A TASTE OF CHERRY (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami is one of today’s most highly regarded filmmakers. His most vocal fans include Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. His A Taste of Cherry shared the top prize at Cannes with Shohei Imamura’s glorious The Eel.

A Taste of Cherry applies to an engrossing instance of life and death cinema’s signature mediation between documentary and fiction. Kiarostami both wrote and directed this complex film; his narrative, though, is a simple thread. Having decided to end his life this very night, Badii (a younger ringer for Kiarostami himself) spends the day driving around the outskirts of Tehran in his Range Rover. He is a (relatively) well-off pilgrim in what, were it not for his imminent suicide, would be called the middle of his life. But he resembles Dante less than he does Robert Browning, who, in the most brilliantly conflicted of all English love poems, “Two in the Campagna,” can’t quite latch onto an elusive evolutionary thread teasing him throughout Rome, a city of ruins haunted by ancient, shifting ghosts. Badii also finds his finite grasp falling short of his infinite passion. He is trying to locate someone who would be willing to assist him in the grim task he has committed himself to. Therefore, he picks up, in his expensive motor vehicle, one stranger after another, interviewing each in turn. His plan is to offer a substantial sum of money—his life’s savings—to whoever will agree to visit the outdoors death site he has chosen in order to make certain the following morning that his pill overdose succeeded in ending his life. This accomplice would also be charged with burying him—unless of course the plan, having gone astray, has left Badii still alive, in which case the stranger would have to help him to his death before burying him. Iran clearly isn’t America, where hardly anyone would turn down a proposal that brought in a buck, so Badii is having a devil of a time finding his Good Samaritan. But, after a few rejections, he gets lucky; his willing ad hoc gravedigger finally appears—a man older than himself and stably employed, but in great need of money owing to his child’s grave illness.

Badii’s course isn’t subject to revision. By providing no explanation for Badii’s death wish, and by so intriguing us that we don’t require one, Kiarostami relieves us of the distraction of weighing whether the “causes” justify the irreversible decision. The decision is self-justifying. The effect of Kiarostami’s economy in the matter also is to situate Badii firmly and wholly in the present, not in some contrived past where he was dealt this blow, and another, and so forth. Such a past, whatever it was, could only obscure Badii’s reality as a character in a film rather than in life. And this is a film; it isn’t life. Now and then Kiarostami insinuates the camera’s presence by his use of windows in the mise-en-scène; but his boldest device—it is the key to the film’s purpose—is his use of a startling ellipsis: Badii’s consenting Angel of Burial isn’t shown, like previous candidates for the job, being stopped for and being picked up; he just pops up in the cab of Badii’s vehicle, seemingly out of nowhere. Nothing so drives home as this that we are watching a film; some of us may even wonder whether we momentarily nodded off and missed the picking-up.

Still, in the course of watching the film, we may do what (even sophisticated) audiences tend to do; by mentally contesting the filmmaker’s distancing strategy, we may “make real” Kiarostami’s fiction—with Kiarostami’s own slyly seductive help, in fact, as he increasingly involves us in Badii’s anxiety-ridden quest to find a burial agent. In short, Kiarostami plays us, moving us the audience in opposite imaginative directions at once. He may deny us access to Badii’s explanatory past; but he nonetheless encourages us into projections of Badii’s possible future. For, eventually, Kiarostami has us wondering whether Badii’s suicide attempt will succeed. If we are mind-locked Spielbergians hopelessly prone to mistaking fiction for reality, we may even wonder whether Badii’s money “saves” the other man’s sick child! Most of us, however, will not go that foolishly far; but we will wonder how things will pan out for someone—a character—who (1) could not be dissuaded from suicide in any case and therefore has no future; and (2) isn’t real to begin with and therefore has no future. Indeed, the resolution of Kiarostami’s “plot” seems to turn on whether Badii ends up alive or otherwise, and our (however misguided) desire for such resolution may prompt us to relax, rendering moot, whatever distancing Kiarostami supplies. We audiences can be a stubborn, silly and wayward crowd.

Up to good even if we the audience aren’t, though, Kiarostami at the end of his film re-distances us. We witness Badii’s pill-taking and, just before sound vanishes and the screen goes black, we see him lying in his “grave”; but, instead of our learning his fate in the next image, we next see something we could scarcely have anticipated: a sequence purporting to show the shooting of the film we have just been watching. Thus Kiarostami implicitly completes a framing device that in fact had no beginning other than the reflection of sunlight off a camera lens—something we, as audience, take for granted. These last images lack clarity; they resemble something on television that is being shot off the television screen. In short, the images are deliberately debased; and jolting us further out of our accepting the film we are watching as “reality” is the appearance of Homayoun Ershadi, the
actor who plays Badii, whom we naturally enough mistake, momentarily, for Badii, prompting us to wrongly think, “Oh, he’s alive; the suicide attempt failed,” until we realize that no word or image is coming to resolve the question of Badii’s outcome, leaving us instead—gratefully or irritatedly, depending on whether we love movies—to gauge our dependence on cozy, conventional, pedestrian narrative.

