Darwin's Nightmare, redux.

As I've now seen the film, Ben and I are able to share our shock and awe at the power and the glory that is Darwin's Nightmare.

A reminder of what Ben sed:

I have struggled to find my opening sentence and this lame offering is it. This is a must-see film, a great cinematic essay. Against the decontextualization of everything on behalf of postmodernism's reduction of reality to a virtual shoping spree, this film delivers a chunk of our actually existing world with ramifications that register off the chart.
We are so long past bullshit about objectivity in documentary film-making. Like I said, this is an essay. And the concrete is placed in just enough context to give the critical "big picture," the local case is shown to have global systemic causes.

But just like a literary essay of yester-year, the exposition of this is not some dry, analytical affair. So much of persuasion is rhetoric and the good documentarians today have enough command of cinematic grammar to fashion - what else to call it? - art. There is some amazing photography and the overall edit is masterful. The film is lean. Everything not only contributes but gains momentum and eventually comes together. Like I said about Lee's Levee, it has an argument. I am simply drawing attention to the brilliance of it's composition. The images are not subtle - how could they be? Shit, each one tells a thousand words and the words are all about oppression, poverty, degredation, desperation. But Jesus, how in hell did they even get the footage they got? And Christ, they cut the pieces together with outstanding craft in order to best enable the information to coalesce.

It is because things do not just speak for themselves that this excellence in documentation is so vital. This is journalism that knows neutrality is a myth and, dialectically, by taking an attached point of view, shows us greater truth about the whole. Have I made it clear that I am recommending the fuck out of this film?

I will not get into the content. I just want to mention I had no idea about the subject matter of DN , thought it was about religious fundamentalism in the US (again). You corrected me somewhat insofar as you told me it is about ecological crisis is some way. That is right. But DN is even more about imperialist political economy, down on the ground in Tanzania. The particular environmental disaster associated with Lake Victoria is only addressed in passing, in the context of the fishing industry that is the monocultural economy of the place - boom, and off we go. All down on the ground, so bloody awful down on the ground.

And since I was just talking about meta-conscious frame-busting in my review of The Prestige, there is a moment of filmic feed-back loop in DN that is so powerful it's staggering. Not this, context-is-always-shifting shit of the dilettante. This is, let's-return-that-to-where-we-found-it-for-even-more-of-THAT-REAL-context. I will not ruin your experience of this moment in the film by going into detail. Yes, I'm actually respecting the spoiler code for once. Just remember me when you watch the film. And please, you must watch this film.

And Finally, My Repost:

First, I must simply declare that this is a flat out, slap you in the face, kick you in the nuts great film. As we've discussed many times, we really are living in a golden age of documentaries. Michael Moore, for all his faults, surely deserves some credit for bringing the documentary out of the art houses and into the mainstream, while guys like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog just seems to be getting better with age. Hell, one of my favourite films from '06 was a doc—no, I'm not talking about Al Gore's Power Point Presentation, but rather Dave Chappelle's Block Party—and the last four films I've watched—DN, Why We Fight, Operation Homecoming and the 70s Vietnam war classic Hearts and Minds-- have all been terrific docs. However, even judged by today's heightened standards, director Sauper's work stands tall.

That said, I must confess that as the film unfolded, I initially struggled a bit to find the form in its apparently meandering ramblings. I watched the bug-killing air traffic controllers, Tanzanian working girls, and drunken, topless Russian pilots do their thing in a rather bemused and detached fashion in this strange African wasteland. Sure, there were these goddamned gigantic fish, which proved strikingly photogenic, and which were clearly the center of the ecological and economic problems besetting this land, but do we really need another environmental disaster film? What the hell was all this jibber jabbering with the locals going to add up to?

