From Word To Word

This last Sunday fell very close to Remembrance Day, which is celebrated on November 11th here in Canada, so I decided to show the Senior High class Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, one of the great holcaust films, and one that would raise some of the larger issues that I have with the ways that we tend to remember.

The film’s strength is the tone that it is able to maintain.  Most holocaust films, and most films dealing with similarly horrific events, tend to rely for their effect on the kind of emotional responses that people have to the shocking images.  They are less aesthetic objects with their own aesthetic sensibility, then they are an exploitation of an object of horror to provoke emotions in the viewer.  As a response to this approach, other films have attempt to remain rigorously factual, presenting the objects of horror with an attitude of detachment, which is equally mi representative of its subject.

Night and Fog, however, avoids both of these extremes.  While it does present much disturbing archival material, and while it does include much information about the holocaust, it does so in a way that is less concerned with these things than in creating an aesthetic object that would do justice to these things.  In juxtaposition to the archival footage, it presents long and continuous shots of the Nazi death camps more than a decade after they were captured by the allies.  The camps are eerily empty, overgrown with vegetation, littered with the implements of their former occupants.  It is easy to imagine that ghostly hands still wield the machinery of death, that spectral prisoners in their multitudes are still herded into the death chambers and fed into the ovens.

The effect of the archival images and Resnais’ new shots together is a violent disjunction.  The lived horror of the one is brutally opposed to the ghostly tranquility of the other, and the relationship between them is reduced to an always inadequate memorial of the one by the other.  The juxtapositin  says, in effect, that it is impossible to recapture the events of the holocaust, that it is only possible to remember them in one fashion or another, and also that our forms of memory have been and continue to be implicated in the kinds of violence that is being remembered.  The narrator himself makes this argument as the film closes, noting that the memory of the holocaust has not prevented the occurrence of similar atrocities since, a fact that our forms of memorial fail to remember.

It is this occluded memory that I find so difficult in the celebration of Remembrance Day, and it is this occluded memory that I tried to explain to my class on Sunday.  I certainly do recognize the importance of remembering the things that we remember, but I am disturbed that our remembrance of these things is too often a refusal to remember the many other things that similarly need a memorial, a refusal to remember our own participation in these other things, a refusal to remember that these things are occurring even now and that we are even now implicated in them.  For many years, there was a slogan attached to Remembrance day: “Never Again”.  We repeated these words to each other, year after year, comfortably separated by time and geography from the events that we were remembering, and failing absolutely to recognize that wwhat we were remembering was happening again and again, continually.

To the extent, therefore, that Remembrance Day is a call to remember particular wars in particular places, I would say that it can only prevent us from truly remembering.  In order for it to produce in us a true memorial, it must always also be a recollection of ongoing war and violence and atrocity, a refusal to ignore the fact of these things in our past and in our present.

The Dinner and a Doc group met on Saturday night to watch The Real Dirt on Famer John, which is directed by Taggart Siegel.  We accompanied it with homemade mushroom soup, with a beautiful sourdough bread that I bought from a new vendor at the market, with apple cider from a farmer for whom I used to work, and with some desserts that people brought despite my explicit instructions that they bring nothing at all.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.

Considering that I teach courses in documentary film, I should probably not admit that I just this morning watched Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera for the first time.  I have read quite a lot about the film, of course.  It is impossible to pick up a book on the subject of documentary without reading about its significance to the development of the genre through its experimentation with various filming and editing techniques, its use of montage, and its self-reflexive treatment of the cameraman, the director, the editor, and the machinery of film.  I have even lectured on all of this, more than once, but I have never seemed to find the time to actually watch the film.

As is almost always the case, the experience of the film surprised the expectations that my reading had formed for me.  What impressed me most about the film was its attention to the everyday.  It takes for its subject the people of the city in their daily activities. but it attends to these things in ways that make them strange and beautiful and fearful and compelling.  It shows their rhythm, not only the natural rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, but the artificial rhythms and  repetitions of the worker and the machine, of the cog and the wheel and the engine and the piston.  It is this labour that the film valourizes, this repetition that is a vitality and a strength rather than a tedium.