Like Orson Welles’s marvelous F for Fake (1975), another Iranian film that jerks its (Persian) rug out from under us, Kiarostami’s film can justify its prank by the thematic purpose that the prank serves. But Kiarostami isn’t satisfied with merely demonstrating how film audiences may buy into a plot at the risk of forfeiting their sense of its unreality. He is also exploring the fluidity of a line of representational reality that defines the very essence of cinema; for the margin of anxiety that attaches itself to Badii, and sticks to him even after he connects with his morning-after burial assistant, provides us with an emotional correlative to the discrepancy between documentary and fiction with which this film so earnestly plays.

Most of the film, hypnotic, is taken up by Badii’s determined journeying through stretches and turns of barren vacancy—a landscape pitched between somewhere and nowhere, between life and death—and by his conversations-in-motion with various candidates for the job he is offering. Badii’s highly specific motivation, therefore, intrudes a fictional premise in what otherwise might seem an observational record. Suggesting cinéma-vérité, the exchanges between would-be employer and might-be employee indeed take the form of documentary inquiry and response. Whereas, though, the pertinent question in Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) is “Are you happy?” the question here becomes, in effect, “Will you bury me?” Is there a difference? I think so. The Chronicle question is objective; interviewer Edgar Morin asks it because he and Rouch are interested in how others will respond to it—and because Morin wishes to socio-analyze the respondents. On the other hand, Badii solicits comments only as a means to an end, and that end—the help he is after—aims at his own benefit (although there is also ancillary financial benefit to whoever becomes his helper). All this makes Badii seem more fictional, less documentary, than Rouch. Additionally, if we were to construct imaginatively a documentary-fiction continuum, we might place Badii’s patently rehearsed inquiry more to the fictional end and the responses he receives, which are made to look spontaneous and unpredictable, more to the documentary end. At bottom, of course, it is all Kiarostami much as, with its (marvelous) pseudo-documentary inserts, The Passion of Anna (1969) is (brilliantly) all Ingmar Bergman. On the basis of appearances (and what else is cinema?), we may nevertheless describe the generic compound to which Badii belongs as fictionally compromised documentary—a nouvelle vaguelike blending of these two opposite modes of expression, flexible and dynamic, where in their back-and-forth exchanges the more-fictional interviewer is nudged in the direction of documentary and the more-documentary interviewee is nudged in the direction of fiction. To me this is astonishing. Kiarostami has found a way to humanize and dramatize what in fact is the fluid nature of cinema as it fluctuates between its two signature modes of expression.

Thus the gap between the two men—Badii and whoever his current passenger happens to be—is at once a mediating area of conversation and mutual influence, transference and transformation, and a kind of submerged battlefield between determined opposites. Relating this gap or, if you will, chafing space between documentary and fiction back to its emotional correlative, Badii’s anxiety, we may discover that those whom Badii interviews are more fully documentary because they fail—more often than not, refuse—to conform to his mental “script.” As such, they represent some aspect of reality that fiction cannot suppress or totally control. In this light, however they respond, his pickups constantly confront Badii with his own anxiety.

But what is Badii so anxious about? Not death; for he faces by choice his imminent end. His demeanor, moreover, suggests he has arrived at his choice—that was the journey preceding the journey we are shown—calmly, carefully, thoughtfully; the steadiness and patience with which he conducts his search reveals the opposite of an erratic soul prone to making a hasty decision. If not death, then, what brings him such anxiety? Life—its manifold uncertainties, which he hopes the single uncertainty of death will put to rest. How fitting, then, that once Badii has actually found someone to bury him he nevertheless retains his anxiety. Before, it might have seemed that eliciting at last a positive response would relax his anxiety in anticipation of his final rest. But life—reality—isn’t so accommodating. Once the desired response comes, it’s conflicted, after all, because the man whose help he enlists, although desperate for money, must find Badii’s request odd and disconcerting, and because one soul’s needs never suit another’s exactly. Loudly accompanied by reluctance and disapproval, in fact, the last interviewee’s assent is riddled with equivocation. Thus is Badii’s anxiety extended rather than removed; and because of this he follows this recruit—embarrassingly! disruptively!—into the man’s workplace and entreats him for more and more confirmation. The man can only say—it’s one of the most ambiguous utterances in all of cinema—“I will keep my word.” Such a statement can do nothing for Badii. After all, the man’s sincere intent isn’t in dispute; rather, Badii’s intelligence tells him that this man’s ambivalence might yet dissuade him from showing up the next morning. Even as he prepares for a departure from life, then, Badii must continue—and continue—to face life’s uncertainty.

All this gives human, dramatic form to the conflicted nature of cinema as it perpetually fails to resolve itself fully into either fiction or documentary. But more: Kiarostami thus posits anxiety over life as somehow at the very heart of the art form—perhaps even the impulse behind a wider range of art. Our own anxiety answers Badii’s and Kiarostami’s. How ironic that we ourselves feel this uncertainty most keenly when we are forced to face Badii’s unreality; for the film’s blatant refusal to follow Badii as far as the next morning leaves us, to the extent that we insist on his reality, unsure about his fate. Thus are we, presumably (as real people viewing reel happenings) by definition pure documentary, irresistibly nudged in the direction of fiction as it absorbs our consciousness and helps structure our perception of what’s on the screen and what’s off, including ourselves.

