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Philip Lee
Film is a mass medium in which the distinction between reality and fiction, from the point of view of the audience, can become temporarily blurred. This does not mean that film becomes 'virtual reality'; rather that the spectator crosses the border unawares and imbues film unconsciously with perceptions and identifications that ignore any obstacle to them becoming 'real'. According to Jean Leirens, the film spectacle creates a 'vacuum which dreams readily fill'.1
Even in a post-television culture in which 'various forms of virtual reality seem positioned to become the important new technology for the twenty-first century'2, film is likely to continue to occupy a central place in the hierarchy of the imagination. Equally, many of the stories told in film - provided that they are reclaimed from those who 'have nothing to tell but a great deal to sell'3- are likely to explore the moral and spiritual dilemmas affecting human dignity.
Some of these dilemmas were apparent in the films shown at the Montreal World Film Festival, which took place 22 August to 2 September 1996. They included issues of life and death, truth and deception, self-doubt and identity, intolerance and compassion.
Citizen Ruth (USA, 1996), directed by Alexander Payne, took up the topical and controversial issue of abortion. The story focused on Ruth Stoops, a glue-sniffing drifter who is pregnant for the fifth time and facing felony charges. Behind closed doors, a policeman tells her that if she visits a doctor and 'takes care of her problem', the judge will be lenient. Moments later her cell is invaded by a group of passionate pro-lifers arrested after a raid on the local abortion clinic.
The film errs on the side of humour and caricature. The pro-abortion lobby employs a highly dubious doctor who carries a tiny replica of an unborn baby in his pocket; the leader of the pro-lifers is a Bible-thumping evangelist who has a blinkered relationship with his own family. And then there is the undercover pro-choicer who infiltrates the pro-lifers...
The director said that the film was not about abortion. 'Rather it is an examination of extremism and fanaticism on both sides of a contentious issue and how polarized debate may at times cause us to lose sight of individuals.' Well, yes and no. The story-line is about an abortion and the moral and financial exploitation of a woman. But instead of treating the subject seriously and sensitively, the film degenerates into improbability and farce. It contributes nothing to the debate. At the end of the film, having miscarried without telling anyone, Ruth simply runs away from the abortion clinic and from having to make any kind of choice.
The eventual winner of the Grand prix des Amériques was Different For Girls (Great Britain, 1996) directed by Richard Spence. Its theme is identity. Karl is so convinced that he is a girl that he undergoes a complete sex change. A few years later, now called Kim, she meets Paul, a former school-friend, and slowly they begin to renew their relationship.
The pair seem ill-matched, neither quite knowing how to handle their ambivalent feelings. When Paul gets into trouble with the police and has to appear in court, the only witness to what really took place is Kim. In the hostile environment of police prejudice and public voyeurism, Kim gives a moving testimony to her own sense of self-worth and to her relationship with Paul.
The director sensitively portrays what many will find a bizarre relationship. The issue is not commonplace, and it raises important questions of sexual identity and social acceptance which directly concern human dignity. Is this a perversion of nature or simply another form of the 'Other' with whom we all have something in common?
An unusual film presented itself in Adosados (Spain, 1996) directed by Mario Camus (winner of a Golden Bear at Berlin in 1982 with La colmena). Andrés, an accountant, has a comfortable, routine life with his wife and two children. Their pet dog starts behaving strangely and on the advice of the vet, who tells him it is an incurable disease, he agrees that the dog should be put down. Unable to tell his wife that he took a hasty decision and may have made a mistake, Andrés lies about what happened.
From this one lie spring countless others as coincidence and confusion draw Andrés into a spiral of deceit. No one is quite sure who is telling the truth and the lies begin to multiply like a cancer. The film portrays lack of communication at the basic level of honesty to self but it fails to convince. Nevertheless, it won the prize for best screenplay.
Women (Israel, 1996), directed by Moshe Mizrahi, is set in the old city of Jerusalem at the end of the 19th century. Rebecca is married to the renowned rabbi Jacob de Elhanan, and they share a profound and intense love. After fifteen years they still have no children so, after much soul-searching, Rebecca persuades Jacob to take the beautiful 18-year-old Sultana as his second wife. Against his will Jacob agrees and Rebecca is soon tormented by jealousy.
According to the director, 'Women is an exploration of universal and ever topical feelings such as love, jealousy, infertility and the burning desire to have children. The story makes us ask fundamental questions about life: What is the true nature of love? Can one really live without loving?'
In the Biblical story which this quasi-modern version echoes, Abraham's wife Sarah persuades him to marry her slave-girl Hagar. When Hagar gets pregnant, she shows off in front of Sarah, who ill-treats her and she runs away. In Women, the plot changes. Sultana does not taunt Rebecca, who simply becomes more and more jealous of Jacob's love for the younger woman. Eventually Sultana does run away, but she returns and there is a moment of reconciliation between Jacob and his two wives.