Vertov is very concerned to show that the film and the filmmaker are also a part of this rhythmic labour and this driving vitality.  The camera or the cameraman or the editor appear in every scene, and they are always engaged in the same kinds of activity that are being filmed.  As the town wakes, the filmmaker leaves his house and leaps aboard the open car from which many of the shots are taken.  As the trolleys carry the crowds to work, the camera is riding aboard them as well, or it is placed closely among them and among the throng.  As the people begin their labour in the factories, the film stock is whirled on its spools, sliced and joined, labeled and arranged in neat rows for the eye of the editor.  As the town retires to the beach in the afternoon, the camera is shown in the water also, the cameraman bathing beside it.  The clear and insistent argument is that the camera is a significant part of the vital and productive city, that its artistic function is not distinct from the labour that drives the city and the nation.

Interestingly, this vision of the working city and of the working camera remain compelling, even if its valourization of the industrial landscape and the automated existence now seem somewhat idealistic and naive.  Despite ninety years of increasing disillusionment with the industrial enterprise, whatever its politics, the film still manages to make the worker and the factory and the worker and the machine seem things worth romanticizing. Its propagandist function remains effective even at this far a remove.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the film also.  There are some truly beautiful scenes, like the images of a sleeping woman’s arm as it lies on the coverlet, or like the flames of a foundry’s furnace that remind me of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness.  There are also some charmingly flippant moments, like the scene where the camera seems to assemble itself for an audience, or the one that captures the interaction between a couple filing divorce papers.  My version of the film also has a beautifully apt musical score composed by Michael Nyman, music that captures perfectly the rhythmic drives of the film.  All of which is to say that I should now have a better vantage from which to discuss the film the next time I teach a documentary course, and I should also have more credibility when I recommend it tp you, as I very strongly do.

I had a chance to screen three documentaries in three very different settings last week.  On Monday, I showed Heidi Ewing’s Jesus Camp to my Survey of Literature I class, comparing its ironic portrayal of religious practises to that of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  On Saturday evening, at my monthly Dinner and a Doc event, I showed With God on Our Side: George Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right as a supplement to the discussion group that my wife will be running later this month on the role that religion is playing in the current political environment.  On Sunday morning, for my Senior High group, I showed Jehane Noujaim’s The Control Room, as an introduction to the problem of bias in the media. I like all three of these films very much, and they are certainly relevant to one another, so there are likely things that could be said about the experience of watching them in so c lose a proximity, but I think that I will just share a moment from each and leave the analysis for another day.

My favourite scene from Jesus Camp is also one of the most surreal moments in any documentary I have ever seen.  It takes place during a worship session at the camp.  All the children are assembled in the auditorium, when one of the leaders enters the stage with a life-sized cardboard cutout of George W. Bush.  The cutout is placed on the stage and introduced as if it is the President himself, and the children are invited to come forward, lay their hands on it, and pray for the leader of their country.  The resulting scene resembles nothing more than the kind of stereotype of idol worship that one finds in a Hollywood film.  It is, though it certainly does not intend to be, a pointed parody, not only of how many Americans worship the president, not only of how many American Christians have come to conflate politics for religion, but also of how American Christians have often depicted other religions as idolatrous.

There are actually several related moments that I like in With God on Our Side.  The first is a scene of Billy Graham telling a crowd that, contrary to the communists, Christ taught the value of private property.  The second is of an evangelical leader telling the interviewer that getting registered to vote is the most important thing that a person can do besides attaining to eternal salvation. The third is of Jerry Falwell saying that the three main purposes of evangelicalism are to get people saved, get them baptised, and get them registered to vote.  The three scenes together illustrate so perfectly the ways that Christianity in the United States has become conflated with a certain kind of capitalist economics and a certain kind of democratic politics, to the point where they have become three inseparable tenets of some uniquely American religion that is as much economic and political as it is theological.

The part of The Control Room that I enjoy most is also a series of scenes, functioning as a kind of personal narrative that ties the film together.  They are the scenes of the young United States Army Captain, a communications liaison at the army’s Central Command.  Though the Captain initially defends the party line very closely, the images he sees begin to disrupt the certainty of his thinking, and he eventually admits that he has come to hate war, even if he does not think the world can do without it yet.  The interviews of the Captain by various other media representatives and by the filmmakers themselves are among the most interesting in the film.  They feel very personal at times, and yet they are filmed in ways and in places that constantly remind the viewer of the Captain’s public location and official position. The effect is interestingly conflicted.

