a vacant lot under some jerry-rigged plastic awning.  One of the birds, perhaps, sings itself to death -- but this isn't clearly depicted.  We learn a few things about finch songs, a couple tricks about catching them, and, then, the documentary simply stops, more or less arbitrarily.  (It doesn't help that Gomes interrupts the documentary with footage of a police strike overlaid with a story narrated by Chinese girl:  she fell in love with a Lisbon cop, he deflowered her -- one of Gomes' favorite motifs -- and, after an abortion, and the collapse of the love affair and, then, a fatal fire,the girl is deported to Beijing.)  A man is caught in the netting used to catch chaffinches -- he turns out to be a genie.  When the chaffinch trapper releases him, he offers the man 10 euros.  The trapper says he needs 10 million euros.  The genie doesn't have that kind of money and so the trapper refuses any pay at all.  Disgruntled, the bird-catcher wanders through the Portuguese landscape; he seems to be the same chap who played Sirmao, without bowels, a figure of the indomitable Portuguese bandit living off the land.  The proceedings are enlivened by various renditions of the song Perfidia (performed by Glenn Miller and Nat King Cole among others) and there is a lengthy whimsical preface involving Scheherazad dallying with a golden boy among the rocky cliffs of a Mediterranean shore -- just as Shakespeare imagined the seacoast of Bohemia, Gomes imagines Baghdad to be a white city on the shore of a gorgeous semi-tropical ocean.  A deep melancholy afflicts the storyteller -- we see her confiding to her father, the Grand Vizier, that she will be out of stories soon and that the King will return to his murderous ways.  There is some dancing and singing, including an utterly bizarre sound cue, a country-western tune called "Son of a Gun" by Lee Hazelwood.  The style in this introductory section is that of Godardian overload -- we get too much information too quickly, titles, voice-overs, songs, in some instances, multiple exposures some of them extremely eloquent, but it all adds up to nothing.   There are hints of other stories that are not developed, something about a great diver and a sunken treasure, and a longing for Bahia, an element of Portuguese nostalgia for its lost empire, but, despite some exquisite imagery, almost too pretty in fact, I couldn't patch this collage together to make much sense of it.  (There is a good gag -- after imprisoning the genie of the wind, Scheherazad pitches her magic lamp into the sea; this upsets a bunch of beach boys diving from the rocks:  "Hey lady! they cry, you can't use the sea as your trash can.)

Ultimately, Arabian Nights seems to me to be a grandiose failure.  The film doesn't cohere and its various parts can't be made to signify anything.  It's a miscellany or grab bag, something conceded in a final title -- Gomes dedicates the film to his eight-year old daughter in the hope that she will extract from it something that she likes.  This is an uncharitable surmise, but all the sound and fury (Gomes production company is called O Som e a Furia) about Portugal's economic recession seems to be nothing but protective coloration, an attempt to impart significance to the film that it doesn't otherwise possess.  Despite some noteworthy sequences, particularly those in the second part of the trilogy, the film is not the masterpiece that critics, eager to support Gomes, have claimed.    

Film essay -- Kazuo Hara's Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974



　

　
Kazuo Hara is a Japanese documentary film maker. (He has made one narrative feature film about which I know nothing.)

Kazuo Hara was born in 1945 in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He never saw his father.

Kazuo Hara attended the Tokyo Technical School of Photography. After that vocational training, Kazuo Hara worked as an assistant cameraman on some films directed by Shohei Imamura.

Kazuo Hara did not attend film school. Kazuo Hara did not attend college. There were violent college protests about the Vietnam war. Kazuo Hara watched those from the side-lines and did not take part.

With his girlfriend, Sachiko Kobayashi, Kazuo Hara founded Shisso Productions in 1971.

In 1972, Kazuo Hara produced Sayonara CP. The film is a documentary about a group of severely disabled men with cerebral palsy.

In 1974, Kazuo Hara produced Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974, a documentary about a triangle between Kazuo Hara, Miyuki Takeda, a Japanese feminist and sex-worker, and Hara’s girlfriend (and production partner at Shissho), Sachiko Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 was so excessive that Hara was unable to raise money to complete any productions for a decade.

Kazuo Hara produced The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on in 1987. This documentary about a crazed World War II veteran investigating war crimes committed in New Guinea in Kazuo Hara’s most well-known film. It is also exceptionally controversial and has never been shown on Japanese TV.