Our participation as audience in the quarrel, tension, contest, what-have-you between documentary and fiction, sealed when we momentarily mistake the actor playing Badii for Badii the character, is the film’s ultimate point of investigating its theme. In effect, after the (unreal, fictional) fact, we ourselves become implicated in the “human” exchanges that were made in the cab of Badii’s Range Rover; we ourselves have been drawn into that imaginative mediatory space where fiction and documentary interact. We find ourselves, as it were, at the crossroads, left to wonder whether the film has put us there or, by its exploration of a theme, discovered us there. We are not there alone. Incorporating these crossroads of documentary and fiction, and life and death, is an image that the film repeats and repeats; in imaginative space, it represents the precise point of mutual influence, mediation, transaction. It is a cherry tree. It is the key image of the film. On one level the tree, in tune with Freud’s cigar, is simply a tree—that is, an instance of absolute thingness. But because it also represents the material reality that Badii plans to give up, the tree becomes by extension a symbol of life. We do not have to reach far for this identification, for one of Badii’s passengers even refers to the cherry tree as a tree of life, the sum of all reasons for rejecting suicide. Thus the tree is both objective (thing) and subjective (symbol)—although such a widely agreed-upon symbolic interpretation of tree as tree-of-life blurs the distinction, crossing over from one realm to the other, one world to the next. If we (reasonably enough) identify objectivity with documentary and subjectivity with fiction, then we find in the tree the very flux between alternate modes of expression that is at the heart of the film—of all films, Kiarostami would say. The way he shoots the tree also supports this; for, framed by the camera at a middle distance, with the screen containing the entire above-ground portion of the tree but almost nothing surrounding it, the tree seems to exist at some medial point, between solid earth and the human mind, as a tree of death as well as a tree of life—a kind of natural gravestone; a floral epitaph. As such, it is not only an enticement for Badii to stick around by keeping himself alive but also an intransigent emblem of hard, sturdy, confining limits very much worth getting out of.

Here, as throughout the film, Kiarostami is abetted by his “third eye,” his color cinematographer, Homayoun Payvar, who resists touting the cherry tree’s loveliness and suggests instead an intriguingly ambiguous embodiment of the film’s play between opposite chords and genres. Payvar is also instrumental in helping the filmmaker devise a purposeful mise-en-scène where the landscape outside the Range Rover, in juxtaposition to the fixed tree, breezes by, providing persistent, nearly subliminal visual evidence of the growing pressure of time on Badii, and of the fleeting nature of life. One other contribution to the excellent result of this film must be noted: the cutting, executed by Kiarostami himself. In particular, there is the popping up in the vehicle of the soul whose child is ailing; this constitutes an audacious rupture of the film’s smoothly continuous flow. On some level, surely, this circumstance is related to the several appearances of the cherry tree.

How roots of this film reach out! Because of its ambition to interrelate numerous strands in a complex analytical fabric (like Antonioni and ’60s Alain Resnais, Kiarostami selfconsciously elects to make masterpieces), however, the film may falls a tad short of being the stunning, unified achievement that, say, Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More (1992) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) are. Possibly the filmmaker places too much store in the image of the cherry tree’s ability to pull the film’s argument and diverse elements together. But A Taste of Cherry is a towering work nonetheless by one of cinema’s most burrowing and philosophical artists.

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (Jan Němec, 1964)

Jan Němec was all of 28 when he made the singular masterpiece of the Czech New Wave: Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci)—except for sound effects, a mostly silent film. A staggering work based on co-scenarist Arnost Lustig’s story “Darkness Has No Shadows,” it is about two Czechs on the run during the Second World War: two teenaged Jewish boys, pursued by authorities and hostile locals, after they escape from a train transporting them to a different concentration camp. (Lustig spent years in various Nazi camps, himself escaping on the way to Dachau.) Fresh, expressionistic and incomparably somber, Diamonds of the Night is a work of brash, youthful genius; who could have known that Němec’s career, and the entire movement to which it belonged, would be crushed four years hence by Soviet tanks rolling in and taking aim at a nation’s independent spirit? After the Soviet invasion, more than twenty years passed before Němec worked again in his homeland. A fusion of nondocumentary and documentary elements, his 1998 Code Name Ruby (Jmeno kodu: Rubin), from the Czech Republic, has testified more recently to his residual gifts. (Němec’s 2001 Late Night Talks with My Mother is not so appealing to me.)