And then things begin to cohere, as moments that appear random creep back and punch you in the back of the head. The three women studying video of the dead prostitute, singing that sweet Tanzanian tune, was a moment of such poignancy and painful self-awareness, reminiscent of a moment in the aforementioned Hearts and Minds, where the director Peter Davis lingers on a shot of an angry Vietnamese villager, who tries his best to escape the camera's gaze, then turns to the lens and ferociously charges that the Americans kill them twice, the first time they shoot them with bullets, the second time with a camera. The lesson, that the filmmaker, for all his ideals and raised consciousness, remains a member of the same imperialist force, seems to me to fit nicely into this shot as well. And there's also the film's brilliant editing that takes us from a public official urging documentarians to show the good as well as the bad to images as horrific as humanly imaginable—children brawling over fetid rice, then sharing snorts of glue distilled from the carnivorous fish's packaging and hits off of cigarettes, women and plucking tiny morsels of edible meat off the mountains of maggoty fish bones. And what can you say about that heartbreaking anecdote of the Russian pilot? Has anyone captured with more precision the essence of this imperial relationship? And finally, while Sauper's use of the Nile Perch as a metaphor for rapacious cannibalistic global capitalism may lack the conciseness of the Russian's story, it makes up for this with it's insightful, spot-on critique of same. Both ravage their environment unchecked, consequences be damned, and when things get tight, they both turn on their own, cannibalizing the defenseless.

I was also very impressed by the filmmaker's ability to make such a strong statement without actually speaking in the film. Sauper allows those most deeply affected by the situation to tell their own story, in their own words. Of course, Sauper decides how to edit all of this material together, but still, it takes a lot of confidence in your storytelling and requires a lot of faith in your audience, to refrain from overt commentary, and I salute the director's abilities here, because I think the film is much more powerful because of this decision.

Darwin's Nightmare is a dirty, nasty and essential film. Brilliant stuff.

Then Ben:

Yes we have mentioned more than once that we are presently in a cultural period wherein documentary film-making is achieving a high degree of excellence and influence. Personally, I am about ready to read some academic theory on this because it seems to me that the mandate in modernism with respect specifically to realism-in-art is being inverted to a (so-called) postmodern agenda for art-in-realism; that is, the original mandate is being transplanted into what was hitherto non-artistic journalistic practice.

In reviewing Spike Lee's When The Levee Broke, I highlighted his departure from the bogus standard of objectivity, calling the non-neutral editing of the content an "essay." But just as an argument in writing cannot be pure reasoning that is convincing but also must be rhetoric that is persuasive, the new approach to the documentary incorporates the documentarian's subjectivity not just as an editorial manipulation of the content but also as an artistic expression of the form.

You are correct that Michael Moore is most responsible for throwing down the opinionated gauntlet, at least in North America. But his approach is actually relatively old-school agit-prop journalism, albeit organized through a First Person lens, and he just happens to wear all the the hats; director, writer editor, narrator, on-camera reporter. Your reference to Werner Herzog, on the other hand - and clearly it's no accident that he is also known and perhaps even better known as a director of fictional tales and an auteaur in general - this is the genuinely new "essay" approach to the documentary I have in mind.

Frankly, I think it might prove necessary to stop calling it "documentary." Contrary to the myth of objectivity, the centrality of the film-maker's point of view in both the form and the content, both ideologically and aesthetically, actually brings us more in touch with the objective facts. What to name this dialectic? I hope Cinemania will host a contest and to kick it off I propose: Testimony. The court stenographer who could care less merely documents the trial - the witness to the event whose own life was changed by it gives testimony.

Hubert Sauper testifies in DN. You remark in passing that he is able to make a "statement" with his film. This is right and captures the artistic side of what I am on about. Yet, Sauper is able not only to "make" a statement, he is able to GIVE one. This is to remember the realism of his testimony. It's not that the facts speak for themselves, they never do. It's that the film-maker gives voice to them. He is not just engaged by them, he is engaged with them.

