TWO DOCUMENTARIES: ONE THEME:
Screened as part of the 2014 San Francisco Film Festival
Program, both films, each in their way, project the consequences of the neocolonialist
program in Africa’s Sudan (Sauper) and Asia’s Bhutan (Balmès). And both films
offer telling contrasts in terms of cinematic approach to time, to cutting and
intercutting techniques, to cultural diversity, and narrative to bring their
message home: neocolonialism is destroying indigenous cultures the world over
in its frenzy to grab resources (Sauper) or new markets (Balmès) for its
products.
“We Come As Friends,” Sauper’s fast-paced accounting of the
rape of recently partitioned Sudan delivers its message by intercutting images
of indigenous people who have been pushed aside, whose land and water has
simply been confiscated, whose children and animals are dying of drinking from
poisoned wells, and who have been forced to camp in the burial place of the
dead by the installation of a Chinese petroleum refinery, with an enterprise
congress where, while Hilary Clinton is live streamed on a huge television
screen, the West is represented at the feeding trough by porcine Caucasian
faces, repeatedly reciting the mantra: “This is not about profit: we are here
to HELP.” It is the kind of help indigenous people everywhere are learning to fear
at great cost.
Sauper’s small mosquito of a plane, built expressly for the
purpose of making the film, skims over the Sudanese savanna, dotted here and
there with circular thatched huts, and clover-leaf compounds rarely seen from
the air, landing on improbably bouncy landing strips, to catch the regional
politician–puppet of the West, whose cowboy hat is George Bush’s emblematic
gift, or to catch a U.S. ambassador delivering his pro forma clichés under the welcome shade of the White dignitaries’
canope while under the broiling sun Africans pay him absolutely no mind, intent
on affirming their own chaotic dances in what they recognize is an occasion
that is theirs to celebrate.
They cannot see the indifference of Chinese petroleum plant technicians
who never make contact with them, and who work and live in sanitized compounds,
dining in bullet-proof rooms; or fathom the arrogance of White contractors who have stolen their lands,
their water, mineral, and foresting rights, with contracts written in a language they can neither
speak nor read. It wouldn’t much matter if they could. The missionaries prove
no contracts are needed when they build their ranch-model houses on
goat-grazing land, enclose them with fences, and in response to native
objections, declare that the natives just better get used to it. After all, they are the
Jesus-People-Come-to-Help. And they talk
The Word of God.
Most telling in this accordion folded mirror of opposing culture
clashes is the visit Sauper pays to a missionary school. School uniforms are de rigeur now, shoes, and military line-ups. The children who still
wear native dress or come to school with native beads—as their people have worn
for millennia—are simply beaten. We are
reminded of the U.S. Indian Schools designed to "take the Indian out of the man." Take the culture out of a people, and you rob them of their identity; you make
it easier to rob them of their land and their resources as well.
Watching Sauper’s close ups of the eyes of starving
tribespeople is an encounter with the stark face of genocide. What is rather telling
is that in an interview he gives in January of 2014 on Democracy Now, Sauper
avers that the missionaries are good people and gave him and his crew
hospitality. But his comments at a recent Pacific Film Archive screening belie such
an anodyne view. “I can’t exactly tell you to enjoy the film,” he waved at the sold-out
audience, “but good luck.”
By contrast, Balmès’ “Happiness” is characterized by longer
takes, in an adagio-like linearity of narrative continuity. Balmès takes full
advantage of the formal announcement by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan in 1999
that to make “our people happy” Bhutan will now electrify the country so that
its people can benefit from access to TV and to the internet. Actual footage of
the royal proclamation and thousands of massed listeners prelude the film which
is set far from Thimphu, the capital, in a small farming hamlet high in the
Himalayas, where people trade, grow their own food, and herd yaks for milk,
butter-tea, and wool.
A widowed peasant woman and mother of five, tells her
9-year-old son that she cannot feed him or educate him and that she wants to
take him to the monastery up the mountain to become a Buddhist monk and where
he will be fed. We see her deliver her
son to the presiding lama, and help him don the monk’s skirt and shawl
before she leaves. All this occurs with contrasting indoor and outdoor shots:
indoor with tremendous virtuosity because the interior light appears entirely
natural—even in the night scenes—and not to have been boosted; and the vast
out-of-doors, the heart-stopping background of sharply rising hills, forested
valleys, snow fields, and snow capped peaks.
The narrative unfolds slowly, moment by moment, each of the
characters completely engaged in the concerns at hand: tending the fire, flying a kite, jumping off
a roof, holding onto the tail of a yak, spinning wool, reciting the sutras,
cleaning votive lamps; time is measured in the slow increments of daily life.
It has been enough for thousands of years. Until television arrives. We see the
slow unspooling of power lines along the ridges, the erection of electric poles, the work of surveyors, and
bulldozer operators. And we see the desire of each peasant family to get a
television set, to watch television, to charge less fortunate neighbors to
watch it, too.
We follow the small boy who teams up with a neighbor on a
trading expedition to Thimphu where a yak will be sold for money to replace a
broken set with a super size screen nearly as big as the man who has to handle
it and get it back to the village. We see the young boy’s delight at his first
(and perhaps only ever) ride in a motorized van. And back in the village, Balmès
concludes his essay. It is night. In hut after hut, we see the time-etched
faces of these peasants illuminated by the flickering light: pink, green,
purple, blue, with images of a place so foreign to them, they sit goggle-eyed
and mesmerized, experiencing “happiness” at last.
It is not necessary to take away a language. Just give a man
a box and tell him it contains a life-time of magic, and you invade his life,
his land, and his culture without arousing even a whimper.
No comments:
Post a Comment