Kazuo Hara produced A Dedicated Life in 1995. A Dedicated Life is a documentary about a radical left wing writer Mitsuharu Inoue.

Kazuo Hara has made two other films since that time, one of them a narrative dramatic picture, but I can not find any information about those movies.

　

B.

Kazuo Hara calls the films that he makes "action documentaries."

He says:

Life is acting. There are two sides to people. The person one wants to be and the person one is. I want the people in my movies to act the way they want to be. ...Movies must have good and evil, bad men and heroes. It is like Batman and Superman. It is the same (in my documentaries). ... I Like to make dramatic movies. I fell strongly about this, more than other directors. I love Hollywood action films, and I wanted Okuzaki (the protagonist in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on) to act like an action star. I want to make action documentary films...

In each of his documentary films, there is are "action" sequences, scenes in which the protagonists engage in behavior that is objectively dangerous. In Sayonara CP, the extremely handicapped hero moves around Tokyo on his knees, walking through heavy traffic and climbing on and off subways, in a way that the man’s wife (also disabled by cerebral palsy) finds dangerous and degrading. She demands that her husband use a wheelchair. He refuses and there is a savage quarrel resulting in the two disabled people physically exchanging blows while the woman shrieks to Hara to stop filming – he refuses.

In The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, the protagonist has served time for both murder and for using a slingshot to fling pachinko balls at the Emperor. He gains access to the homes of elderly world war veterans and demands that they answer his questions about atrocities committed in New Guinea. When the old men refuse to answer his questions, the protagonists attacks them and literally beats the truth of his witnesses – in some cases, also beating the wives of his unfortunate interview subjects who intervene to protect their elderly husbands. Outraged that some of the old men obstinately refuse to admit that they are war criminals, the film’s protagonist offers to commit a murder while Hara is filming. Hara declines the proposal but, only, because, as he says, "I was really sick of Okuzaki and was tired of him."

In A Dedicated Life, Hara begins the film by prying into the sexual life of his subject, the radical Leftist writer, Inoue. Hara hunts down women with whom Inoue had affairs while he was married and interviews them. Then, Inoue develops liver cancer. Hara films his surgery in graphic detail. Inoue’s cancer has metastasized and Hara laters films his decline and death.

In Extreme Private Eros 1974 Love Song, Hara’s ex-girlfriend, pregnant with a half-Black child, decides to demonstrate her feminist principles by having the baby in her apartment without any medical personnel present. Hara films the ordeal.

　

C.

My second film, Extreme Private Eros 1974, was all about my "privacy." It was about a triangle between myself, my former wife, and my present wife. You know, I make documentaries, and as for reality and fiction, well, we call them documentaries, but they are really made up...From my viewpoint, a documentary should explore things that people don’t want explored, bring things out of the closet, to examine why people want to hide certain things. When people are talking about themselves, they put limits and taboos on what they are willing to talk about, their privacy...

The sound is not synchronized with the image in Extreme Private Eros 1974. Hara says: I was very poor at the time. I could not afford a camera that would do the sound with the pictures...

On the subject of the film, Hara says:


In the sixties and seventies, there as feeling that if the individual did not cause change, nothing would change. At the time, I wanted to make a movie, and I was wondering how I could make a statement for change. At the time, there was much talk of familial imperialism ("kazoku teikokishugi"). One of the strong sentiments of the time was that familial imperialism should be destroyed. I thought that if I could put my own family under the camera, all our emotions, our proviacy, I wondered if I might break taboos about the family...
Interviewer: You were called a masochist about you made Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974.

Hara: When the subject of my film is perceived to be stronger than I, as Miyuki Takeda (the main character in the film) was, I was called a masochist: when the subject was perceived to be weaker, I was called a sadist. Instead of being a masochist or sadist, I would say that the nature of documentary filmmaking is that the director puts himself in various situations.

Interviewer: How was the movie received?

Hara: Very well. One funny thing was that the birthing scene, well it seemed to be the women who felt uneasy about the scene, they sometimes got up and left. The men, however, had no chance at that time to see a baby born, so they came to see the film, and watched the birthing scene spellbound...


　
D.

In Europe, particularly England, we date the punk movement from 1972 to about 1976. Greil Marcus in books like Lipstick Traces relates punk esthetics of the Situationist movement. Although it is probable, that Kazuo Hara never heard of the Situationists, I think his Extreme Private Eros can be productively considered as a punk documentary, punk film making ultimately, if remotely, influenced by European situationism. Certainly, the ravaged quality of the soundtrack and images, the intentional display of squalor, and the outrageousness of the emotions on display all accumulate to an experience that is not unlike listening to the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK. Accordingly, I think it helpful to import some ideas about Situationist esthetics into analysis of Hara’s film making.