On this score, I am not sure you are right to suggest that Sauper in DN is analogous to Davis in Hearts and Minds (which I have not seen). I am not so naive to proclaim that DN is a non-contradictory "part of the solution," but I would not be so quick to implicate it as yet another manifestation of the imperialism it witnesses. For what it's worth, the film raised the fuck outta my consciousness and it's not Sauper's fault that I don't know what to do about it. And perhaps you will accuse me of retreating from political activism into theoretical formalism, but the scene you describe in Hearts and Minds sounds very different from the one in DN to which you compare it. Far from attempting to escape the camera and then confronting it head on as an antagonist, the prostitutes in DN welcome Sauper's camera and he does not exploit their trust. Quite the contrary, he uses film to allow them to be witnesses to their own shared history and - I believe - raises their consciousness in the process. I hope this does not appear condescending, as if they would be lost without Sauper or some white-man's-burden shit. I'm just trying to make a case against reading DN as "part of the problem." In any case, I am adamant that Sauper showing the whores the exact same footage he showed us earlier in the film is art-in-realism and not a cheap exploitation of either his subjects or his viewers. Used simply as a technical device, it would be postmodern decadence of the most offensive sort. But it is used as a tool of education, for the whores, for me, and at bedrock Sauper himself. To "essay" is to attempt, after all.

You state that Sauper does not actually speak himself in DN. Compared to the tactics of, say, Micheal Moore, this is correct. However, it is not literally the case. Not unlike Herzog in, say, Grizzly Man, Sauper - or someone "on set" - asks questions off camera. This is not trivial. The question-asking has to do with the supposed emptiness of the planes when they arrive. The pacing of this ultimately leads to the confession by the Russian pilot at the conclusion of the film. But even before this, the question is asked a number of times and caught me off guard most powerfully. At first I thought the question was asked to make us consider how wrong it is for Tanzanians to export fish they cannot afford to eat themselves and not even receive any needed imports that they can afford in return; to display the lie of "free trade," to show the truth about the exchange between capital and those in need without effective demand. But no Ben, you fool, the planes arrive in Tanzania full, all too full. You did not reveal the nature of this cargo in your review and I refrain from doing so now. And notice that we are applying spoiler rules normally meant for fiction/art to a documentary. This is for me confirmation that DN is an example of what I have called testimony.

But enough cinephile chit-chat. Jesus Christ! The humanity. People are living those lives on this planet right now. It's beyond empathy. I can't even begin to imagine... Never mind Darwin, those mountains of maggoty fish bones you mention - to live on that, in that, with that - nightmare. Hell on earth. Brando mumbling "the horror, the horror" surrounded by a bunch of heads on sticks is cartoon stupidity in comparison. The art of DN is IN REALISM.

And Dan:

I did not mean to leave the impression that either Davis's or Sauper's film is another example of imperialist exploitation. I respect both films immensely (I'll get Hearts and Minds in your hands soon), and believe that they both are "part of the solution" to use modern parlance. Still, Davis's point does transfer (at least to some extent) to Sauper's film. That is, both filmmakers are using images of "third world" depravity to create a product for consumption back in the imperialist homeland, and even if the images stake out some sorta higher ground or aim for a greater good, there's still an element of exploitation about it. I mean, when Sauper was filming that young woman singing that song, only seconds before she was being manhandled and tossed around by some asshole Russian, and the filmmaker captured the moment without intervening. I wonder if he would have done anything if the Russian started to beat her? I mean, he shows ups images of Tanzanians, both young and not-so-young, beating each other up in the streets, and he doesn't seem to do anything there. To me, there's an element of exploitation to that sort of documentary filmmaking.

Again, that's not to say that the film as a whole is exploitative. It's obviously got it's heart and brain in the right place, and I cannot think of any recent film that moved me as much as this one. It's one a helluva film.