Diamonds of the Night blends objectivity and subjectivity. Its basis is an actual experience that Lustig, unlike the boys in the film, survived; the unnamed boys’ fate reflects that of the unlucky many, which Lustig himself escaped. (He and Němec will not break faith with the Six Million the way that Steven Spielberg did on a dime with the monstrously sentimental, “uplifting” Schindler’s List.) Moreover, the actors in the film are all nonprofessional, and the agitated use of hand-held camera mimics documentary filmmaking in the same way that it did in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). Yet for all this foundation in objective reality, or at least the appearances of objective reality, the film proceeds in a subjective manner, its camera attuned to the boys’ desperate flight and attempts to remain alive. The repetitive circular mosaic that constitutes the film’s method, with its flashforwards and shafts of memories and, possibly, dreams, records the boys’ flight as a doomed, fear-fraught standstill. (It is quite possible to read these “deaths” subjectively, as projections of the boys’ fears.) On the other hand, the same method stirs our souls to the imaginative task of keeping the boys alive and out of lethal hands as long as possible. Němec’s distancing techniques permit us to catch our breath, but elsewhere they function not as objective devices but as subjective ones communicating the depth of the boys’ push for every last ounce of life and freedom. The film is thus highly versatile and flexible, allowing us both to empathize with its protagonists and to contemplate the fates that their fates represent. It is, at once, emotionally distanced and emotionally up close.

Diamonds of the Night opens with a stunning passage that predicts the style of the film. It is a single, sustained, continuous shot that picks up the boys in flight, running as fast as they can, one discarding his coat in order to pick up speed, the sound of the train in the background, the sounds of gunshots presumably in their direction: human beings—and boys: kids—as hunted animals. The camera breathlessly keeps apace, moving in closer to the boys’ faces, capturing their labored breathing, one at one point nearly climbing over the other as they mount a hill. The immediacy of the action and of the fearful emotional event: this is the tenor of the film that its opening establishes. The usual application of a continuous moving shot, such as a tracking shot, is to convey spaciousness, expansiveness, freedom. Němec, however, explores another possibility. One of the peculiarities of such a shot as his opening one is that the movement of the camera constantly redefines the limits of the frame, in this case, in effect, newly boxing in the boys repeatedly: perpetual movement as perpetual confinement. Here, form determines content. Surely there is something of an echo, too, of Antoine Doinel’s flight from reform school that resolves itself in an eternally confining freeze frame, at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959).

Doinel ends up at the seashore. The flight of the boys in Němec’s film, as if in a fairy tale, takes them to a forest that they must penetrate. When they collapse on the ground before their brisk walk into utter darkness, one behind the other, they are both recouping strength after what has just passed, the flight from gunfire, and steeling themselves for what is to come. One boy’s hand, in a Buñuelian touch, swarms with beetles from the forest’s floor, and it’s a measure of both his exhaustion and his confusion as to which realm he inhabits, the human (thoughtful) or the animal (instinctual), that it takes a while before he wipes off these insects. Our near blindness as the camera, behind, dogs the boys as they go deeper into the woods is correlative to the dissolution of their social moorings, and the interrupting bright flash of one of them, in long shot, boarding a city tram provides an index of the highly defined existence that has since yielded to an oceanic expanse of lost definitions, lost boundaries—this expanse of darkness and silence we watch them enter, their arms, like insects’ antennae, bounding out to navigate through the thicket of branches attacking them. Němec and the magnificently dark and dusky black-and-white cinematography by Jaroslav Kučera have taken us inside the boys’ consciousness. We feel trapped inside their feeling lost, alone, utterly abandoned by everything and everybody in the world that should be defending and protecting them. Not for a moment do we doubt that this is precisely what it must have been like for two such boys on the run—and countless others with no place to hide and no place to run.

The boys keep silently walking all night and into the daylight, their experience interrupted by memories of two conveyances: the city tram; the train transporting them to a death camp. The latter memory, an impossible one of their eating as they sit on the train compartment floor, springs from their current hunger. On the floor of the forest, one eats berries, or whatever food he has found, while the other takes off his boot to examine his damaged foot, the boot laces inevitably reminding us of the shoelaces that a starving Charlie boiled, as substitute spaghetti, in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). A measure of Němec’s brilliance is how this remains a fleeting (and poignant) association, not asserting itself as an allusion.

By now, the briskness of the boys’ pace through the forest has been worn down to a halting pace, even a stumbling one: an antithesis of their youth. Their journey becomes even more hobbled as they mount a hill of rocks, during which one of the boys asks the other to view a colony of beetles whose community contrasts vividly to their own state and status. The boys enjoy a respite in sudden rain. Shattering.

A pivotal scene follows. One of the boys enters the home of a villager, who, wary, gives him bread and, on his return entry, milk. The boys eat and drink. During the first entry, the boy repeatedly imagines killing the woman. This, however, he does not do. His not killing her, ironically, will lead to the boys’ capture. The woman will begin what elderly male villagers complete: the murder of the two boys.

The humaneness of this film perhaps most of all lies in its refusal to submit to the facile conclusion, “Well, the boy should have killed the woman.” Survival isn’t the highest instinct of humanity. If you have seen Amir Bar-Lev’s extraordinary documentary Fighter (2001), in which he is one of the two main characters whom the film follows, you know the delightful degree to which Arnost Lustig has retained his humanity. This is the triumph of Jewry over Nazism and the Holocaust: the heroic survival of Jewish humanism. The balance of the film depicts the methodical hunting down of the two boys.