The International Situationists were radical thinkers comprised of Marxist and post-Marxist activists, initially philosophers a generation younger that the Existentialists and on the fringes of that movement. Their influence is important, particularly in Paris, where Situationist ideas led in part to the failed revolution in May 1968 – disgust and nihilism arising from the collapse of the Paris uprising sent shock waves throughout European capitols and created the environment from which the Punks arose. The Situationists became international in 1957 when the London Psychogeographical Society (a proto-punk movement) combined with the Parisian Lettrists, an offshoot of the doctrinaire Communist party. The leader of the situationists was Guy Debord. His most famous book is The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967 – this book is an underground classic and has been immensely, if covertly, influential: it was a kind of Bible for the punk movement and remains important in various countercultural contexts to this day. (Debord committed suicide in 1994).

Debord argued that Capitalist society is divided into two phases: production and spectacle. People either work to produce capital or they create spectacles intended to endorse the ruling capitalist paradigm. When workers are not working to produce wealth for the bosses, they are narcotized by spectacles designed to keep them from understanding the economic system in which they labor. Debord thought that production of spectacles was equally important to actual economic production in late Capitalist societies because it was only by "spectacle" that the bosses ruled. Debord declared that "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation...images supplant human relationships." In "spectacle," we live by proxy, remotely, through surrogates on TV or the big screen. "Spectacle" is the principle means of social control by which the masses are held in check.

Debord thought that spectacle could be overcome by artists creating counter-spectacles that he called detournement – this was appropriating the spectacle and its seductive imagery to a purpose counter to that for which the spectacle had been engineered. The spectacle engineered to suppress subversive ideas can be "turned topsy-turvy" or upside-down by detournement to yield meanings opposing those espoused by the State. (Debord demonstrated how this might be done by making a film called Society of Spectacle in 1973 using Hollywood film-clips re-cut to yield subversive or counter-cultural meanings.) Counter-spectacles, called "constructed situations", could be staged to subvert ideology advanced by the societally sanctioned "spectacles."

Several elements relating to this praxis can be observed in Hara’s films: first, the director constructs situations that are volatile and that yield violent confrontations from opposing perspectives – these are counter-spectacles "concretely and deliberately"organized to undercut the dominant ideology. In Japan, people who are crippled are deemed esthetically problematic – they are made to disappear. Hara subverts this dominant ideology in　Sayonara CP by having his hero strip naked and squat in the middle of a public square so that the camera can record his deformities and, further, show the reaction of outraged citizens. In Extreme Private Eros, the heroine publicly opposes Japanese ideology relating to the role of women in that society – she seems to think that conceiving a half-Black child is a kind of political gesture that will force a confrontation with the dominant culture. The heroine’s appearance and bisexuality is in stark contrast to Kobayashi, a woman who seems conventionally Japanese in her subordination to the film maker Hara. Furthermore, the entire film project is Debordian spectacle – the film maker Hara prosecutes his intimate relationship with Miyuki by means of a spectacle – he films a relationship that should otherwise be enacted, demonstrating that his relationship with Miyuki is mediated by his camera and sound-systems: the film presents a classic example of an interpersonal relationship colonized, as it were, by media and turned into a spectacle – although, certainly, a counter-spectacle. (Thus, this despairing propositions: all is spectacle – there is no outside to spectacle. Our relationship to reality is now either inevitably through the spectacles staged by the dominant capitalist culture or through a counter-spectacles: fundamentally, we have no authentic relationship with the real.) Psychogeographical concerns are, also, central to Hara’s practice in Extreme Private Eros – the film maker insists upon distinctions between Tokyo and Okinawa. The people on Okinawa have a different geography and, therefore, psyches that differ from the people in Tokyo. To an ideology privileging the relationship of the serene, long-suffering Japanese mother to her children, Hara opposes images of Miyuki Takeda giving birth in a brightly lit room with her first son (Hara’s boy) squatting near her thighs and howling in terror at the spectacle. Hara doesn’t eschew the idea of the spectacle – it’s just that he presents a spectacle that can’t be turned into commerce: no one is going to make a perfume commercial or ad for automobiles out of the imagery that comprises the film. (This is very different from Hollywood films lavish with product placement and that feature tie-ins with car companies – for instance, the Bond films have a symbiotic relationship with Jaguar.) The texture of the film is punk – its all home-made, a product manufactured outside the distribution networks of conventional capitalism: do-it-yourself like a screed printed on poor paper, mimeographed, and handed-out to random strangers, a sort of nightmare ‘zine. Hara’s out-of-focus images and non-synched sound are the equivalent of the punk garage bands blasting out anthems constructed on the basis of one mis-tuned chord.

