A film with a difference

This week I had to introduce the film You Are All Captains and lead a discussion on it at the Academy of Art in Honolulu. This film was directed by the young Spanish film director Oliver Laxe. He had made a few award winning short films earlier, but this is his first attempt at full length feature film making.

This film is not what one would call an entertaining film in the ordinary sense of the term; it does not have twists and turn in the plot line generating suspense at every turn. Nor is it an action-packed film or spectacular film as we ordinarily understand them. However I submit that it is a compellingly interesting film if one approaches it with the kind of mind-set or frame of intelligibility that it clearly demands.

Issues

Although it is unlikely that many in Sri Lanka would be able to see it, this film raises a number of issues that should engage the interest of all lovers of cinema. My intention is not so much to critique the film or offer a review of it as to make it the starting point for a discussion of the art of cinema drawing on the commentaries of such outstanding philosophers of cinema as Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy.

You Are All Captains won a prestigious award at the Cannes film festival and went on to garner great critical acclaim at various other international film festivals. This film deals with the experiences of a young Spanish film director who is in Tangier, Morocco, trying teach a group of troubled and disadvantaged street children the art of filmmaking; he is conducting a workshop to initiate them into the art of cinema. Clearly, he is fascinated by these children and is labouring to channel their energies which are invariably diverted to destructive purposes for positive and constructive ends.

Project

Initially, the children are fascinated by the project. They are thrilled by the film equipment and the kind of power it bestows on them to express themselves through the art of cinema. However, before long, they became disenchanted; they are suspicious of Oliver’s motives.

It is their disconcerting feeling that they are being manipulated by the director for his own purposes. They are unhappy with the working conditions. This initial resentment grows into an open rebellion. What is interesting is that Oliver who is behind the camera now becomes a character himself acting and reacting in front of the camera.

As a result of the dissatisfaction of the children with Oliver, a new director is selected for the undertaking. In the second half of the film we see the children making a visit to the countryside and filming sights and sounds that they themselves find appealing. This in essence is the story of a film. What we find is more a situation than a full-fledged narrative. There are number of interesting points that need to be made about the film.

First it is both documentary and feature film and we all know that the dividing line between the two is often unclear and changing. Second, there is the interplay between the native and the foreigner. Oliver is a foreigner who is deeply interested in the culture and life ways of his students, and they, initially, find that intercultural exchange interesting and worthy of pursuit.

Resistance

Third, one observes a very compelling intersection between authority and resistance. The director, naturally, expects to establish his authority as the one who is overall in charge of the flow of events, and as time progresses there emerges resistance to it. Fourth, the interaction between narrative and reflection is significant. There is a narrative discourse that is unfolding in the film, although it might not be as prominent as in commercially successful films. The idea of reflection is equally important and makes its unmistakable presence. In fact the director has interwoven the narrative and reflexivity in interesting ways in the filmic text. Clearly, this is one of the strengths in You All Are Captains. What is noteworthy is that all these dualities serve to underscore the central issue that he is advancing through his film – what is a film?

Quick transition

This film is indeed interesting thematically. However, this not to suggest that it is a flawless piece of work. At times the pace is jagged; there are extended long-takes, especially in the second half of the film, and quick transitions in the first half.

The narrative itself is highly fragmented and does not seem to coalesce in any significant way producing a point of convergence. However, I am persuaded that this is a film that merits serious consideration. After the showing of the film, I had to field questions from the audience, and they clearly reflected the fact that members of the audience felt the same way as I did.

I thought of briefly commenting on this film for a Sri Lankan audience because it raises some fundamental questions about the medium if cinema and the responsibilities of a filmmaker. To understand the nature of cinema we need to grasp the nature of the intersection of the real world and the cinematic world that we observe in cinema. All film directors seek to fashion a cinematic world based on the experiences of the real world.

In some of films, there is a great overlap between these two worlds, while in the case of others the degree of overlap is minimal. However, it is not possible to effect a complete disconnection between the real and the cinematic worlds. Even in fantasies and science factions the shadow of the real world is constantly and inescapably present.

Two worlds

In You Are All captains, there is a great overlap between these two worlds. Earlier I said that one observes a merging of the documentary and feature film in this work of cinematic innovation. Oliver Laxe has sought to interrogate one with the aid of the other. He is clearly of the opinion that we cannot slip out of the real world and enter totally the cinematic world; we always bring an aspect of the real world into the cinematic world. What Laxe is aiming to do is to demonstrate the complexities and many-sidedness of this interaction between the real and the cinematic worlds. This raises a number of issues that are of great significance to students of cinema.

The central question that this film raises, to my mind, is the being of a film; to use a high-sounding philosophical term the ontology of film. Is it a reflection of reality? Or a recreation of reality? Or an invention of reality? How does the cinematic reality come into being? These are all questions that invite close and sustained attention, and films such as You Are All Captains serve to promote that profitable discussion.

When exploring issues of this nature, it is almost obligatory in contemporary film studies to invoke the names and works of fashionable French theorists. Instead of that, I wish to refer to an American philosopher who has done some innovative work on the question of the being of a film. He is Stanley Cavell.

Cavell, in his work The World Viewed, raised some of the issues connected to the art of cinema. Let me cite a few passages. ‘How do movies reproduce the world magically? Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen.