Some may be appalled that Němec pits the elderly, drunken “posse” against two adolescents in the bloom of their youth. When one adds his own youth into the mix, one can fault Němec, I suppose, for a lack of generosity—for ageism, if you will. I forgive youth almost anything, and, in addition, Němec has found the perfect means to convey the idiocy and meanness of ordinary citizens’ by-rote implementation of the Nazi horror. I applaud his emphasis on the fact that Nazis didn’t “do it all.” Heartrending are the closing seconds that portray the boys walking through the woods after we have already heard the shots that killed them and seen their corpses lying in the dirt.

Vittorio De Sica rejected Cary Grant as the star of Bicycle Thieves (1948), in favor of Lamberto Maggiorani. Similarly, Ladislav Jánsky and Antonín Kumbera, the two nonprofessionals who play Němec’s “diamonds of the night,” could not have been improved upon.

ORDET (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1954)

For years, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word), from Denmark, reigned as my idea of cinema’s highest attainment. It remains the most powerful film I know of, and it’s currently among my three favorite films. Its source material is the play, written in the 1920s and first produced in 1932, by Kaj Munk, whom the Nazis assassinated in 1944 for his opposition to the German occupation. (Gustaf Molander had made a film of the play, starring Victor Sjöström, in 1943.) Dreyer’s film is set in Vedersø, on the west coast of Jylland, where Munk had been vicar. Without doubt, Ordet is the finest and most passionate expression of Christian faith in cinema. It won the top prize, the Golden Lion of St. Mark, at Venice and both the best film and best director prizes at the Bodil Festival in Copenhagen. In the U.S., the National Board of Review named it best foreign-language film, and it won the Golden Globe in this category as well.

The setting is a prosperous farm in a remote parish in 1925. The patriarch of Borgen’s Farm is elderly Morten Borgen, who is set in his ways. His three sons live with him and help run the farm: Mikkel, an avowed atheist, whose wife, Inger, devout, anticipates his return to the fold on the basis of his decency and goodness; Johannes, whose study of Søren Kierkegaard has unhinged his mind (tell me about it!), convincing him that he is the risen Christ and prompting from him binges of hilltop preaching; and teenaged Anders, who has fallen in love with Anne, the daughter of Peter the Tailor, with whom Morten has long been locking horns over their differing views of Christianity. (Morten, whose Christianity consists of “the fullness of life,” feels that Peter’s consists of “self-torment” in a lifelong preparation for death.) Mikkel and Inger have two daughters, and Inger is currently expecting another child—a son, her father-in-law hopes, for what reason one wonders, given that Morten, one would think, has sons enough. However, he will have his prayer answered, but at a terrible price: the deaths of both infant and Inger.

Morten believes that the time of miracles is past, because faith has wavered. In his own case, his prayers for Johannes’s recovery have failed, he believes, because his faith, which seems monumental to us, was insufficient to draw God’s attention to them. He explains that he prayed hopefully rather than in the certainty of faith in God’s responsiveness. Meanwhile, the unbalanced son for whose recovery he has been praying preaches that God is immutable and that the time of miracles, therefore, is now. It will turn out that Johannes is correct and that the miraculous event with which the film culminates, Inger’s resurrection, signals the completion of a round of reconciliations, Johannes’s recovery, and Mikkel’s conversion of faith. Under the spell of this soul-shaking film, the viewer also experiences the truth that miracles remain the province of the still living and indeed eternal God.

Making certain changes to Munk’s play, Gustaf Molander’s earlier film version turned it into a drama, but Dreyer’s film, adhering to the Munk, creates a comedy instead; in this, it is heir to Dreyer’s silent comedies The Parson’s Wife (1920) and Master of the House (1925). But Ordet combines Dreyer’s comedic grace with the almost frightening power, not to mention the solemn, deliberate pace, of his great tragedies, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943). The slowly spoken dialogue and the exquisite slow tracking and panning shots all seem to belong to something other than a comedy, as does the full radiance of Nature’s beauty that recalls the incomparable haunting beauty of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930). But this accounts for the freshness of the thing; Ordet seems destined for tragedy, and yet Dreyer fills it with unparalleled comic charm and overflowing delight. It is, on different levels, a film that makes one achingly glad to be alive.

The film’s signature image is the family laundry, whites outdoors on a line, furiously flapping in the wind—perfectly mundane, and yet an image of such power that it betokens spiritual possibilities. We see this activity in various shots, in different frame locations in relation to the rest of the mise-en-scène. The image becomes an aural as well as a visual motif. In the film’s last passage Johannes chides the believers who have gathered for Inger’s funeral for not believing fervently enough. Holding his little niece’s hand and invoking the name of Jesus Christ, he prays for Inger’s return to life in front of her laid-out corpse. Both the laundry and its sound in the wind reassert themselves, transmuted, indoors. The sheer curtains through which gorgeous natural light filters in evokes the laundry on the line; the sound of the clock which alone adorns the sheer white wall evokes the laundry’s flapping in the wind. It is the sound of time, the sound of life; embracing her, Mikkel tells his resurrected wife and sweetheart that he has found her faith at last.