Then Ben:

When it comes to the commodification and marketing of third world suffering in radical packaging for the likes of you and me, I will admit that there are all sorts of political problems associated with this. What you are identifying as an element of exploitation in DN is not substantiated by the examples you mention, however. With respect to those examples, it seems to me that you are asking for a level of engagement that would necessarily lead to the film not getting made at all. It would require putting the camera down and taking up arms, as it were. You are telling the film-maker that it is not enough to impose his camera, he must intervene bodily. It is not enough to bear witness, he must participate. If this is to place the personal taking of political action above the personal making of documentation, you'll get no argument from me. But if we are willing to allow for the personal making of documentation, I think is is worthwhile to touch base with the case of Kieslowski, who ultimately did not have the stomach for the job. It is awkward for me to have to uphold this position, so standard is it for me to promote engagement. Nevertheless, I have to insist on some more dialectics because having a point of view is not to step into view and the engagement so vital to giving testimony can not be absolute, it must be tempered by detachment. You wonder if Sauper would have stepped in if the john's abuse of the prostitute had become openly violent. I wonder if he had stepped in under any provocation, would the film exist. Or are you going so far as to suggest that the subsequent murder of the prostitute is indirectly on the hands of the film-maker, too busy watching the daily rushes to get involved? I didn't think so.

And Dan:

Perhaps you're right, and I'm being too sensitive on this matter. It still bothers me, and while there is no easy way out (I'm convinced that the world would be a lesser place if the filmmaker had decided to drop the camera and surrender his art in order to wade into the situation) I can't help but feel a bit compromised as it unfolds.

And rather than (or in addition to?) reading up on the causes of the (re-)surgence of documentary filmmaking, maybe you need to write about it. I think you're onto something with the suggestion that it is a reaction to post-modernism and notions that an objective, tangible reality may not exist outside of our perceptions of same, because the best of these filmmakers sure so seem to make a compelling case against such solipcism.

Then Finally Ben:

I don't think that you're being too sensitive on this matter. Not at all. What you might be, however, is too sensitive about being sensitive. This is to propose that your response to certain scenes in DN might be best understood as a defence mechanism on your part. And I'm not trying to put you down now, I'm out to compliment you. And Sauper too, at the same time. Simply put, he got to you. It is a tribute to your compassion that it is possible to get to you. But you've got to give it up to him for getting to you. For the most part, you do so. Yet, it seems to me, another part of you feels: How dare he!

Initially, this feeling did not come out directly. You projected it onto and on behalf of certain persons in the film. Now, you are more directly speaking for yourself. You say you can't help but feel a bit compromised by the film. Hey, I felt compromised too. Bloody awful compromised man. But not BY THE FILM - BY THE REALITY. I said before that Kieslowski ultimately did not have the stomach to make documentaries. Well, please do not think that I am on a macho trip when I say that it takes some kind of stomach to watch the likes of DN. Liberal flight from the film will - correctly - point out that is it horribly one-sided, shows nothing positive, gives no hope, never mind a practical suggestion. But real critique, genuine radicalism, must not turn away too quickly from the negative facts of the matter.

Previously, you thought you sniffed a scent of voyeurism in the film that even smelled a bit of callous slumming. I responded to this by advocating the film-maker's detachment as necessary to some extent. Prior to this I said that DN educated my stupid commie ass and it's not Sauper's fault that I don't know what to do about it; that I don't know how to use his detachment for my engagement. You objected to the film-maker not reaching out from behind the safety-glass that is the camera lens, to which I responded: But what would you have the film-maker do? Now, I follow your lead but return the question from whence it came. For I believe you asked of Sauper what his film forces us to ask of ourselves. What is to be done?

I reiterate that Sauper's film is not cheap exploitation of either his subjects or his viewers. Or his viewers. That includes you. Meanwhile, if anyone is being too sensitive here it is me. Clearly, DN fucked me up and I... don't know what to do about it. And while I sincerely thank you for your suggestion that I write some (more) theory about documentary as testimony as art-in-realism as a critical response to postmodern solipsism - like that's gonna help change the world.