Another influence on Hara’s film making is cinema verite. Hara’s picture, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on is generally cited as an outstanding example of cinema verite. And, of course, a number of documentary films made in the seventies broke new ground with respect to depicting on-screen subjects that were previously taboo – the classic example of a ground-breaking cinema verite film on this order is PBS’s An American Family, a series of films that showed intimate details in the life of the Louds, a dysfunctional family living in Santa Barbara. Other pictures of this sort are the Mayles’ brothers, Grey Gardens, (1975) about members of Jackie Kennedy’s extended family living in squalor in the East Hamptons and Shirley Clark’s Portrait of Jason (1967), a film about a homosexual African-American hustler and alcholic. Hara’s film is infinitely more "home-made" and aggressively ugly than these films but shares some of the same sensibility. We should remember that these kinds of movies were exceptionally controversial when they were made: the question posed by these films was whether the film maker was cynically exploiting the mental illness of the subjects of his or her film.

And this question, I think, hovers in a noteworthy way over all of Hara’s productions, most particularly Extreme Private Eros.

Brighter Sunnier Day (The Boy-Murder on Gulin Street)

Edward Yang's four-hour film, entitled in English Brighter Sunnier Day (below those words, the Chinese title appears:  characters that mean The Boy-Murder on Gulin Street) is not so much a movie as a vocation.  This is because the film is very long and extraordinarily complex, the Middlemarch of narrative films with over a hundred speaking roles and a dozen or so sub-plots.  Further, the film, made in Taiwan, is an island-picture, insular in that the movie pre-supposes the knowledge that people in Taipei would possess in the early nineties.   As the commentator, Tony Rayns, notes that this knowledge is not readily available to Americans or Europeans and, indeed, as time progresses, becomes increasingly inaccessible to East Asians as well.  Although the movie is very lucidly constructed, moving effortlessly between its subplots, we should not deny that it poses a number of challenges -- first, many of the characters will look alike to Western eyes and it is, sometimes, hard to tell who is who.  We may account this racism on the part of the viewer or simple inattentiveness, but it remains a fact that I had to consult the brochure accompanying this Criterion release several times in order to keep track of the players. (And I am presently working through the commentary -- a four-hour task.)  Second, the milieu is unfamiliar -- the movie involves refugees from Mainland China (Shanghai) who have fled the Communist regime and are living, uneasily, in houses confiscated from the Japanese in Taiwan.  These people are middle-class, conservative, and, mostly, hate the Communists.  They are also trapped -- they have been on Taiwan 12 years when the film begins around 1961 and have little hope of returning to their homes.  Taiwan seems to be a kind of austere military dictatorship and there are many tensions between the native-born Taiwanese and the immigrant Chinese. 

