Mention the word “documentary” to your average film-goer and you’re likely to receive a blank stare. Insist on the subject and that stare may gradually shift: your victim is hunting for the obscure word from the dusty recesses of archival memory. Chances are this facial expression -- just now as blank as a film screen -- will then shift into a not very pleasant recognition: “Why would I want to watch one of those?” Documentaries, unfortunately, can’t seem to shake a reputation for being the ugly ducklings of film. In a way, this is understandable. A world-wide industry feeding the insatiable maw of television’s unwavering need for up to 24 hours of original programming per day produces marching row upon row of documentaries. They parade on the grass of the same banal commercial considerations which keep dramatic films (and most TV productions) fixed within that well-lit Nuremberg playing field of “entertainment.” The blank stare of the entertained can be frightening to behold -- clear evidence that manipulability stems from within. The mass-market documentary version of entertainment has even coined a new English word: “Info-tainment.” This because, under sometimes zippy layers of production, it’s assumed that information lurks somewhere -- like the necessary sewer pipes. And there’s the rub. Documentaries are assumed to be celluloid delivery vehicles for information. They belong on TV. They are one short step removed from being educational films. They certainly shouldn’t have a theater ticket price attached to them. All of which is only more evidence that word hasn’t yet gotten out to the masses: during the last decade, documentary has turned into something of a swan. Freed from the chains of a convention that insisted that, whatever the truth of film production, the documentary must at least appear to be a servant of “objective” reality, documentary film is experiencing a quiet renaissance. (Film, the most complex, manufactured medium in human history, is of course manipulated, edited, mixed: it is artifice -- inevitably the product of strings of subjective choices as long and intricate as a DNA spiral. This is true whether you speak of documentary or dramatic film.) In this second, let’s call it “auteurist” stage of documentary, the information which was assumed to be the cargo of documentary has shifted; it has made a “transmigration”, becoming the director’s knowledge, imported through his or her subjective realization. The documentary renaissance, which has seen a number of films earn substantial box-office returns in US theatrical release, is partly a result of a public increasingly irritated by a Hollywood product which is getting further and further from any kind of relevance, or even link to reality (and which functions by regurgitating half-digested formulas that have already been synthesized better in the past). And partly, again, it’s because documentaries have woken up to the potential of treating the raw material of “real” reality as fabric from which the most sophisticated artifact can be fashioned (that’s “art”-ifact). In this sense, of course, documentary is being more honest to the medium itself. And in this it will always be ahead of the Hollywood game, because the most subjective focus on experience, correctly handled within a documentary, will still be above and beyond the most ambitious attempt at objectivity by Hollywood fiction-makers. Despite the infamous Heisenburg principle, despite the distractions of lights, camera, and action, documentarians can profit from the ring of truth emanating from material with roots sunk deep into the soil of real earth (not the plastic filaments of Los Angeles astro-turf). To shift metaphors: no matter how manipulated, the subject matter utilized by documentarians still emerges fresh from reality’s dressing room. It retains the integrity of the real. Not so for Hollywood, which increasingly floats face down in the overheated swimming pool of it’s own image-making. Slovenian audiences, of course, are familiar with Hollywood toxins. It’s not just that they dominate every movie theater in town. They have also poisoned local film production so immaculately that the state sank half it’s yearly film-art contribution, last year, into an embarrassment of a war epic by a director who already proved repeatedly that he has nothing to say (but needs a lot of cash to say it). The Slovenian filmic landscape is littered with such stories. Slovenia will never be able to compete on the same ground as Hollywood, and shouldn’t even try. In the 80’s, then-Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica conquered the highest terrain of the international film landscape by making works concentrating on the concrete specificities of his local macro- and micro-historical experience. (His later collaboration with Serbian state fascism is another story.) More recently, Train Spotting came like a rocket out of the addled underworld