With a crystalline sense of the eternal, the mystery in our midst that gives rise to religious feeling, this expression of Dreyer’s and Munk’s Christian faith encompasses, outdoors, then, an unsurpassed beauty of landscape and an almost palpable depth of air and, indoors, a miracle, an instance of resurrection whose depth of spiritual suggestion, revelation of human possibility through the agency of faith, and emotional power all remain unmatched in cinema. Characters debate dogma—human words obscuring God’s word.

Twentieth-century humanity’s remove from the natural sources of faith Ordet’s scene of rebirth, following death in childbirth, shatters in a tidal wave of passion; Dreyer burns “religion” down to its ancient core of wonder, taking us, believers and nonbelievers alike, to a summit of shared private experience where the pure air seems the very breath of God.

Henrik Malberg’s enactment of the role of Morten Borgen must be accounted among the greatest performances in cinema. Munk had originally wanted Malberg for the part in the 1932 production of the play, but this didn’t work out. Now in his eighties, Malberg finally gets a crack at the part, and we are all the better for it. As Mikkel and Inger, Emil Hass Christensen and Birgitte Federspiel are also marvelous, winning as best actor and best actress at Bodil. One must add that the film finds the most compelling love story in these two characters—and (rare!) the love story of a married couple, two souls no longer in the blush of youth or yet in their “golden years.” Cay Kristiansen is perfect as Anders, who looks after his brother Johannes as best he can. Preben Lerdorff Rye is a hoot as Johannes, who really looks as if he has read too much Kierkegaard.

Henning Bendtsen is the superb black-and-white cinematographer—Dreyer’s miracle worker-in-chief.

As a nonbeliever, no wonder I am so captivated by Ordet, which allows me to experience the wonder of faith without having to subscribe to the irrationality of faith. I appreciate that this may not have been Dreyer’s intent. But then who knows? Perhaps Dreyer anticipated the likes of me as part of the audience for his film. The God of Cinema, Carl Th. Dreyer works in mysterious ways.

DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE (Hubert Sauper, 2004)

Among the most powerful films on its subject, Darwin’s Nightmare provides an inside-out view of globalization. Hubert Sauper’s documentary, from France, Austria and Belgium, focuses on a fishing community in the “independent” East African nation of Tanzania. This is Mwanza, which depends for its livelihood on Lake Victoria, the origin of the Nile River. The lake once flourished with all kinds of fish and other aquatic life, sustaining the Bantu inhabitants. This is no longer the case. The lake’s ecological system has been destroyed by the introduction into it, as a “scientific” experiment in the 1960s, of a predatory fish, called the Nile perch, that has devoured the other fish and even eats its own. Mwanza’s main industry now comprises catching, processing and packaging these fish so that boxfuls of tin cans can be flown to Europe and Japan, where they inexpensively appear on supermarket shelves. After filleting the fish for European consumption, Mwanza pays the price. Sauper’s film documents the cost to the people who work in and about Lake Victoria—a name that identifies the reach of the new global economy with earlier forms of European colonization of Africa as effortlessly as the Nile perch itself exemplifies the idea of “survival of the fittest.” But, of course, we are speaking here of engineered Nature, red in tooth and claw and European (and Japanese) appetite and prerogative. The tins sold in Europe are cheap, that is to say, to use an old, familiar term, competitively priced. But at what a price in Mwanza, invisible to the eyes of middle- and lower-class European consumers!

To create its burgeoning portrait of human devastation in Africa, Sauper’s film may seem at times to be jumping from topic to topic. But everything that his camera shows—Sauper (along with Sandor Rieder) is his own brilliant color cinematographer—reflects on the consequences of European economic exploitation of the region. In describing this film, whose bold images are as hallucinatory as they are indisputably real, one scarcely knows where to begin.

How about here: famine is ravaging the region. Once, Lake Victoria bountifully fed Mwanza. Now people must make do with the scraps of fish left over after the fish have been filleted. We see a “killing field” of these scraps: heads and eyes, tails, bits of flesh stuck to skeletons. It is an awesome expanse of waste, at one point swarming with maggots—an image inside the image that recalls Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), in which sailors touch off revolution by revolting against inedible food, leaving us to wonder what will happen if, someday, the Third World that is being exploited rises up defiantly and violently against the West, seeking independence from its “independence.” What’s to be done about this? What, in fact, is already being done: the West exports arms to Africa, helping to keep the continent embroiled in national and regional conflicts. A native who is interviewed naively believes that airplanes arrive empty and only load up with exports before taking off. But, of course, it is the arms that are being exchanged for the fish. Another native who is interviewed, who has fought in a war, hopes for more wars so that he can get work again. Meanwhile, boys erupt into violence against one another as they scramble for the discarded food. But I seem to digress; the rich, associative way in which this film proceeds makes someone who is attempting to describe it seem constantly to digress. To return to the “killing field” of fish scraps: from this reality arises a metaphor for the Mwanzans themselves, whom Europeans have picked dry, leaving them to die amidst the famine that picking Lake Victoria dry has helped cause. African dictators have long engineered famines to retain power at the expense of ordinary Africans; why not Europeans? After all, Europe’s colonial egg hatched this African chicken of oppression.