The film's plot resembles in some ways an immensely extended, and much more serene, even blissfully indifferent, version of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.  Two brothers live with their immigrant parents.  The film's protagonist is a kid named S'ir ("Fourth").  Si'r has been in trouble at high school, expelled, and is now attending a less prestigious night-school.  The town is divided between two violent youth gangs, the "Little Park Gang" and the lower class "217's."  Everyone listens to Elvis Presley and there are nascent rock-and-roll bands with falsetto singers.  Military convoys roll down the highways and, it seems, that there are only two options for the young men attending high school -- join a youth gang or the biggest, most aggressive gang of them all, the Taiwanese army.  The movie follows Si'r's attempts to navigate this mine-field.  But the picture is much larger than Si'r's story with subplots involving the hero's brothers and sisters, their uncles, and his parents -- Si'r's father, for instance, is suspected of disloyalty and mercilessly questioned in some Kafkaesque scenes by government secret police.  As with a Scorsese film, there are outbursts of shocking violence.  But the movie is astonishingly beautiful -- Yang was one of the greatest masters of the wide-screen format in the history of cinema.  His compositions are packed with people arranged with the perfection that you see in Degas' paintings and mezzotints, little floral bunches of people posed against empty space, sometimes with a dog or infant thrown in for a good measure.  Yang's interiors are geometric studies of enclosure, paper walls and tight corridors framing his characters in abstract patterns that sometimes look like elegantly colored Diebenkorn canvases.  Early in the film, Yang cuts from an interior to a nocturnal landscape, an image of lagoons and flowers and reflected streetlamps as strangely beautiful as a Monet painting.  Some kids heading for a rumble dart across the landscape and the image takes your breath away.  A few shots later, we see a movie set from overhead -- two boys have climbed up into the rafters to watch a film being made:  we look down into a schematic image of technicians, actresses, wardrobe people, all of them flapping their fans against the tropical heat -- the moving fans somehow unify the separate groupings of people and the image is densely detailed, gorgeous, similar to one of Thomas Struth's big photographs.  It's evident that Yang had one of cinema's greatest eyes and the movie is placidly gorgeous without being overt or unnecessarily "pretty" about its beauty. (You will see that I have exhausted myself in comparison to great, painterly artists -- and, although those similes are inexact, they are the best that I can do to articulate how this picture looks.)  Furthermore, the wide-screen invites the viewer to explore the images, to look past the central action, to study the background and the landscape, to move, in other words, through spaces in the frieze that are animated with activity to other spaces that are empty or still -- some of the most beautiful images contain highly charged action off-center to space that is vacant. 

Yang's staging of events is often oblique, even elliptical -- the principal events in the film's first part involve the death of Honey, the leader of the Little Park gang, and the reprisal committed by Honey's friends in league with a Taiwanese gang.  Although Honey is an important character -- he is world-weary at 19, has read a novel that he regards as the best of the martial arts books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and seems inclined toward negotiation instead of fighting.  (Honey cites Tolstoy and wishes that someone would write a book about the gangs so that people "in a hundred years could learn from what we happened to us" -- referring, it seems, to the movie that we are watching.)   Shandong, the leader of the 217 gang, kills Honey with a gesture, shoving him in front of a moving vehicle -- and this after the two men have engaged in a quiet, even philosophical chat:  it's clear that neither of them have any inclination toward violence and their periodic assaults on one another, or opposing gang members, seem purely perfunctory.  (The casus belli is a rock-and-roll concert staged by the 217 gang on turf that is nominally controlled by Little Park -- but this is no more than a lame excuse for a fight that is fundamentally unnecessary.)  Yang doesn't show us what happens to Honey -- later, we see a corpse, some lights, and a small dog lapping up some blood.  But the event is staged in a way as to make it invisible -- because I kept falling asleep in this part of the film, I was confused:  the characters all act as if Honey is dead, but I didn't see that episode, was asleep for a while, I guess, when it happened and it took me several viewings of this part of the film to piece together what happened.  Honey's girlfriend, Ming, descends into catatonic mourning and has to be sent away.  Then, Honey's friends, with a Taiwanese gang, wreak bloody revenge on the 217, attacking their pool hall in the middle of a chaotic typhoon with samurai swords.  (This part of the movie seems to come from an entirely different film -- the Taiwanese have found a cache of Japanese weapons, daggers and swords, and, draped in rain-slickers and wearing coolie hats against the storm, they swarm into the pool hall and cut down the hapless 217ers.  The sequence is staged as if by the light of lightning flashes -- the power has failed in the neighborhood of 217 clubhouse and we see the violence only as briefly illumined acts offset by turbulent darkness.  It's a bravura sequence that looks like something from a Kurosawa movie and, in fact, has an entirely different texture and emotional timbre than the surrounding picture.)  On the same night as the 217 massacre, Si'r's father is summoned for interrogation by the Secret Police -- they suspect him of being a crypto-communist.  He is taken to deserted army barracks, harangued by debonair and articulate interrogators, made to write out his life-story (also a metaphor for the film) while huge blocks of ice melt in the corridors of the abandoned post -- the picture teeters here on the edge of surrealism but, ultimately, withdraws from that brink.  Si'r seems horrified by the carnage -- no one else pays any attention.  My summary omits family quarrels, nostalgic discussions of old Shanghai, efforts by finagle a place in day-school for Si'r, and various romantic encounters between the school boys and the girls -- Yang films all of this with equal analytical focus and this creates a center-periphery problem for the viewer:  it is hard for us to ascertain what is central to the narrative and what is peripheral.  This effect is intentional but a hardship for the audience -- this part of the movie is afflicted by longuers and, in a warm room, it is impossible to stay awake for much of this action.

