HANDS UP! (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1967; 1981)

Former boxer Jerzy Skolimowski, one of the authors of the brilliant script for Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962), is himself a director; his Rece do góry is legendary. Its images, including a four-eyed Stalin on an enormous poster sheet, as well as its demonstation of the deleterious influence of Stalinism on a particular generation, convinced Polish communists to suppress the film after a single showing. Fourteen years after it was shot, Skolimowski re-edited it, reducing the original material, and adding an extended prologue at the urging of Solidarity—a disturbingly ironical interference. The new stuff is apocalyptic science fiction that stylistically intrudes upon the original raw protest stuff, charged, stark political theater, which remains (in sepia) stunning.      Rece do góry completed a trilogy following Andrzej Leszczyc, Skolimowski’s surrogate, whom Skolimowski plays in the final installment. One must recommend the thing we now have. It is only for the 1960s material, however, that the film is worth seeing, and I wish we could see all of it.

YESTERDAY (James Roodt, 2004)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

HIV/AIDS has spawned more bad, sentimental movies than any other category of sickness—and two wonderful movies: A.B.C. Africa (2001) and Yesterday. While the former is a documentary, the latter is fictional—an attempt to humanize the statistics. White South African writer-director Darrell James Roodt focuses on a single couple in a rural Zulu village; John works in the mines in Johannesburg, though, staying away much of the year. Yet this pair provides a window onto the vast African AIDS pandemic. Beauteously cinematographed by Michael Brierley (he and Roodt orchestrate light to suggest hauntingly the passing of life), this spare film encompasses a full draught of the human tragedy involved.
     The protagonist is Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo, marvelous), an illiterate young woman who, feeling ill, takes two dauntingly long foot-journeys, along with her daughter, Beauty, to see a doctor at the nearest clinic; both times she is turned away and told to return in a week’s time because of the number of patients the place serves. Finally, a blood test reveals the problem. Alone, Yesterday makes another long journey, by bus, to inform John, who beats her, unable to face the truth. Soon, though, he succumbs to the illness, wastes away and dies under his wife’s committed care in the “hospital” that she has built outside the village—ignorant about AIDS, their neighbors do not wish them to remain there—because the actual hospital is too crowded to admit him. “Beauty?” John asks as he wanes. “No,” his wife answers at his bedside. “It is Yesterday.”
     According to Roodt, his is “a film about the heart and mind of an ordinary person trying to survive against an extraordinary circumstance.” Yesterday hopes to live long enough to see her daughter, unlike her, start school. After all, tomorrow is Beauty’s day.

THE NIGHT OF TRUTH (Fanta Régina Nacro, 2004)

The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“We are of the same clay. We have endured the same nightmare. . . . Your pain is my pain.”
     Burkina Faso’s first feature by a woman, Fanta Régina Nacro’s La nuit de la vérité is a fable of the attempted reconciliation between opposing sides in a fictitious just-ended ten years’ West African civil war. A nighttime celebration shared by government Nayaks and Bonande rebels instances the classical motif of the “failed feast”; burdened by memories of the conflict, including of war atrocities, “war” erupts anew. Confessing an atrocity he committed against the President’s child, the rebel leader explains, “War opens up our souls, and demons drive their way in.” Tied above an open pit, the man is roasted to a crisp. More demons—more evidence that a peace treaty can punctuate a war but not erase it.
     Nacro employs an artillery of Brechtian distancing techniques that at first gives the film a stilted, stagy appearance. Nacro doesn’t want her film to wash over us; we are snapped to analytic attention. By degrees, however, the film adds emotional force to its brilliant intellectual clarity as Nacro draws her material out of its distanced domain into a startling naturalism. Nacro’s first procedure encourages our thoughtful understanding; her second, our humane engagement.
     Nacro is an ironist. The film’s opening long shot tweaks Monet; but it is a procession of souls—presumably enjoined Bonandes and Nayaks—whose reflection we see in the water below rather than the Impressionist’s luxuriant Nature. But are these reconciled beings, or ghosts of the war dead? The President later gets over his wife’s murder disconcertingly easily; is there more blood to pay? There’s a “happy” schoolroom conclusion that relegates the war to the nation’s past; but isn’t this punctured by the film’s ironical procedure?