Back to the present. The current European and beyond-European intrusion stems from the fish processing and packing plant that Europe has built, employing Mwanzans at sub-subsistence wages (what does money matter, one soul asks, when there is nothing around to buy?) and the need to collect and transport cargoes of the fish. With all this has come prostitution, to service those lonely guys away from home, and others, and to help impoverished girls pay the rent. A few prostitutes are interviewed. The one who seems most full of life, we later learn, was killed by an Australian client. Meanwhile, AIDS and HIV are ravaging the region for a number of reasons, prostitution being one. Another is rape. Another is that the exploitation of these people has undermined and undone their social structure, leading to sexual promiscuity. Meanwhile, young boys, with nothing else to do and only fish scraps to eat, melt down discarded and stolen boxes from the processing plant, to sniff the resultant chemical glue. This knocks them out. We are shown two such boys knocked out at night in a tunnel, and we are told that their drugged condition makes them ripe for sodomization. Punctuating the point ominously, with the boys in the forefront of the shot, a car passes by, visible through the tunnel opening in the distant background of the shot.

Almost everything in this film works poetically, suggestively, associatively. Among the airplanes at the airfield are former Soviet ones, now piloted by post-Soviet Russians. But the Soviet aura that the airplanes induce, given the demise of the Soviet Union, lends an end-of-the-world feeling to the film. The chatter of European Commission delegates almost has an air about it of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. In one indelible interview, a woman, one of whose eyes has been claimed by the ammoniac gases that the processing plant exhales, professes to being better off than some others. To what extent, then, is she as much the victim of the self-promotion attending the introduction of the plant into the area as she is the victim of its existence there? It is monstrous to contemplate those who might not be as well off as she. The camera catches her slipping her foot back into the open shoe that has slipped off one foot in the midst of the fish scraps. Somehow, this makes her modesty and humility all the more heart-wrenching—and here, as elsewhere, the viewer can almost smell the stench of the fish.

A Russian pilot sighs heavily as he notes that guns are flown in and grapes are flown out. He wishes that all children could be happy but admits he doesn’t know how to make this happen. The mind boggles when we think of the Tanzanian children in this film and what part of the rest of the world is doing to them.

Darwin’s Nightmare has won a feast of prizes, including the one for best documentary at the European Film Awards.

Tom Zaniello, author of Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films About Labor, merits a last word: “Darwin’s Nightmare will teach you more about globalization than you will ever want to know.”

EARTH (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)

One of the greatest films of all time, Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s lyrical Earth (Zemlya; released here in the States, as Soil, the same year as in the Soviet Union) is one of the quintessential Soviet films. Dovzhenko, cinema’s “poet of the Ukraine,” made this film in response to another (wonderful) film, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye, sometimes called in the States The General Line, 1929). Dovzhenko, in Earth, was expressing his own view of “the old and the new.” (It is Godard who has said that the best way to criticize someone else’s film is to answer it with a film of your own.) Dovzhenko’s film is both national and urgent, and serenely transcendent. Selfish peasants—kulaks—resist collectivization; seeking to hold onto exclusive ownership of land, they oppose Nature by violating the bond of sympathy that weds individuals to the common good and to the earth. Nature is shown here as bountiful, ripe and nourishing, the source of moral truth, and an ennobling, humanizing force that the farm cooperative as a practical idea embodies. Nature also is the eternal witness in whose philosophic breadth and breath human mortality—the tragedy of life—unfolds. Whereas Eisenstein’s The Old and the New points proudly, confidently ahead, Dovzhenko’s Earth finds a solemn continuity—imaged forth by a vast ocean of waving wheat—threading past and present.

Dovzhenko’s film is as heartfelt as Eisenstein’s brisker, highly analytical achievement. It’s a different way of seeing—a different way of breathing air. Earth also narrowly misses having more history to take into account; for, at the same time that Dovzhenko was making his film, Stalin’s 1929 collectivization policy, which would soak the earth in human blood, had just begun. When the film was released in 1930, then, the tragedy was still unfolding. For all Dovzhenko’s acquiescence (at that time) to Stalin’s iron grip on the Soviet film industry, Earth was deemed suspect by Soviet authorities; Dovzhenko’s father as a result was even expelled from his farming collective. (The film, though, was warmly embraced in Scandinavia and western Europe. In Italy, Dovzhenko was declared the modern Homer.) It’s possible that Stalin and the sort with whom he surrounded himself found the silence of the film—Earth is Dovzhenko’s last completely silent film—itself dubious, as though sound might better promote the national interest by propagandizing, or doing so more plainly, directly. In any case, the experience surrounding Earth pushed Dovzhenko into what has been described as a suicidal depression.

