Ilisa Barbash/Lucien Castaing-Taylor, US, 2009
Great first shot! After a nearly agonizing long time, that sheep looks right at us.
There might be a bit too much of Ricky Leacock’s snide characterization of observational documentary in this movie. It was monkeys typing, wasn't it? Observer doc-makers think that if you shoot and shoot and shoot something eventually is bound to happen. And it either doesn’t, or your endless hovering manufactures the happening and compromises the record.
Both things might be true here. Audience members were in clear agonies about this insistent and extended exposition, and maybe the filmmakers could have cut a bit. But to the film’s credit, it did exactly give us the pace and sense of a real rancher’s life, the patterns and travails and occasional satisfactions—knowing hands, understatedly affectionate relations—that rarely get aired. Colin Low’s Corral does the same thing, rejecting the whole history of Western melodrama and character confrontation. But Low's short film gives us the sense, or a taste, while this one gives us the thing itself. It makes for a rigourous viewing experience, but it's true, isn't it? There's life for you, and maybe if we don’t like that we should just have to lump it.
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| Unlike this awful movie... |
And isn’t it vivid? There’s an absurd dialogue between the old guy and the young guy as they sit looking out of that open tent that couldn’t have been bettered by Nobel Prize winners. The beauty and, then, simultaneous cruelty of the land that they’re crossing is powerfully present, and should more than compensate for any lack of conventional incident. Plain traveling to stunning locales is more than enough for the person driving in his car. Why should it be any different with movies? Also, intended or not, there’s something powerful about the shepherd and fold echoes. What’s really instructive is how Jesus is gentle and kind, and these guys get all resentful, even despairing, then get it done anyway. Good Christians!
A final word on that infamous blue streak on the mountain top. We always hear from the pulpit that swearing is for people that don’t have the imagination or vocabulary or brains to say what they really want to. This is good propaganda, of course—deride the undesired behaviour while inviting your charge to come to the smart and substantial and righteous side. But actually, lots of smart people swear, and to considerable purpose, and with considerable insight and even gain: JD Salinger, Robert Towne, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly, David Mamet, James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, on and on. We may not like it, we may not approve, but we can’t honestly just dismiss it either. (No women? We haven’t even touched upon hip-hop music.)
In addition, profanity can be and has been the last or best or maybe only weapon against tie-tightening, suit wearing, poor-evicting pillars of the community. You know, the people whose outward deportment is perfect, and who’s very lives and deepest assumptions (economic Darwinism, or attorney savagery) are those of the ravening wolf. Those guys should be sworn at. Or finally, there’s anger, or sorrow, or choosing just the thing to say in the face of some obscenity. Think René Levesque responding to Pierre Laporte’s murder (Action: The October Crisis of 1970, Canada, 1974).
Oh, and there’s a last last thing. As this film kind of suggests, and as the preachers always tell us, sometimes the profane just aren’t very smart, or very educated, or very broadly experienced. They may not be very principled. But the fact that we don’t want our kids to turn out this way doesn’t really address a big moral remainder. After hearing this cowboy’s sort of shocking, then sort of reasonable, kind of hilarious, eventually tiresome and finally poignant swearamiad you might be left with a realization. Who cares if he swears! He can’t be dismissed! People like this are still worthy and deserving of our sympathetic attention, maybe even our ministrations. They may respond thereto, or they may stubbornly hold their course. We are still responsible. It is not funny that immediately afterwards he got on the phone and cried to his mother. There’s the culmination of that shepherd motif—things are tough, and people are silly, and they deserve to be gathered and cared for.
Winter Soldier
Produced by a collective, US, 1972
This is an extremely disturbing, upsetting movie. It might be customary at this point to say that it’s an extremely disturbing, upsetting movie that everyone should see. Actually, maybe not. You don’t have to be an Israelite without guile or a snow white dove to get traumatically disturbed by this wrenching, nauseating assemblage. But if it’s not appropriate for many audiences, that sure doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have been made. The simple assertion, or maybe the devastating fact, is that My Lai wasn’t an exception, but rather the logical extension and irreducible embodiment of the whole policy and direction of the war. Of war itself?
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| Lt. Calley |
The no production value comes off as a virtue, not for any clever reason, but because sometimes production value doesn’t matter. Does it ever? The gradual introduction of photographs and footage is also, maybe, merely a consequence of how they were rushing things together, or creating this as a collective. But it also comes off kind of triumphantly. We might have disbelieved the testimony, wondered whether they weren’t either showing off or being too hard on themselves. Then comes the visual confirmation. Afraid not.
Two other things. This film is a pretty irrefutable demonstration that profanity and obscenity are not necessarily the same thing. Obscenity is big, deep, an affront not only to the sacred, but to plain, ordinary life itself. Which, as it turns out, is sacred. Profanity can be coarse and cruel and punishing. But it turns out that it can actually function as a moral corrective, an apt and exact expression of inner turmoil, inner terror, and general outrage. Thumper’s mother is usually right, but the bureaucrats and p.r. men need to be vigourously countered when they say nice or say nothing about abominations like this.
The second thing brings us to the very real possibility that this terrible material is actually quite appropriate. The obvious reason is that this happened, and it was a result of government policies, budgetary appropriations and such. Recreational R-rated movies are one thing. The world, supported by your tax dollars, are quite another. Less obvious and more affecting is that these shaggy, haunted young men are terrible sinners. They have sinned by fulfilling orders and then, sometimes, by going above and beyond those orders. Their victims will deplore their names, but they have also hurt themselves really terribly. They need to repent. And if you’ve been on the other side of a confession, or a lancing, or any other purgative act, you know that it’s not nearly as unpleasant as it is necessary. This is the sins are as scarlet part. White as snow comes after…