The last third of the film shows Si'r's deterioration, confusion leading to his murder of Ming.  Si'r's mental collapse is paralleled by his father's ruin.  Released inexplicably from State custody, Si'r's father loses his job, becomes increasingly paranoid, and succumbs to despair -- Yang handles these calamities with tact:  as a character deteriorates, his collapse occurs increasingly off-screen.  For the last half-hour of the film, neither Si'r or his father are shown except obliquely -- we see them from odd angles, glimpsing them in the distance, but, primarily, know of their misfortune by the effects that it has on others.  Si'r insults a nurse, gets called to account at school where he, apparently, assaults the supercilious and arrogant headmaster with a baseball bat -- rather comically, there is a big barrel full of baseball bats confiscated from gang members in the Principal's office.  Expelled, Si'r studies hard to regain admission but becomes confused about his relationship to Ming.  (In fact, he really has no relationship at all with her -- they seem to be casual friends.)  Si'r tells Ming that he will replace the late lamented Honey and defend her.  With realistic and practical acumen, she says that she doesn't need his protection. Enraged, Si'r stabs her to death on Gulin Street.  He is sentenced to death, but not executed -- instead, he serves 15 years in prison.  We see Si'r's younger sister singing in her church choir.  Si'r's friend, the little Elvis fan, has written to Elvis Presley and sent him a cover of "Are you lonesome tonight". Elvis responds with a letter and a gift and the boy makes a tape for Si'r, asking the guards to bring it to him.   The guards contemptuously throw the tape away and the movie ends with a list of Si'r's contemporaries who have graduated from High School.  The last half of the film can't draw the various threads of narrative into any meaningful pattern and the immense movie raises more questions than it answers.  Si'r's murder of Ming is shockingly unmotivated and despicable -- it seems inconsistent with the boy's character as it has been developed in the film.  The bravura sequence involving the extermination of the 217 gang leads nowhere -- in fact, the gangs, more or less, vanish from the film during its second half.  The pleasures that the movie affords are its precise and lucid presentation of surfaces -- that is, the way a school gymnasium basketball court looked in 1961, the various gardens and landscapes that the film explores, and the luminous interiors with their diaphanous wings of mosquito netting.  Yang's tendency is to show you something and, then, provide explanatory information much later in the film and this makes the movie very hard to understand on first viewing.  For instance, there is a spectacular scene in which Si'r's father beats Si'r's older brother, the hapless Lao Er.  Si'r watches from outside in the garden.  Earlier we have seen Lao Er at the abandoned headquarters for the defunct 217 gang playing pool.  During the beating, Si'r's sister tells him that Lao Er somehow learned that Si'r had stolen and pawned his mother's watch (an event that reoccurs several times in the movie).  To protect his brother from discovery, Lao Er went to the 217 pool hall, placed some bets and won some money, but the cash was discovered before he could redeem the watch.  As a loyal brother, Lao Er takes the beating without disclosing that it was Si'r who stole and pawned the watch.  When we see Lao Er in the pool hall, we have no idea what he is doing; similarly, during the protracted beating, we don't know why Si'r's father is assaulting his oldest son.  The film making is gorgeous but confusing -- presumably Yang wants us to experience the chaos of events just as they are presented to his characters, but this cuts against the analytical, almost geometrical clarity of the film's mise en scene -- spaces and relationship of characters in space are always lucidly presented.  And, the story seems fundamentally inconsequential, too slim to support the gargantuan length of the film -- it's hard to make a meaningful and dramatic climax when nothing is at stake:  in effect, Si'r kills Ming on a whim and based on a total misunderstanding.  He imagines a relationship with her that doesn't exist.  In the final shot, we hear a list of students who have successfully graduated from High School -- the students are going to study Chinese literature or foreign languages.  Of course, this is the group of successful students that would have included Si'r but for the misadventures shown by the film.  But what if Si'r had graduated, how would things have been any better?  We don't see that any of the refugees from Shanghai are actually happy or successful.  (In fact, as Edward Yang's own career shows, the route to success on Taiwan runs through America, and, in fact, the computer programming capitals on the West Coast -- Yang worked as a computer programmer for eight years in Seattle before returning to Taiwan to work in the film industry.)  Would Si'r have been better off with a degree in English literature and working as an ex-pat in San Jose?    