The film itself reflects none of this agitation. It is serene, meditative and more visually beautiful than any other film in existence. (This visual beauty is matched by that of the opening movement of Dovzhenko’s next film, the 1932 Ivan.) No other film places human mortality into the round of Nature with greater conviction. Indeed, early on there is an instance of human death, startlingly portrayed outdoors on the ground, in the care and domain of Nature, as it were, not in a conventional indoor “death bed” scene. The man is old, having spent 75 years, we learn, as a simple worker, a farmer plowing fields with his oxen. He is surrounded by family, or possibly a family of friends, of different generations—and by a harvested crop of pears lying on the ground, as a vast image of both his status as farmer and his connection, as such, to Nature. He dies after biting into a pear. This entire scene is interrupted by shots of oceanic wheat fields under a vast and still sky. (The sky, a measure of eternity, is a vital element of mise-en-scène in a shot of field-plowing where the camera is hung low and tilted upward, with the farmer appearing as a small figure in the lower left-hand corner of the frame.) Moreover, the scene is preceded by the film’s celebrated opening: a montage of shots of the wheat alive in breeze, a shot of a girl’s face as she stands next to gigantic sunflowers, and a montage of shots of apples, ripe, smooth and perfectly round. Closeups of the sobered faces of those surrounding him follow the old man’s death; only children, enjoying the fruit of their elders’ labor, the fruit that one day they themselves will harvest, are untouched by this sobriety. Earth’s opening movement is perhaps the greatest in all of cinema.

Dovzhenko follows this quiet, lovely, perfect scene of leavetaking with a family indoors in epileptic throes of excessive grieving. At first we assume that they are responding to the old man’s death. Nothing of the sort; their selfishness stands in sharp contrast to the old man’s selfless, unself-pitying departure. This is a family of kulaks beside themselves over the news of collectivization. Rather than turn over his horse to the farming collective, one of them is prepared to kill the animal with an ax, but a family member stays his hand at the last moment. These are people whom Dovzhenko portrays as ridiculous in their resistance to change. If the passage of the old man’s dying reflects how good people can be, this subsequent passage reflects how deformed people become when they cede to their selfishness. As no one has ever done better, Dovzhenko thus contrasts those who believe in the common good, which for him is natural rather than ideologically driven, and those who instead idolize private property—if you will, those who farm land while in denial that this land isn’t “theirs” but, rather, something that they share with neighbors. In cutting themselves off from others, such people have succeeded in also cutting themselves off from their own humanity. There isn’t a drop of propaganda here; the source of Dovzhenko’s conviction is Nature, not political dogma.

Earth is, among other things, a celebration of workers, and one of its most beautiful passages—I’m not sure how I feel about the preceding part where urine cools the radiator of the newly arrived tractor—shows harvesters, from every conceivable camera angle, at work in the fields. There is such joy in their labor, for being a part of Nature and close to the earth. Subsequent scenes show the mechanical threshing of wheat and, close up, the plowing of earth. A generalization arises as to the holistic nature of these people’s lives.

The serpent in the garden, however, is the reactionary character, selfishness and resentment of the kulaks. Using soft focus to imply the delusional quality of people’s sense of safety, Dovzhenko constructs a remarkable passage, a montage of villagers, couples, including the girl to whom Vasili (Semyon Svashenko, in a great performance), the boy who chairs the collective committee, is engaged, and with whom he is spending a peaceful, romantic summer’s night. This leads to a celebrated sequence, where, walking home in the moonlit wee hours, Vasili, full of joy for love of the girl he will soon marry, breaks into dance on the road. Maintaining a fixed camera, Dovzhenko allows Vasili to dance and dance, from long shot to closeup to just out of camera range, with a subsequent long shot sealing the integrity of the dance—a solitary boy’s perfect enjoyment of a moment in his life. Suddenly Vasili drops; did he stumble?—did he fall? A horse reacts—but to what? Vasili, in the prime of his youth, has been shot dead by the embittered son of a kulak. He has been robbed of the long life of the old man whose death he himself witnessed earlier in the film—robbed, as the kulaks themselves feel robbed of the property that collectivization threatens to turn over to universal use.

The grief and anger of Pyotr, Vasili’s father, is vivid, and there is a stunning shot of Vasili’s body being carried through the wheat fields, the sea of stalks washing by, where the action is framed so that the process of his body’s being carried is eliminated to create a sense of independent motion, ironically, in the direction of burial. The funeral service is one of the great set-pieces of cinema, and the murderer’s insane dance among the graves, replacing Vasili’s joy in dance with inconsolable guilt, stresses the point that these two boys ought to have been comrades—friends; brothers. Earlier, the image of Vasili’s intended bride, naked and in the throes of inconsolable anguish and grief, provides yet another dimension of the tragedy that has occurred.

Nature responds with lament: a downpour splashing fruit.