THE GREAT WHITE MAN OF LAMBARENE (Bassek ba Kobhio, 1995)

If we decide that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Roberto Rossellini’s The Age of Cosimo de Medici (1972) do not, strictly speaking, belong to the genre (although the opposite case could be made for either of these masterpieces), then the two most brilliant film biographies I have seen are probably Rossellini’s The Rise of Louix XIV (1966) and Blaise Pascal (1974). Upon Rossellini’s death Claude Goretta made the film about Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Rossellini had been set to direct: The Roads of Exile (1978). This wonderful film falls just short of Rossellini’s level of achievement. Just short—by a mere drop of clarity and purpose, and by the depth of a lifetime of filmmaking genius. In the same category I place Le grand blanc de Lambaréné, about Albert Schweitzer. The film, from Cameroon and Gabon, is by Bassek ba Kobhio.

This is one of the strangest, most absorbing films I know of. But the Schweitzer that it presents bears little resemblance to the “actual” Schweitzer—at least the one that I, as a white person, have read about.

For the “take” on him here is from the perspective of colonized Africans. This film, moreover, comes with a revisionist agenda; to execute it ba Kobhio seems as willing to tweak and trash facts as Shakespeare was when he penned Richard III. Indeed, hardly any of his facts about the Alsacian medical humanitarian are correct. Perhaps ba Kobhio’s most stragetic shift from them, towards what one might call an “artist’s truth,” involves the identification of Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre’s cousin, with forces of European colonialism that Schweitzer in fact opposed. Schweitzer’s words: “We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of in the newspapers . . . [and] the still worse ones that are shrouded in the silence of the jungle night”; “Our institutions are a failure because the spirit of barbarism is at work in them . . . Our society has also ceased to allow to all men, as such, a human value and a human dignity; many segments of the human race have become merely raw material and property in human form.”

However, I understand, I think, what ba Kobhio is about here. Just as John Ford in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)—Sergei M. Eisenstein’s favorite American film—posits a Lincoln whom an adulating mob draws into demagoguery precisely to show how even the greatest democratic leaders may be led by populism into deleterious behavior (in Ford’s context of anxiety, fascism), so is ba Kobhio providing an index of entrenched white European attitudes towards black Africans by “revealing” their susceptibility in an unusually enlightened white European—one who would feel differently, presumably, if the thing were even possible. Thus Schweitzer isn’t even really the point of the film; rather, ba Kobhio is using Schweitzer as a means of investigating the core and the residue of white colonialist beliefs. Too, his film, in no way mean (again like Ford’s), reaches a gentle and generous conclusion, a wistful lament for the two disparate cultures’ missed opportunity to come together in equal interest and status and mutual respect.

Ba Kobhio co-wrote the film with Serge Lascar. At its center is as complex a portrait of Schweitzer as Shakespeare devised for King Richard. Here is a man full of both personal and cultural pride, whose endless frustration in life derives, implicitly, from his inability to embrace the African environment (except, pointedly, for the passive local fauna) and the culture his chosen mission has placed him amidst. To him, the Gabonians remain strangers whose language he never learns and whose music, although he is a music scholar, never interests him. Ba Kobhio has also given Schweitzer a troubled marriage (regrettably) along stereotypical lines. (Hélène, his wife, is quietly tormented; Albert, oblivious.) The sum of his situation and inclinations is a figure of alienation, one who in fact is self-alienated by his incapacity, given his scientific knowledge, to embrace the widely held African view that he is almost superhuman. Slowly, ba Kobhio’s Schweitzer accumulates into a symbol of white unease with and incomprehension of black Africa, for which the Great White Man’s vast, elegant funeral serves as a sorely ironical coda.