All three films are worth seeing, and they inform each other in strange ways.  There is an argument to be made from them on the interrelation of politics, economics, religion, and nationalism in the United States, and also on the way that the media functions to reinforce the conflation of these elements, but, as I said earlier, I will leave the analysis for another day.

This past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc was an interesting one, though not for the reasons I expected.  I had intended to make tomato soup, since last Saturday was tomato sauce day, and I expected to have a fair number of tomatoes remaining.  In the event, however, we used all the tomatoes but had perhaps a quarter of a bushel of red peppers left, so I made roasted red pepper soup instead, a recipe so good that I will keep it and make it again when I have a chance.

I had planned to screen Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick and Katerina Cizek, and I will likely do so next month instead, but we had only a very few people come, and the consensus was that we wanted something a little different, a little less intense.  So, we had a look at my collection and decided to watch Touch the Sound by Thomas Riedelshiemer, a film that explores the music of Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist who is also deaf.  What I saw of it, between putting children to bed, was quite interesting, and everyone seemed to enjoy it very much.

Though I usually try to have some discussion after the film, people mostly dissipated fairly quickly, helping with the dishes or going their way, and I found myself on the porch instead, smoking my pipe with my brother and conversing about music and sports and the preserves that he was stealing from me in order to supplement the diet of a starving artist.  We talked very little about the film, but our conversation was good and fitting with the rest of the evening: not what I expected, but good in any case.

Dave Humphrey likes to say that we are the festival, making reference to an idea from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.  He means by this that the festival only occurs in the way that it does, only occurs at all, in fact, because we go to it, participate in it, and, in short, make it what it is.  I had something of that feeling on Saturday night, that those who attended made it what it was, which was something quite different than I had expected.  The event became what it was quite apart from anything I had planned, and what it became was good in its own right.  It was good because those who came made it what they needed it to be.

While on Manitoulin Island this past week, I discovered an interesting literary coincidence.  I am always looking for bargain books and films to add to my collection, even in as unlikely a place as Manitoulin, and I purchased several things during the course of the week.  At the Providence Bay Fair, in a stall of used and abused odds and ends, I found Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s The Celluloid Closet, a very good documentary on the history of how homosexuality has been depicted in Hollywood film.  At the Providence Bay Library, which is open all of three hours a day on two days a week, I also acquired George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Aldous Huxley’s Island.  I watched The Celluloid Closet several months ago, and I have read The Princess and the Goblin several times over the years, so, the moment that I finished Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I turned, with immeasurable relief, to Huxley’s Island.

Island is a fascinating novel in many ways, though it is sometimes a little stilted, in that the events of the plot often seem to serve the necessities of the philosophical argument rather than to tell an involving story.  This is probably a greater issue for readers today than it was for those who were contemporaries of the book’s initial publication, simply because so much of its philosophy is historically circumscribed and no longer compelling.  The sort of utopia that the novel advocates, a pseudo-Buddhism mixed with some scientism and topped with a little mescaline induced self-realization, is too much the idealism of another time to have much intellectual force any longer. Even so, the structure of the story is strong, and its conclusion, which I will not disclose for those who have not read it, is forceful.  Also, despite the now unconvincing solutions that it presents, the novel’s political, social, and economic critique remains often valid and insightful.  There is much in this respect, along with a very readable story, to recommend the novel even now.

None of this, however, has much to do directly with the the literary coincidence that I set out discuss, a coincidence that appears very early in the novel, when Will Farnaby, the protagonist, refers to another utopian novel, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.  The coincidence here is that I only just recently read Erewhon after finding it in a North Carolina used bookstore on my last trip, so that, with the strange illogic that seems to characterize my existence, I actually purchased two different novels by two different authors in two different countries on two consecutive trips, and one just happened to reference the other in an explicit and substantial way.