of the UK narco-proletariat. To thoroughly paraphrase Tarkovsky, the most subjective vision has a fighting chance of being the most objective -- in fact, it can become truly universal. Whereas an imitation of something that is already an imitation of an imitation only turns into a muddy color xerox. It’s good only for the trash-can. Tarkovsky, of course, wasn’t speaking of documentary, but his observation applies here with even more contemporary relevance than in the case of dramatic film. Civilization, such as it is, is traveling further and further into a new zone of mediated reality. We are surrounded by screens, and spend a greater and greater time each year staring into them. The seductions of Hollywood and mass-market television have now been supplemented by cyberculture, which can be interactive but nevertheless has the effect of rendering all the infinite time and space outside it’s computer-monitor confines moot, even useless. How, then, to pull “reality” -- subjective/objective -- back into the frame? By transferring it to the screen, where it can be seen. Of course. For the past three years, Ljubljana has been conspicuously well-served in the documentary department of the Film Art Fest each year by Belgian expatriate film programmer Koen Van Daele. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that my film Predictions of Fire had its world premiere in this section last year.) By far the most concise, focused section of that film festival, it is an extraordinarily worthy part of Ljubljana’s annual cultural calendar. Despite some unfortunate, predictable choices imposed on Van Daele by the festival administration, this year was no exception. Out of the thirteen films offered, I’ve selected two which deserve special attention -- though I would certainly write about some of the others, given enough space. Romanian expatriate academic Andrei Ujica’s stunning film Out of the Present is specifically a revelation, for the simple fact that, when you back the camera off far enough, it manages to stake a claim for objectivity unparalleled in the history of cinema. Through the person of Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce wrote that the author, “like the God of creation”, should float above, “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” In the case of Out of the Present, the camera documents that zone, though it’s not bound by it. (In fact, at our current level of technological achievement, the camera couldn’t be further away from that project loosely called “civilization” -- and still document human life.) We’ve seen plenty of science fiction films in which humans hurtle through space and time, the very substance of the universe, only to emerge on the other side, guns blazing. They may as well have taken the subway. What we haven’t seen is the spectacle of men (and women) floating in orbital disassociation as an empire disassembles itself on the earth below. But is it really disassociation? Or is it rather an elusive, definitive objectivity? I vote for the latter. For me, part of the Soviet Union’s fascination lay precisely in its space program. Here was an empire composed primarily of wooden shacks with outdoor plumbing and vast, shabby workers’ dormitories -- structures that flatter themselves with the name “apartment buildings”. Yet the USSR, for all it’s horrors and prison archipelagos, was also a cradle of astrophysics, of frighteningly advanced airplane construction, and finally (after a continent-wide tracking shot across steppes and decaying socialist cities), of the amazing technical self-assurance of the world’s largest and most accomplished space program. Just beyond Baba Yaga’s wooden hovel, in other words, the towers of the Baikonur Cosmodrome gleam. With a thundering crash and roar, booster rockets continue to blaze a flame-trail into space from there, cracking the sky on their way to an orbital space station that has been continuously inhabited for more than a decade. This pinnacle achievement of Soviet science is the primary stage for Ujica’s film. It’s a stage where the rules of gravity have literally been turned on their head -- and not just as a cheap Hollywood trope. In the beginning was the word. That word was “light.” Out of the Present begins with a mesmerizing ghostly black and white TV image of the Mir space station. This grainy image is cradled in a web-work of Cyrillic lettering and spinning numerals of telemetry, but that can’t obscure -- in fact it only accentuates -- a strangely mythical quality. Mir in fact appears almost static, sprouting rectangular solar-power panels like Icarus’ wings. It is the earth which is moving, far beyond. Across this strangely fascinating, low resolution picture we hear the unhurried professionalism of the cosmonauts, talking to each other in measured tones. It becomes clear that a manual docking is in progress. We hear the following exchange: Cosmonaut 1: -- I think the