Ba Kobhio’s job of revisionism is near seamless. His lies, that is, mesh into a consistent, tight although breathing fabric—like Shakespeare’s “true lies” do. However, one point where the method shows, tearing a tad at the whole, is the film’s failure to provide any adequate explanation of why Schweitzer remained in Gabon, not returning to Europe, after Gabon became an independent nation in 1960. (Of course, ba Kobhio doesn’t mention that in spirit Schweitzer remained there longer, even after his death, through his daughter, who took over her father’s work at her father’s hospital.) There is another point where, if the fabric isn’t itself vulnerable, some viewers may nonetheless wish to give it a good rip. The film’s epigraph is Schweitzer’s most famous remark: “All we can do is allow others to discover us, as we discover them.” This is impermissible. It is patently unfair of ba Kobhio to manufacture an irony on the basis of his own revisionism by holding up a reinvented Schweitzer to something that the actual Schweitzer said. This is more than a bit of having one’s cake and eating it.

Luckily for my volatile emotions, ba Kobhio’s film is concise, insightful, even profound. Its style owes something to Rossellini’s present-tense histories, although the style here is, by comparison, subtly enlarged and nudged in the direction of more conventional drama. Certainly ba Kobhio’s film has much the same placidity and calm that, in tandem with fine distancing, engages the viewer in a thoughtful, judicious way. The result is that the film’s enormously complex material is given exceptional clarity and lucidity.

For this, only his second film, moreover, ba Kobhio, already an assured artist, has devised a brilliant, fascinating mise-en-scène. Almost nothing here is presented boldly to the eye; rather, things are so exactly measured and nuanced, although completely visible, that each frame reverberates with insinuation, drawing us into a contemplation of crisscrossing issues and feelings. Minutely detailed, this mise-en-scène, because transparent, is nevertheless never “busy.” And it provides, among other things, a visual expression of part of Schweitzer’s complexity: his need for order, and his equal need not to show this need of his for order. This contradiction, in turn, casts light on Schweitzer’s motives for his mission and also on reasons for his odd failure to commit to the mission’s human environment. Intersecting in all of this are Schweitzer’s individual psychology and the politico-cultural mindset of European colonialism in its faded glory and waning hours. It’s a tangle, really, and a paradox; for Schweitzer is a man driven to hide publicly, to order his world decisively yet invisibly, to feel superior to others by in fact tending to their welfare while at the same time, even medically, curbing his responsiveness, and to keep aloof from black Africa in order to assert his Europeanness in the face of his own self-imposed exile from Europe. Remarkably, the film conveys all of this.

Greatly assisting ba Kobhio in realizing his highly analytical mise-en-scène are his color cinematographer, Vincenzo Marano, and his art director, if any there be. The credits do not credit any production designer or art director.

The entire cast is another asset, headed by, as the Schweitzers, André Wilms and Marisa Berenson. Twenty years past her memorable youth, let me add, Berenson—the haunting beauty of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975)—is still a thrill to behold.

THE GO-BETWEEN (Joseph Losey, 1971)

Twelve-year-old Leo Colston is spending summer with Marcus Maudsley, an aristocratic schoolmate, in a luxuriant mansion in the hot, lush Norfolk country. Leo’s family’s solvency isn’t nearly as strong. His mother, a widow, may have to sell the rare books that her husband, a banker, collected as a hobby. The Maudsleys buy Leo new clothes, their generosity a reminder to him (and themselves) of his indebtedness, of his more or less borrowed life. They are well practiced in their upper-class manners and rituals, all of which bespeak their power as conferred on them, and others like them, by England’s entrenched class structure. Meanwhile, Leo has his own secret rituals; involving curses and magic, they bespeak his powerlessness, for which they are compensation, on three fronts: he is a non-aristocrat, a child in a vast, bewildering adult world, and someone who is fatherless.