Our Beloved Month of August

When writing about Miguel Gomes 2008 film, Our Beloved Month of August, the temptation  is to clarify the film, normalize it, and make the movie seem less strange than it really is.  Every description of the film that I have read has this effect and it is inimical to the way an audience actually experiences the movie.  In the first shot, we see majestically combed roosters clearly agitated by something -- as the shot continues, we see that a little fox has entered the chicken coop and is eyeing the roosters:  the image is magisterial, at once, strange and suspenseful, shot from a peculiar angle as if to mirror the perplexity of the big, bright roosters.  In the second shot, we see that the fox is separated from the chickens by a wire-mesh.  But the mesh is inefficacious and the fox bursts in among the chickens -- the film, then, cuts away to a pavilion where someone is crooning in a soft-rock pop song; it is night and the weight of the summer is palpable in the scene, an erotic humidity and warmth and, while the singer performs, gradually couple gather on the dance-floor, entering, however, from an unexpected angle.   At the end of the film, Gomes castigates his soundman, a figure that we have been watching throughout the movie, for recording in nature sounds that can't possibly be present -- pop tunes, apparently, picked-up by the soundman's microphone on its lance-like baton.  Each member of the crew berates the soundman who maintains that he didn't do anything wrong -- on the soundtrack we hear forest sounds, birds chirping and the wind in trees, gradually supplanted by faint pop song that grows in volume.  While crewmembers are berating the hapless soundman, their names and roles in the production are shown on-screen.  When the sequence is over, the film's final credits are projected and the movie ends. 

Much of the movie follows the logic, or illogic, of these sequences.  Only gradually, after about an hour, does the audience sense that there are actual characters in the movie, people extruded above, as it were, the documentary milieu -- as soon as we become accustomed to the fact that we are watching a lyrical documentary designed according to associative and poetic principles, suddenly, we are confronted with fact that there is, in fact, a story, that the story becomes increasingly melodramatic, and, ultimately, seems to seize control of the film, turning the movie into a family melodrama with some kinky attributes, a bit like a film by Fassbinder or Douglas Sirk.  The narrative seems wholly improvised -- at first, we don't know that we are seeing any kind of narrative at all.  The pleasure that film yields is that aspects of the picture that we initially perceived as purely documentary become assimilated into the improvised story.  For instance, we have seen a red fire-truck somewhat incongruously touring the mountainsides of the Portuguese forest where the film takes place.  These seems are vaguely comical and we can't quite make any narrative sense out of them.  Later, we are introduced to two girls who work at a fire-tower, one succeeding the other with regard to their sentinel duties -- these girls are fire-watchers atop a high mountain in the forested range.  The girls gradually become central characters in the narrative and, at the end of the film, there is a wild-fire that has the melodramatic function of ending a bitter family argument and, in fact, reuniting characters who had disavowed any further relationship with one another.  (The fire clearly stands for sexual love-- the fires of passion.)  Here is the question that film poses:  did this imagery of fires and fire-fighting drive the narrative and yield, through improvisatory means the narrative or was the film maker cunningly foreshadowing narrative events by concealing in plain sights, as it were, this theme within the documentary aspects of the movie.  I don't think this question can be answered and therein lies part of the charm of Our Beloved Month of August. 