camera should be turned on now. Cosmonaut 2: -- The camera! C1: -- That’s most important now. (The image, meanwhile, grows slowly on the TV monitor.) C1: -- Dock manually, Sasha. C2: -- Alright. C1: -- And you, Lena, go to the back and operate the camera... (Finally) C1: -- Lena, you can turn on the camera now... With this, the blurry black and white image cuts abruptly -- with the force of a revelation -- to the immaculate purity of a 35 mm color film frame of the space station. The effect is startling: a moving picture leaping from low-quality television directly into orbital flight -- the result of reflected light hitting the film-plane after its trip from the sun to the station and earth (Mir, appropriately enough, means both “peace” and “the world” in Russian). Microcosmos and macrocosmos are revealed, the machinery of space flight a white swan floating in the ineffable, endless fall of earth-orbit. It is therefore simultaneously Icarus falling and an unruffled swan. Falling, it remains composed and graceful as it glides across the distant cloudscapes and river deltas of that other Mir, the earth. As Ujica said: “It’s no longer the Olympian gods quarreling about the fall of Troy, but rather Homo Technicus in the heavens who learns about the break-up of an empire.” It is, in fact, precisely an empire which collapses into history -- not the wings of the spacecraft, which contain no wax but which do in fact have a relationship with the sun: they gather power. As Ujica’s friend pointed out to him (a story conveyed in his film notes), perhaps the only thing to survive the October Revolution is the space station. “Considering this,” Ujica writes, “I thought the converse: actually the revolution seems only to have survived at the space station.” By some cosmic sleight-of-hand, Out of the Present proceeds from this dazzling opening to put the events of the Earth into a kind of deep-focus perspective. It also places our period of history into what I would call movingly premature amber. The devices, the very machinery of the Soviet Union which we see -- launching and recovering cosmonauts who have landed, after blazing-hot re-entry (in the good old-fashioned heat-shield method the US, with it’s space-plane, has almost forgotten) -- this whole “Mir” is already fading back into time. It is the result of the investment and massive effort of an accumulation of resources and peoples which has now irrevocably shattered; perhaps the last of the old-style empires. The machinery of space-travel, so recently the embodiment of a dream of utopian progress, now already becomes a place where (due to complex political trading), a cosmonaut can be marooned for ten months, spinning one full orbit every 92 minutes. (Which, not by coincidence, is the exact length of the film as well). Such was the fate of Sergej Krikalev; his return to earth was delayed while the Soviet Union unraveled down below. The poignancy of his situation -- which loosely defines the core of this complex film -- is perhaps best illustrated by an exchange between a Moscow radio interviewer and the cosmonaut, in the middle of the momentous events of August 1991. Interviewer: -- At your take-off the USSR still existed and Gorbachev was in power. Your place of birth was called Leningrad, today it’s St. Petersburg. Which of these changes impresses you the most? Krikalev: -- I didn’t get the question. (The interviewer repeats the question.) Krikalev: -- Hard to say. So much has happened. But what surprises me most of all, perhaps, is this: Just now it was night, but now it’s light and the seasons rush past. That’s most impressive of all you can see from up here... His voice fades to silence, engulfed in a vast vacuum, at the end of an era. It’s our fate to leave the remainder always unsaid; perhaps appropriately so. Or is there a remainder at all? (I have never seen a better illustration of Beckett’s observation that words are “a stain on the silence.”) Out of the Present contains many other virtues. The images of earth, moon, and sun from orbit rank with the most exquisite ever recorded by a camera. One shot in particular of the sun, gradually easing below the horizon, while simultaneously skating laterally due to the station’s movement, encompasses a thousand conventional sun-sets in its delicate kinetic tracery of cloud-scapes. The references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris “dock” this work with two of the very few philosophical cinematic meditations on the significance of the space-age. (It’s somehow fitting that this is a nostalgic, backward look.) Finally, the extraction of the returned cosmonauts from the tiny, charred cinder of their cramped re-entry vehicle is inexpressibly moving. The voyagers have to be physically wrestled out of the narrow hatch. Covered with sweat, disoriented, frequently unable to walk unassisted, this scene of recovery is redolent with overtones of birth, or re-birth. Sitting