From Word To Word

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.

This will be one of those stories that begins too long ago, meanders in too many directions, and entertains no one but me. It does entertain me though, so am going to tell it, even if it ends in tragedy.

Last year, at about this time, I was preparing for the Survey of Literature II course that I was to teach in the fall. I was frustrated because my course on the novel had been cancelled, and I was bored with the format of the Survey of Literature II course, and I was thinking about both these things together when it occurred to me that the two courses cover almost exactly the same time period. So, I decided to teach the survey course as if it were the novel course and to introduce some new methods of evaluation, including a wiki of several hundred important novels from which the students had to select five texts and in which they had to post assignments on their selections.

Of course, once I had assembled this list of novels, I was acutely aware that I had read only a very few of them, so I set myself the task of reading as many as I could before the fall, a task that I am still completing in a desultory sort of way. Among the many novels I read that summer, I particularly enjoyed Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The energy, the intensity, the near-poetry of the prose sets it apart from all but a few of the novels I have read (Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer and Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers have something of this quality also), and the layers of internal and external allusion gives it a gratifying fullness of weight and depth (the kind of effect I find in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or almost anything by Salman Rushdie). Lowry’s novel also contains one of the most extraordinary sentences in the English language, one I am tempted to quote in its entirety, but it is so long that it would make a post in itself, so I will show some restraint.

I did not think again about the book for some time. I still had others from the list that I wanted to read, and none of my students chose to read Under The Volcano that fall, so it merely drifted with so much else in the soup of my literary unconscious. Then, this past Christmas, Dave Humphrey gave me a little book called The Film Club, written by journalist and film critic David Gilmour. The book is an autobiographical account of the unique film club for two that formed when Gilmour allowed his son to drop out of school on the condition that he would watch three films a week with his father. It is interesting to me mostly for what it implies about the nature of learning, but it also made one of those literary connections that I sometimes feel as an almost physical pleasure. During a list of films that he and his son were watching during a particular stretch, Gilmour mentions a documentary called Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcom Lowry, directed by Donald Brittain. He went so far as to say that it was perhaps the best documentary ever made.

Since I teach a course on documentary, and since Under the Volcano had impressed me so much, I could hardly leave this claim untested. I immediately began looking for Brittain’s film, but I could not find a copy anywhere. None of the video stores, not even my local and favourite purveyor of oddities, was able to find it for me. A search of the internet revealed that it was no longer available. I was almost in despair until one of the search results lead me to the bonus features of the Criterion Collection edition of John Huston’s film adaptation of Under the Volcano. Apparently, although Brittian’s documentary was no longer available in its own right, it was readily available on the disc of bonus features that accompanies Huston’s film. More importantly, the edition was available for free from my local library, less than five minutes walk from my front door. I was jubilant.

When I returned with my prize, I only intended to watch the documentary, for at least two reasons. First, I usually find only melodrama in dramatic films, which is why I prefer films that are intentionally unreal and ironic. Second, film adaptations of novels, in my experience, while sometimes good in their own right, most often fail to capture the mood and sensibility of their literary ancestors. Despite the force of these reasons, I had heard that Huston’s film was supposed to be classic, and I had it in my hand already in any case, so I watched it.

I have rarely, if ever, found a film adaptation that is so respectful of its source novel, not necessarily of the novel’s exact narrative events, which are largely reduced in the film, but of the novel’s spirit and temper. I felt as though the film and the novel had been made with the same fabric, the same materials, that their difference of genre was a distinction less important than their unities of tone and disposition. They seemed to be different iterations of the same artistic act, extensions of one another. I have seen better films, but I do not think I have seen a better adaptation of a novel to film.

Brittian’s documentary was also very good. While I would not perhaps agree with Gilmour that it is among the best ever made, it has an easiness of narrative tone and pace that makes it a pleasure to watch. There is a strong sense of affection for Lowry, but it never becomes idolatry. It is an affection that is always well aware of Lowry’s many frailties, an affection that remains despite these frailties, and perhaps also because of them. After all, the novel is so much a product of Lowry’s personal tragedies that it is difficult to feel its emotional force without also feeling the emotional force of the life it reflects. In this sense, Brittian’s documentary makes a very good companion to the novel, and to Huston’s film as well, and I am currently formulating some possibilities about a course format that would allow me to use the three of them together.