At first, we seem to be watching a documentary about some kind of musical festival occurring in a rural and mountainous region of Portugal.  Bands appear on a dramatically lit stage, are identified by super-title over the image, and perform -- the music that they play is not some kind of European "roots" or traditional music; rather, it is ingratiating key-board and synthesizer-heavy Euro-pop.  At first, the film plays as a kind of movie-essay, the sort of film that Chris Marker used to make -- there are some portentous voice-overs and we see lots of tracking shots of wooded and hilly landscape.  A big motorcycle rally is underway and the narrow, winding roads on the mountain side are, often, blitzed by swarms of bikers -- near the start of the film, we see an immense campground where the bikers have gathered.  There is a look-out atop one of the mountains, a statuesque ridge where giant wind rotors are turning, and some beautiful streams where people swim and sunbathe near a dam.  Local people are filmed in their habitats telling stories about how the festival originally involved a testicle feast and one man recounts the story of ax murder.  It appears that the film is documenting the Feast of the Lady of Conception and, at twenty minute intervals, there are images of long processions in which the people carrying sacred figures on litters going uphill meet and pass similar crowds descending the steep streets.  Bands play in out of the way alleys and there seems to be a lot of feasting underway.  From time to time, a man from Lisbon admonishes the film crew to get underway -- Gomes, who plays himself in the film, says that he has to record sound effects because he doesn't yet have actors.  At the climax of the religious festival, someone -- apparently the town drunk -- will have to jump off a high medieval bridge over a ravine where the river flows.  He isn't anxious to do this -- last time, he jumped he hurt his ankle.  Frequently, we see the sound man recording in groves of trees or on the mountainsides -- of course, we never see the camera crew:  the film's point-of-view is the camera crew and the reason we don't see any footage being shot is because the only camera on location is the one recording the various random, or seemingly, random snippets of film that comprise the movie.  At one point, the villagers gather to see some rushes of a "terror movie based on Little Red Riding Hood" -- this may be the project the filmmakers have come to produce.  An older woman appears in the clip of film, scary and formidable as a witch -- we later see her from time to time in the streets of the town, a heavy-set, jolly old woman nothing like her image on the screen.  (The locals aren't fooled -- they laugh loudly at the horror scenes.)  A boar is butchered and an old man climbs into a deer stand.  Two girls try to get parts in the movie and are inexplicably turned-away -- the crew is more interested in playing quoits.  Gomes is a very cunning and intelligent director and this seemingly random footage probably fits together and forms patterns that are not immediately apparent, but, nonetheless, meaningful -- in part, an associative principle connects the short sequences:  while we watch a religious procession, a man talks about being healed by an encounter with the plaster figurine of the Lady of Healing; in the next scene, we see a man singing karaoke -- the song is about being saved by the Virgin Mary, although the tune and melody aren't sacred sounding at all, but more of the saccharine Euro-pop that characterizes the soundtrack.  (Our Beloved Month of August, if nothing else, is a musical, featuring about 12 fully performed songs.)  Gradually, we begin to notice recurring characters and, in the last hour, there is a story:  a girl named Tania sings in a family band with her father, Domingos, and her uncle.  The girl's mother has run away from the family to Lisbon -- it's not quite clear why she abandoned the family.  Father and daughter have a close, almost freakishly close, relationship -- at one point, the villagers accuse the couple of incest.  The lead guitar player in the band is Helder, Tania's 15 year old cousin.  Helder and Tania fall in love.  This leads to conflict in the family, problems in the band as well, and, ultimately, there is a showdown between the young lovers and Tania's father -- catastrophe is averted by a fire on the mountain in which the family members are trapped.  The fire is a deus ex machina that resolves the major tensions in the film, although the movie has trouble ending -- I counted about six or seven separate endings.

Our Beloved Month of August is fiendishly clever but overlong.  The story that is improvised out of all of the fragments of apparently documentary footage is melodramatic and slight, if pleasant -- young lovers (there is a subplot involving another girl Lena and her admirers) enjoying long lissome summer nights together.  But the story isn't strong enough to sustain the film's length and, in any event, its clearly disposable -- something Gomes constructed out of bits and pieces and, then, improvised a few acted (or dramatic) scenes.  The film's length is integral, however, to the very gradual development of the plot -- the narrative consists of a series of secrets disclosed to the audience only very, very slowly and with immense hesitation.  If the whole plot were summarily presented, we would probably reject the film as banal and uninteresting -- part of the pleasure in the picture is fitting together the fragments to construct the narrative.  I think it's a film that is probably designed to be watched several times -- some parts of the film have a meta-narrative aspect that is fantastically complex.  In one scene, we see two men from behind at one of the ubiquitous mountain lookouts -- one man tells the other that he's concerned about the film makers.  "They seem awfully disorganized," he says.  The other man responds:  "Well, it's just their method."  The first man reveals, then, that he was the fellow who talked about being cured by our Lady of Healing -- "they recorded me without my knowing," he says.  Of course, we are seeing the two men from behind and this begs the question of whether they know they are being recorded and filmed in this sequence.  Both men are part of the film's narrative -- but how do we distinguish the narrative from the documentary aspects of the movie?  Can this even be accomplished?  In one scene, Helder masturbates, apparently to images of Tania's missing mother, someone called Auntie Rose Marie -- this sequence is clearly staged.  A few minutes later, some Belgian dudes approach the girls who are swimming at the dam and try to pick them up -- this sequence seems completely documentary, although the scene plays a role in dramatic narrative.  Was this scene staged or is it documentary?