What makes this coincidence even more interesting is that it plays a significant role in establishing one of Island’s central themes.  The reference consists in Farnaby saying, borrowing the words of Higgs, Erewhon’s protagonist and narrator, “As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.”  Farnaby actually quotes these words three times, twice mentioning their source explicitly, and dwelling on their irony each time.  I am not interested in providing a definitive explanation of why Huxley emphasises this allusion so heavily.  There are probably several such reasons, and there have likely been more than one unreadable PhD dissertation written on the subject.  My own interest has to do with how the allusion defines the nature of Faraday’s appearance on the island, either as chance or as destiny.

Higgs, who spoke the words first, during his discovery of Erewhon, very much confuses the ideas of luck and providence.  Though he clearly believes himself to be under the influence of a divine providence, his words unconsciously make this providence seem to depend on luck, revealing that he is less a man of religious belief than he is a man of convenient belief, which is characteristic of how Butler depicts him.  His real religion is in profit, and providence is merely a convenient word, roughly equivalent to luck, that he can use to describe the good fortune that he finds in his pursuit of gain.  His story is not one of spiritual or even personal growth.  Quite the opposite, Higgs ends the novel almost precisely as he began it, determined to exploit Erewhon for his own ends just as he was initially determined to exploit the unclaimed mountain pastures for his own ends.  Higgs’ story is entirely irreligious, entirely unprovidential, in this sense.  He is not brought by an external force toward a salvation.  He merely pursues his own interests and uses the idea of providence to justify his successes after the fact.  He sees no irony in a providence that depends upon and is little different from plain luck.

Faraday, however, is acutely aware of how ironic Higg’s phrase really is, and he uses it to describe his equivocal feels about how has arrived on the island.  “As luck would have it,” he keeps saying, “Providence was on my side.”  Though he does not believe in providence, neither can he fully believe that the circumstances of his arrival on the island and of his survival of the storm are merely luck.  He seems to quote Higgs defensively, seeing something almost providential in what has happened to him, and disparately placing Higgs’ irony between him and this possibility.  Whereas Higgs does not even recognize that he makes providence depend on mere luck, Faraday sees and clings to this dependence as a defence against the possibility of providence, even when other characters present him explicitly with the possibility that he was destined to come to the island.

Faraday’s fear and rejection of providence are interesting because his story, in contrast to Higgs’, is precisely a providential one, where he is brought to salvation, seemingly by forces beyond himself.  In opposition to Higgs, whose experience of utopia fails to change him any significant way, Faraday’s narrative is one of a journey to a kind of intellectual, political, social, and personal salvation.  His is a conversion story and a salvation story, though he is converted and saved in ways that are quite different from his preconceived religious notions.  His journey, though he fails to recognize it entirely, has all the markers of the providential.  It is a religious journey, for the same reasons that Higg’s journey is irreligious.  Where Higgs espouses a providence that really depends upon luck, Farady espouses a luck that comes to depend upon providence.

Huxley does not actually decide for his readers in favour of providence, of course, and I will refrain from doing so also.  Huxley does, however, decide for his readers in favour of posing the question of luck and providence, not just as a simple binary, as in most utopias, nor just as a simple irony, as in Erewhon, but as a complex question that cannot, and perhaps should not, ever be answered definitively.  Rather than argue for a providence that can be defended as such, he seems to propose a kind of providence that never appears clearly as what it is, but can always be understood as merely luck, a providence that might just exceed the very opposition between luck and providence.  I think there is something true in this.

A month or so ago, my friend Dawn Matheson sent me a link to a discussion between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris that was published in The Believer. I only found the chance to read it last night, but it was well worth the time I made for it. Herzog and Morris are among my favourite directors, and their discussion, coming out of a long acquaintance, was both illuminating and intimate. The two comment on each other’s work, discuss their perspectives on certain general issues related to documentary filmmaking, and recollect the times when they had visited serial killer Ed Kemper and almost exhumed the mother of murderer Ed Gain. I have not read anything more entertaining in a very long while.

Morris is perhaps the most influential documentary filmmaker of this generation. His first film, Gates of Heaven, was unlike anything that had been made before it. The Thin Blue Line, one of his later films, was the first documentary ever to have a murder sentence reversed. I screened his Oscar winning The Fog of War at my Dinner and a Doc event a few months ago, a film that remains one of my favourites. His newest release, Standard Operating Procedure, which I have yet to see, looks at the photographs that were taken of the torture in Abu Ghraib prison. His subjects are varied to the point of eclecticism (from the forced move of a pet cemetary to the strange and remarkable life of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.), but all are characterized by a sense of narrative and story that distinguish them from most documentaries. They always bear several viewings.