In complete contrast, Farewell, My Darling (Korea, 1996), directed by Chul-Soo Park, takes a light-hearted look at traditional Korean funeral rites. Although it seems to concern itself with death, it gradually reveals more and more and about the living, their relationships with the deceased and with each other, and their different attitudes to tradition and modernity. Love, hate, jealousy, greed and ambition, as well as repentance and forgiveness, figure in the clash between village and city manners.
If this were a film about death and grieving some might find the subject offensive. It is, however, a comedy of manners that takes an intelligent look at a rapidly changing Korean society which is simultaneously hanging on to and losing its age-old traditions.
The complexity of guilt
For its prize, the Ecumenical Jury at the Montreal Film Festival sought a film with aesthetic and artistic qualities that revealed spirituality, justice, and human values beyond the confines of race, culture or religion. It made its award to Hamsun, (Denmark, Norway, Germany, Sweden, 1996) directed by Jan Troell. The film's story concerns the last few years of the life of Norway's celebrated author Knut Hamsun, persuasively played by Max von Sydow.
The film covers Hamsun's war-time complicity with the Quisling regime in Norway and sympathy with Hitler's National Socialist Party in Germany. At a deeper level, it explores his failure to relate to his wife and children and to come to terms with the withering of his creative powers. Although Hamsun lived until 1952, his reputation rested on books written at the beginning of the century, the last of which, Growth of the Soil (1917) earned him the 1920 Nobel prize for literature.
In an interview, Max von Sydow said that it had been an old dream of his to have the chance to create such a cold but genial character in all its depth. He described Knut Hamsun as 'both naive and blinded by a sense of his own importance. Manipulated by his wife, whom Germany used like a puppet, he manipulated her in turn. His fate reveals the traps of fame awaiting a man whom everyone wants to use for their own ends. It should make the artist think...'
The Ecumenical Jury chose Hamsun for 'its compelling examination of a famous writer's incapacity to act morally. The complexity of personal guilt is revealed in the ways Hamsun fails both his family and society. While the actions of the man are reprehensible, the film invites serious reflection on the nature of individual and political responsibility.'
The Jury also gave a mention to Gentle Into The Night (Italy, 1995), directed by Antonio Baiocco, in which Renato, a jaded private detective, encounters Martha, an elderly American lady who is beginning to lose her memory. In the course of their journey together, the theme of human sympathy is explored in a way that is sentimental yet revealing. The Jury commended the director for 'throwing a warm light on the relationship between an elderly lady who has lost her way and a Good Samaritan who takes her to the place of her childhood.'
In these and similar ways, films are able to explore moral issues 'in the spirit of resistance, rebellion and refusal' defined by Robert Phillip Kolker. 'Narrative film can set out to please its audience, soothe it, meet and reinforce its expectations. Or it can challenge, question and probe, inquire about itself, its audience, and the world that both inhabit.'4 The spiritual quest undertaken by a great artist is personal and unique, yet it can still be discerned by the attentive reader, listener or viewer. At times only a glimpse can be caught or an echo heard before obscurity returns. Yet reading between the lines, making out the blurred image, straining to hear the faint echo, are the essence of human endeavour and spiritual growth.
A film offers a different experience from television. Where television has an immediacy that lacks symbolism and expressivity, film challenges the human psyche to respond imaginatively, evoking visceral responses that have the potential for transcendence. 'The central communicative function of film is - quite intentionally - the poetic experience... Films are the archetypical transfiguration of reality. In spite of involvement in the plot of the film and the fascination of close-ups of personalities, the film spectator is kept at a distance. The subject matter, the actions and the faces in film are charged with a symbolic values.'5
Films explore the human predicament in all its shame and in all its glory. But, as T. S. Eliot pointed out, in a poem that might also be a film6:
'We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.'
Notes
1 Leirens, Jean (1954). Le Cinéma et le temps. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Quoted in Metz, Christian (1974). Film Language. New York: Oxford University Press, p.10.
2 D'Agostino, Peter (1995). 'Virtual Realities: Recreational Vehicles for a Post-Television Culture?', in Transmission: Toward a Post-Television Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., p. 269.
3 From the Viewers' Declaration of Independence: The Manifesto of the Cultural Environment Movement. See Media Development 3/1996, p.26.
4 Kolker, Robert Phillip (1983). The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. New York, OUP, preface.
5 Martín-Barbero, Jesús (1993). Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations. London: Sage, p. 217.
6 Eliot, T. S. (1944). From 'Little Gidding' in Four Quartets.
Philip Lee studied modern languages at the University of Warwick, England, followed by piano and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Since 1976 he has worked for the World Association for Christian Communication at its General Secretariat where he is jointly responsible for studies and publications. He has been a member of several Ecumenical Juries at international film festivals. He is the editor of The Democratization of Communication (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995).
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