Anyway, I did not have occasion to think about the novel or its accompanying films again until I noticed that my wife had brought Gilmour’s The Film Club on our recent trip south. As soon as I saw it, however, I recalled again how much I wanted to teach the three Volcano texts together, and I decided to buy the Criterion Collection edition when I next had a few dollars to spend. Then, the very next day, while browsing a DVD store in a Georgia suburb, I saw a used copy of the very thing: John Huston’s Under the Volcano, with all the extras that I wanted and more. I believe that I might actually have exclaimed audibly at the coincidence.

The price was $36.00. I checked my wallet, though I knew before I opened it that I had less than $20 left to spend. I contemplated using the credit card, but I knew that my wife would not approve of such a flagrant disregard for our budget, so I walked resignedly past the cash register, empty handed. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me, a consolation of sorts, however inadequate. It is only appropriate, I reflected, where Malcom Lowry and Under the Volcano are concerned, that I should know exactly what it is I want and still be unable to obtain it. Of course, none of this will prevent me from ordering the thing when the budget next allows.

This past Saturday was Dinner and a Doc night again. We ate homemade carrot soup and watched Errol Morris’ Fog of War, which made a good combination in my estimation, since each reminded me of truths that I have a tendency to forget.

The soup’s story began longer ago than you might expect. Last year at about this time, my mother-in-law continued a tradition of her late husband’s by planting a substantial vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes for me to sauce, potatoes for me to store, strawberries for me to jam, and some other things, including a few carrots. Now, to be clear, when I say that she planted a few carrots, I mean merely that she planted more carrots than any single woman with a mostly absent son could have reasonably hoped to eat in a decade. She had bushels of carrots. She had far more carrots than she could dig or I could process. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that she could cover the undug carrots with some leaves and the carrots would stay fresh until the spring. So, we had a reprieve of several months, but for the past week or so I have once again been drowning in orange vegetables that neither of my sons will even eat.

I added the tops to stock until I had emptied my freezer of soup bones. I froze more bags of sliced carrots than I want to contemplate. I put carrots in one form or another on the menu three times last week. I made six different carrot soups to put in the freezer, and I brought a massive pot of my favourite soup to this month’s Dinner and a Doc. The recipe comes originally from one of the Moosewood cookbooks, its primary flavours being mint and yoghurt. Speaking only for myself, it was one of the best tasting soups that I have ever had, though its consistency could perhaps have been better.

It was also a reminder, albeit an ironic one, considering that the carrots were not exactly in season, of a truth that I always seem to be forgetting and relearning: seasonal ingredients, because of how suddenly they are harvested and how quickly they need to be used, force me to cook creatively and to discover new and interesting ways to prepare food. I had never realized what could be made with a carrot until this past week, and I have had similar realizations with everything from strawberries to garlic scapes to kale over the years. Seasonal ingredients force a kind of seasonal preparation that almost disappears with supermarket shopping, where almost everything is available all the time, and this seasonal preparation fosters culinary creativity and a connection to the seasons in a way grocery store produce does not. This is the truth that the carrot soup recalled to me.

The truth that the film recalled to me also begins some time ago. When I was first designing Documenting Justice, the documentary course that I teach, I had been told of a particularly relevant film, Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick. The film explores the use of the camera, particularly the handicam, as a tool or as a weapon in situations of social injustice. While it does draw attention to the problems inherent in the assumption that we can believe the filmed images that we see, its central thesis is essentially that the visual images produced by the video camera do inspire belief in a way that make handicams a powerful weapon. To phrase this thesis in a way that the film would not, the handicam is effective as a tool or a weapon precisely because most people are niave enough to believe in what they see.

I few months later I saw Fog of War for the first time. I enjoyed it very much, and it remains one of my favourite films, even through what was my fourth or fifth viewing on Saturday night. The film is really an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, and it is structured around a series of lessons that he draws from his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defence during the cold war and the first years of the Vietnam War. What struck me on my first viewing and again on my fifth was one of those lessons: it reads, “Sometimes both seeing and believing are wrong.” This seems a simple and obvious statement, but I seem always to be forgetting it.