Herzog is, if anything, even more eclectic in his work than Morris. He has directed countless films, both fictional and documentary, has published many books, and has also directed operas. His documentaries range from Grizzly Man, which is more or less traditional in form and is probably his best known work, to My Best Fiend, a personal and often surreal account of his volatile working relationship with actor Klaus Kinski, to Lessons of Darkness and Fata Morgana, highly imagistic and poetic works that rank very highly among my favourite films. Herzog is himself a figure of mythical proportions. Accounts of his exploits on the sets of his films, particularly early in his career, almost surpass believability. He is a person I would both love and fear to meet.

What I particularly enjoyed in the dialogue between these two personalities was the very brief exchange on what Morris calls “ecstatic absurdity”, which he says is something that he understands in Herzog’s films.  Morris defines ecstatic absurdity as “the confrontation with meaninglessness,” and he goes on to say that Herzog’s work “could be considered an extended essay on the meaning of meaninglessness.”  I think that this is a very useful way to talk about what Herzog does in many of his films, particularly the more surreal and imagistic ones, and it may also be a useful way to talk about Morris’s own work, though his films are not so obviously concerned with the absurd and the meaningless.  Perhaps, at the risk of generalizing Morris’ phrase itself into meaninglessness, I might even say that any film worth the name, whether fictional or documentary, every work of art worth the name, any thinking worth the name, should be characterized by this ecstatic absurdity, by this confrontation with meaninglessness.  Though it is not a confrontation that can ever be absolutely decided, a willingness to confront meaninglessness may define best what it is that I value most in art.

I changed the location of the Dinner and a Doc event last night.  We had been meeting in a local church space, but I decided to try hosting the meal and screening at my own place.  I really enjoyed the change.  Some friends brought their young daughter with them, much to the delight of my eldest son, and the kids circulated freely through the house during the meal and the film, their parents following dutifully behind.  My mother brought a crisp of freshly picked sakatoon berries, which beautifully finished the meal after the homemade potato soup.  The atmosphere felt less constrained and more intimate.  I think that I will repeat the experiment in August.

The film this month was Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which introduces the photography of Edward Burtynsky, famous for his images of industrial, fabricated landscapes.  The film follows Burtynsky as he visits various sites, mostly in China, and photographs the disturbing and yet somehow beautiful landscapes that are the by-product of industrial humanity.  The images are often vivid: a slow tracking shot that moves down a seemingly endless factory floor; derelict ships half-dismantled on a beach; mountains of hand-sorted recycling; people demolishing their own cities, brick by brick, to make way for ships in what will be the reservoir of a new dam.  There are no descriptions that can do these visuals justice.  They need to be seen and experienced.

The effect of the documentary footage and of Burtynsky’s own stills, especially when they are layered over each other in succession like they are in the film, is to defamiliarize industrial humanity, to make strange the economic and social systems that have become normalized for most of us.  There is an overwhelming sense of estrangement from the photographic subjects, as if they have been discovered on an alien planet or the set of some fantastic film.  The film constantly forces the viewer to confront the strange, unnatural, inhuman ways that industrial humanity transforms its own landscape.

The phrase that kept ocurring to me throughout the film is from Ivan Illich.  In several of his books, Illich talks about how social relatations and institutions have become “industrially deformed”, and though he does not explicitly use this phrase in relation to the modern manufactured landscape, I do not think he would object to my using the idea in this way, because the industrial landscape is inextricably linked to other industrial relations and institutions.  It is not that one produces the other, but that they both produce each other, reinforce each other, construct each other as normal and natural ways of being.

By forcing us to confront the strange and unnatural landscapes of industrial humanity, therefore, Baichwal’s film and Burtynsky’s images should also force us to confront the strange and unnatural relationships, institutions, and systems that produce these landscapes.  I am not simply making the obvious argument that our consumption causes us to manufacture landscapes that are unnatural.  I am making the less obvious argument that the defamilarizing function that Manufactured Landscapes plays should force us to see how our own immediate landscapes have become industrially deformed also, to see how the suburban housing development, the strip mall, the parking lot, the gated community, and much more of our own landscape is as deformed in its way as the strip mine and the interminable factory floor.