Leo is the protagonist of Joseph Losey’s third and final collaboration with Harold Pinter, whose script is based on L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between. It is framed in the present, that is to say, after the Second World War, but in the main it unfolds in the past, when Leo was a boy, prior to the First World War. Its opening is famous: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The Edwardian England that Leo distantly remembers: how much of it was real? how much has passed into fiction, conjured by the pressure of Leo’s always having been the outsider desperately wanting to be let in? Memories are a function of the mind and subject to all the things that influence it; they are an elusive grasp of moods and events that were elusive themselves in the first place. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The opening line comes to fruition in the book very near the close when, in his sixties now, Leo confesses that he is a “foreigner in the world of the emotions, ignorant of their language . . . .” This first-person utterance isn’t in the film, and it doesn’t need to be. The truth of it is visible in Leo’s voice and demeanor in Michael Redgrave’s brilliant performance as someone who “flew too near the sun and [was] scorched.” What happened to the boy that Leo once was? That is what the film, like the book, is about.

Marcus’s older sister, Marian, befriends Leo, not because she especially likes him; in Julie Christie’s interesting, underrated performance, Marian often seems like a smug mass of barely suppressed impatience lying in wait to pounce on the boy. But this social inferior proves useful to her. Marian is betrothed to an appropriate match, Trimingham; but her lover is the inappropriate Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer. Marian and Ted enlist Leo as their go-between, who secretly delivers written notes between them. It is clear that Marian will marry Trimingham, and indeed she does, thereby becoming Lady Trimingham. It is also clear that her parents and Trimingham know about her and Burgess, and have probably forbade any more contact between them. (At one point, having figured out that Marian and Burgess must be together, Trimingham also uses Leo to deliver to her a message summoning her to join him.) Leo’s increasingly unwilling role as their private postal carrier provides a means of surreptitious contact. But Marian’s mother (Margaret Leighton, superb) interrupts Leo’s thirteenth birthday celebration to compel him to take her to Marian, whose absence can mean only one thing. But who is Leo, after all, not to be sacrificed at the altar of Mrs. Maudsley’s class and parental prerogatives? Leo leads—or, rather, Mrs. Maudsley leads with Leo, the ostensible leader, in tow. They come upon an indecent scene of the lovers having sex—indecent precisely because Mrs. Maudsley foists a view of it on Leo’s innocent eyes. It is a primal scene fantasy brought to vivid life, and Leo loses his surrogate father, who indeed commits suicide (this is beautifully handled as a quick, light aside, as though Leo has been unable to confront Ted’s end), reiterating or compounding Leo’s loss: it hardly matters which. Properly, as she has been trained to behave, Mrs. Maudsley covers Leo’s eyes; but it is she who has brought him to this horror, thereby consummating the selfish, ruthless, unthinking use to which her daughter had put an infatuated Leo. It is important to take into account that Marian had manipulated Leo on the basis of his unformed sexual feelings for her.

How much did Marian love Ted Burgess? Who can say whether their affair wasn’t predicated, at least on her part, on its forbidden nature, its taste of romance and adventure before an endlessly prim, uninteresting marriage. Regardless, it destroys Burgess and, because of his participation in that destruction, Leo.

But there is something more to Leo’s destruction—and their realizing this essential aspect of Hartley’s novel may be Pinter and Losey’s finest achievement in The Go-Between. The class divide over which young Leo delivered the notes between Ted and Marian: this is ultimately what destroyed Leo, making all the more loathsome an elderly Marian’s refusal to accept any responsibility for the parched thing that Leo has turned out to be and, stupefyingly, her re-recruitment of him to deliver yet one more message, this time to her grandson, the real identity of whose grandfather . . . well, the past keeps impacting the present, doesn’t it?

Luchino Visconti’s disciple, Losey does what he has rarely been called upon to do: bring to life period detail. But what the film evokes is not so much an actual past as a dream of the past—a dream disclosing, at least on one level, the classist sentiments that Marian embodies, as did her mother. (One keeps wondering, for instance, whether Marian’s mother also had a similarly sordid affair before her marriage.) It is Leo who is, of course, narrating the film, and therefore he is the one who is doing the remembering; but it is his tragedy that his own memories are entangled in Marian’s and the life that she lived, which never did really, nor could, let him in.

The Go-Between took the top prize as best film at Cannes.