I keep forgetting McNamara’s lesson for at least two reasons: first, because the niave view, that I can actually believe what I see, is the dominant assumption of my culture and its media; and second, because the more critical and cynical view, that I see only what I want to believe, is the dominant assumption of most critical discourses in my culture and its media. Yet, what McNamara recognizes, and what I seem to be continually relearning, is that, while seeing and believing may function together to reinforce a particular perception of the world, both may be wrong. I would even argue that both are always wrong, in every case, to one degree or another. No amount of seeing, whether through the gaze of the camera or the data of a scientific instrument, and no amount of believing, whether in the goodness of humanity or the omnipotence of God, will suffice to guarantee the rightness or truth of anything.

This does not mean, at least to me, that we cannot know rightly and truthfully. It merely means that we can have no guarantee of this, and that both our seeing and our believing need to be characterized by a fundamental humility. I need to be humble in this sense, not provisionally, not because I have yet to find what will guarantee my seeing and believing, but absolutely, because I recognize that I will never be able to find this kind of guarantee. Though I am sure that McNamara did not mean to say quite this, it is nevertheless the truth of which Fog of War reminds me each time I see it.

I held my monthly Dinner and a Doc event last night, screening Laura Poitras’ My Country, My Country (Independent Television Service / Praxis Film Works, 2006). The film follows an Iraqi doctor as he prepares to run in the 2005 Iraqi elections, providing both surprisingly intimate footage of the doctor’s family and more general footage of the election preparations among local Iraqis, private security contractors, coalition forces, and UN election workers.

Poitras’ representation of the complex questions raised by the occupation and the elections is sincere and thoughtful. There is no defense of a particular politics, either Iraqi or American, only a sense of living alongside a family and a nation as they experience how democracy will emerge in their own situation. The fear and anxiety of the people living through these events is clearly portrayed, but so is also is the courage and even the humour, like when the Doctor’s teenage daughter asks that he pay her for her vote, or when a scene of a military administrator casually handing out $80,000 in cash to a contractor is followed by a shot of a helicopter gunner’s helmet, the camera clearly focused on the words “panic button” printed on its side.

One of the themes that Poitras emphasises particularly throughout the film is that of the election as a “show”. She includes several scenes where American or international officials openely use the word ’show’ to describe the election, and uses one such instance to draw attention to the word directly. The scene is of an American officer training Iraqi police in how to respond to the potential security issues that the election might pose. The officer begins by telling the trainees that “policing in a democracy is different,” and then, referring to the election, he explains that they will have “front row seats to the greatest show in the world.” One of the trainees questions him about his use of the word ’show’, asking whether the election will be “just a show.” The officer assures him that it will be for real, that it will be “real history,” but the trainee is still clearly confused as to why the word ’show’ is being used.

What is at issue in this scene, I think, is a difference in understanding about the nature of spectacle. The officer understands the staging that any election entails, the international interest and investment in this particular election, and the degree of mediatization that this particular election is likely to generate. He understands that, to a greater rather than to a lesser degree, the election is a show. Even so, this understanding does not pose a problem to him. His understanding that the election is a spectacle does not prevent him from believing in the election as an election. He may not have believe that it will necessarily produce a good government, but he still believes in the idea of the election as such, despite its spectacular and mediatized nature. He sees no paradox in calling the election both “the greatest show in the world” and a “real history.”

The Iraqi trainee, however, does not understand the nature of spectacle in the same way. He may suspect that the whole election is just a show. In fact, this is his first suspicion when the officer uses the word. However, he does not see how it can be both a show and a real history. The two ideas are separated for him; their coincidence is as strange for him as it is natural for the officer.

Yet, I think that the officer is preparing his trainees more fully than he knows when his first lesson in democratic policing involves the dismantling of the line between spectacle and reality. While all political power, whether democratic or otherwise, is essentailly staged, it is perhaps unique to democracy to admit this and to insist on its validity despite the fact. Where other forms of political power tend to conceal the ways that they are staged, democracy presents itself precisely as a show, but demands that we believe in it nevertheless.