To make industrial humanity strange for us at the distance of China or even of a local mine is certainly a necessary and useful function, but it falls short  if we do not recognize the implication that our own landscapes and relations and institutions need to be made strange as well.  Burtynsky makes this connection to himself more than once, commenting on the industrial implications of his photography and supposing that he had perhaps used fuel from one of the oil tankers rusting on a beach.  There is no point, however, when the film challenges its viewers to make this connection for themselves.  In the end, it is still possible to finish the film with the sense that our office jobs and tidy homes and ordered towns somehow escape the deformation that industrial humanity has imposed upon its landscapes.  It is still possible to avoid the fact that our own landscapes, though perhaps cleaner, safer, and healthier, are often just as unnatural, abnormal, and inhuman.

This possibility need to be eliminated for us.  We need to be confronted with the strangeness of what we have created ourselves to be.  We need to have our lives made alien to us so that we can see what they have become.

The stars aligned for me yesterday in a way they seldom do. My wife took my eldest son away for the morning, and my youngest son decided to have a nap, so I had what turned out to be something more than two hours all to myself. I was initially too overwhelmed with my good fortune to know how to use it, but I eventually decided to watch one of the many documentaries that I have collected but have never had a chance to watch, Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which follows the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Apocalypse Now is, of course, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a book that holds some intense memories for me. I read Conrad’s novel several years ago in strangely appropriate circumstances. I was working in a fiberglass manufacturing plant, in what is called the winding tunnel, a long hallway situated beneath a gigantic vat of liquid, boiling glass. The heat and the noise were so intense that someone had scribbled above the entryway, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” the words that are written above the door to hell in Dante’s Inferno. It was right there on the factory floor, amidst these hellish conditions and these equally hellish allusions, that I read Conrad’s account of a man’s journey into the unknown darkness of the African interior and of his own soul.

My impressions of the novel are obviously heavily marked by the circumstances in which I read it. It was as if I was experiencing the heat and the humidity of the jungle with Marlow, the novel’s protagonist. I actually felt myself to be in the atmosphere of Conrad’s story, and it is this atmosphere that I now recall far more than the details of the narrative. The descent into the darkness of the human condition, into my human condition, was almost a palpable thing, like the moisture on my skin and the heat on my face. The heart of darkness was something that I felt through the body rather than read through the intellect.

It is perhaps for this reason that I did not read Heart of Darkness as portraying the Congolese natives in racist ways, though many have made this argument, and though it is one that I think is valid to some degree. It is certainly true that Conrad’s depiction of the Congolese people and of the jungle itself is one that emphasizes the primal, the fearful, the dark, the savage, and the evil. Marlow’s journey is a descent into the mysterious and originary desires of human nature, and what he finds is violent and savage and fearful. Conrad makes the jungle and its peoples the physical correlates of this spiritual place, and so they too are portrayed with its darkness.

In many ways, the same kinds of criticisms could conceivably be made of both Francis Ford’s Apocalypse Now and Eleanor’s Hearts of Darkness as well. Francis Ford’s film ostensibly portrays Vietnamese natives, but it is perfectly content to substitute Filipino natives in their place and to film them in the ruins of buildings that are neither Vietnamese nor Filipino nor anything else outside of some Hollywood set designer’s imagination. Clearly, his concern is not with representing these people with any accuracy. They are merely figures, as they were for Conrad, for something dark and savage and unknown, merely part of the scenery in the heart of darkness.

Eleanor’s documentary is different in that it is at times quite concerned with the native Filipino tribe that is providing the extras for the film, but her interest often seems to be in the native merely as an aspect of her husband’s own journey into the heart of darkness that is the shooting of the film, a journey which she never fails to compare to those of Willard and Marlow. Again, there is a sense that the people and the scenery are equivalent, that they are of interest only because they represent the darkness and the strangeness of the filmmaking journey on which Francis Ford has embarked.