feebly in a folding chair, a cosmonaut is handed a steaming cup. He takes a sip and closes his eyes. “Lovely tea,” he says with a sigh, “that’s so good.” Leaning his head back, we see sunlight reflect from his wet forehead. His hair ruffles in the breeze. “And the weather is wonderful.” Later, cosmonaut Arzebarski is asked by a journalist when, exactly, it is that a space traveler knows he’s home -- is it immediately after landing, or is it later? Arzebarski understands the question immediately, and answers without hesitation: “As soon as he breathes the earth’s air through the open hatch. The smell of the earth. That’s the feeling of being home again.” There’s no need for pious observations about how enlightened this product of return, of re-entry, Arzebarski’s identification with the planet is. Anyway, it’s too visceral to be “enlightened” in the conscious way we understand it. Departing the Soviet Union by going directly up, then returning to a Russia poised on the shifting sands of a collapsed empire, the lexicon of meanings has irrevocably changed in an entirely different way for these people. Orbital Krikalev’s reaction to the politically loaded questions emanating from earth is therefore not simply evasive. It truly doesn’t matter what his homeland or home city is called by the different tribes of our species. Home, in fact, is: The Earth -- Mir. Speaking of which, the historical deep focus of Out of the Present occurs again, in a kind of inverted way, in another revelation of the Documentary Section -- this one made up entirely of 35mm nitrate film shot between 1912 and 1933 in the Dutch East Indies. Mati Dao, Podobna Zelvi also starts with a creation myth, only this time it’s explicit. “According to a legend from the island of Nias”, Koen Van Daele writes in his catalogue notes, “the earth was created by Mother Dao. She collected the dirt off her body and kneaded it into the shape of a globe. Later she became pregnant -- without a man -- and gave birth to a girl and boy: the first inhabitants of a fertile world.” Conveying this information close to the beginning -- where else? -- the film also incorporates other poems and songs from Bahasa Indonesia, and is otherwise entirely without overt commentary. Apart from the prescience of the globe shape (are there any other creation myths that so accurately foretold what would come to be established as the true shape of the terrestrial realm?), the immaculate conception side of the story certainly gives grounds for reflection on the unity of the seemingly diverse, human species inhabiting Mir. As with Out of the Present, the images of Mati Dao (culled from over 260,000 meters shot by Dutch documentarians in a massive effort “to demonstrate the prosperity of the Dutch colonial enterprise”) include some of the most riveting film footage I’ve ever seen. A short list: -- The raw carnivorous ferocity of a sea-crocodile massacre on a beach. Let it suffice to say that these animals don’t give up without a fight. -- The almost blinding white suit of the colonialist, delivering a lecture in a hall, surrounded by an uneasy audience of brown-skinned locals. It could not have been better conceived as a purely visual illustration of colonialism (it’s practically an iconic image of the entire European colonial effort). -- The Tarkovskian beauty of workers tossing luminescent, weightless mountains of cotton filaments, and finally disappearing into them, literally swallowed up by their own efforts. -- The stomach-churning black comedy of the arrogant Dutch orchestra conductor, clumsily attempting to teach his hapless band of locals how to play a basic melody, entirely unable to disguise the condescension coloring every movement. The disturbing sense of European civilization as the planet’s brain, with the rest of Mati Dao’s children relegated to the role of muscles and lungs in this “fertile world”, is something not easy to shake after a screening of this film. That world and the one we live in, clearly, are not so distant from each other. What I’ve called “historical deep focus” truly kicked in, for this viewer anyway, at a specific moment. Shortly after footage of a (relatively) huge Dutchman who, in a good-humored way, measures the skull of a tiny aboriginal villager with calipers, the film cuts to an air-to-air shot of a biplane in flight. Suddenly a piece of machinery, which in other circumstances might seem almost comically antique, embodies the buzzing energy of the entire Modern revolution (and with it, all of Western civilization). High above the “third” world, it’s orbital progeny don’t even have to figure into the equation. Here is a frightening, floating flying machine, vibrating with the angry sound of a thousand horses behind an invisible propeller blade. A hallucination of heaver-than-air flight. A vision of power with four wings, high above the earth, perilously near the sun. The future, moving amber of the past.
|