In all three of these texts, the novel, the film, and the documentary, it is easy to argue that the native cultures are stereotyped and racialized, whether they be from the Congo or Vietnam or the Philippines. All three of these texts seem merely to employ native cultures as convenient figures for what is dark, primal, and savage. They are part of the strange and originary darkness where the too civilized English sailor, American soldier, and Hollywood director can go to discover their own darknesses and to find an epiphany of primal and forgotten violence.

Even so, I think it would be a mistake to understand these portrayals as entirely racist. In each case, though less obviously with Eleanor’s documentary, I would argue that the native peoples are not intended to represent real people at all. They appear only as metaphors and stereotypes because that is all they are intended to be. Their function is not to correspond with real people in a real world, but to correspond with what Western culture has traditionally imagined the primal and the savage to be. This imagination certainly contains many racisms, and it could be easily argued that all three texts serve to reinforce these racisms, but I do not think that they themselves function in racist ways.

I have little in the way of obvious proof for this assertion, but let me return, by why of providing anecdotal evidence for what I mean, to the place where I first read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In that tunnel of heat and sweat, feeling the text like a physical presence, it was always clear to me that the natives were not natives at all but fantastical beings, like elves or Lilliputians. I never paused to consider how Conrad was portraying the Congolese people because I did not for a moment see his natives as corresponding to real people anywhere. They were creations of fantasy, not stereotypes of reality.

I recognize the danger with this kind of argument, and I am not even entirely comfortable with what I am saying, yet I think it may also true of Francis Ford’s film and even of Eleanor’s documentary. The natives of Apocalypse Now are Filipinos who are playing Vietnamese who are standing in for Congolese, and they exist in a scenery and an architecture that has no real correlate. They are entirely unreal fantasies.

The natives of Eleanor’s Hearts of Darkness are similarly unreal. Despite voicing a claim to a kind of ethnography, the documentary shows a people who have no connection to reality. They perform their traditional ceremonies in a building constructed by a production crew on the set of a Hollywood film. They are buried to the neck to play severed heads, with umbrellas perched above them to protect them from the sun between takes. They are unreal fantasies. They do not correspond to real natives. They exist only as part of the heart of darkness that Eleanor represents Francis Ford as enduring to produce his film.

Does this fantastical element justify Conrad and the Coppolas? I am not sure that it does. I am only certain that there is a difference here, perhaps a significant one, between a racist depiction and a fantastical depiction that happens to participate in racist cultural assumptions. I do not intend this distinction to be a justification of anything, but I will suggest that it contributes to the fact that I have a good deal of affection for all three of these texts, despite the problems they pose for me.

The Atomic Cafe, directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, is the film I screened at tonight’s Dinner and a Doc. It is a remarkable film, a kind of collage that satirizes the whole of an era’s relationship to the atom using only the era’s own documents. There are no contemporary interviews, no editorial voiceovers, no expert analyses, only footage from the early atomic age, edited together in ironic and often humorous ways. This approach represents the source material in such a way that it can only satirize itself, and it forces the viewer to see the ironies in the official propaganda, the media hype, the well-intentioned education, and the opportunistic money-making that surrounded the cultural effect of the atomic bomb. The film makes unavoidable the gap between reality and what the average citizen is usually told.

I realized tonight, however, that this kind of satire only becomes effective when it is too late to be really useful. The culture in the United States during the fifties would not have interpreted much of The Atomic Cafe ironically. For many people at the time, the culture of the atomic bomb was still too present and too real, and the voices that were constructing this culture for them still held too much authority. In fact, to the degree that the editing made the irony unavoidable, mant people of that era might have found the film untruthful and irresponsible. In order for people to see and accept the irony of the film, they needed to be separated by time and culture from what was being satirized.

This is an important idea for me, because it helps explain why irony and satire are not more dominant modes in Western culture today. The problem is certainly not that there are no opportunities for them, as the success of satirical news shows like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report can attest. The problem is that the broader portion of people in our culture are still too enmeshed in their own culture, still too subject to it. They do not often see the ironies of their own political, economic, and social existence, and they do not often choose to accept these ironies when they are forced upon them. It will likely take the next generation, looking back through the lenses of our own media, to point out the absurdities in our ideas of terrorism, or national security, or ecology. Of course, by that time, it will already be much too late.