This is not a wish for power over creation. (as Pygmalion’s way) but a wish to need power, not to have to bear its burdens. It is in this sense, the reverse, of the myth of Faust. And the wish for invisibility is old enough. Gods have profited from it, and Plato tells it in Book II of the Republic as the myth of the Ring of Gyges. In viewing films, the sense of invisibility, is the expression of modern privacy or anonymity.

It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing by, as that we are displaced from our sense of natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our final distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition.’

Invisibility

Here Stanley Cavell raises a whole host of issues of invisibility, film experience, representation and power that are vitally connected to the being of films. And all these issues serve to illuminate important facets of the experience of You Are All Captains. Similarly, how films relate to the past and accepted codes and conventions of filmmaking and how they deviate from established paths in order to conquer territory is a topic that is of enormous interest to students of cinema.

Stanley Cavell makes the following observation with regard to these issues.’ What needs accounting for is simultaneously that the tradition is still available to current successful films, and also that serious works are in the process of questioning their relation t the tradition, that they are moving into the modernist predicament in which an art has lost its natural relations to its history in which an artist. exactly because he is devoted to making the objects that will bear the same weight of experience that such objects have always borne which constitute the history of art, is compelled to find unheard-of structures that define themselves and their history against one another.’

Stanley Cavell then goes to make the claim that without the constancy of human experience, history cannot advance meaningfully and it would not have its ironies and losses and close escapes. In other words, there would be no human history, only another form of natural evolution. Consequently, it is important to recognize the fact that history of an art is a human history.

Existence

Against this backdrop of thinking he asserts that, ‘When in such a state an art explores its medium, it is exploring the constitution of its existence; it is asking exactly whether, and under what conditions it can survive.’ These observations are extremely germane to the ambition and agenda of Oliver Laxe, the director of You Are All Captains. Questions of the past of cinema, its present and future and the conditions of its existence are at the heart of Laxe’s imagination

The film deals with the experience of a group of children learning to use the camera to express their views and imagination and longings. Indeed, the camera itself holds a prominent place in the filmic experience of You Are All Captains. The children are taught by Oliver Laxe to use the camera as a mode of self-expression, and this is indeed an idea that is at the center of the art of cinema.

Again, Stanley Cavell’s ideas on this issue are highly pertinent. ‘’The notion of self-reference suggests that the need is for the camera to tip its hand. That is sensible enough- if the camera must acknowledge itself, at least it oughtn’t to hide – and more than sensible indeed, for it recognises the hard Berkleyan-Kantian truth that an event in which we participate is not knowable apart from our knowledge of our participation in it….the camera cannot in general merely declare itself; it must give at least the illusion of saying something.’ These observations help us to frame our approach to the understanding of the film You Are All Captains

The use of the camera has to be analysed in great detail and with the utmost sensitivity if we are to read films productively. Unfortunately, in film criticism in Sri Lanka there is much discussion of the plot lines and the vision that emanates from them but precious little about the careful use of camera as an integral part of the meaning system of the film.

Elegy

For example, I recall that Stanley Cavell in commenting on the film Bonny and Clyde says that at the end, the film persists in an elegy of bullets well after the each of the two main characters. Here, according to him, society is making sure of itself. However, art is not content. The camera is simultaneously confessing its invasion of their existences and its inability to preserve them and our pasts in them.

It simultaneously seeks vengeance in them for their absence and accosting them across the line of death. In the popular film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the freeze frame at the end of the film has a way of investing them with immortality. So the camerawork can be read as a vital aspect of the meaning of a film. .

Earlier we discussed the importance of locating films within an evolving tradition of cinema. This line of thinking has significant implications for making sense of You Are All Captains. For purposes of analytical convenience I would like to identify three states in the evolution of cinema and meaning. In the first stage, which film scholars normally refer to as the classical realist cinema what we find is an undisguised attempt to impose a clearly visible pattern, coherence, a logic and meaning in the flow of events.

Much of cinema conforms to this classical realist modes and conventions. The second phase can be characterised by the capacious term modernism. Here what we find is a focus on the tensions, contradictions, fissures, fault- lines, alienations, displacements that mark modern social existence.

However, the important point to bear in mind is that filmmakers who subscribe to a modernist credo are interested in searching for, and establishing a coherence and meaning; theirs is a meaningful attempt to grasp the meaninglessness that mark modern life.

Disunity

The third stage, for want of a better term, can be called the post-modernist stage. Here the ideas of fragmentation, disunity, playfulness, blurring of genres, relativity are foregrounded in the filmic text. The search for a unified and coherent meaning is given up as an unattainable goal, and the diversity of interpretation is recognized as an inescapable reality.

Oliver Laxe’s You Are All Captains, it seems to me, does not properly belong to any of these convenient categories. He sees all three being limited by their respective rhetoric.

What he is seeking to do, not altogether successfully, is to present the world as it is. His aim is to present the world itself. This is, to be sure, a task fraught with great difficulties; film is a highly mediated form of public expression and the desire to present the world as it is one that is constantly thwarted by the imperatives of the medium of cinema itself. Nevertheless, this is what the director of You Are All Captains is hoping to achieve in his film.

Influence

One of the film directors who seems to have exerted a profound influence on Oliver Laxe’s cinematic imagination, it seems to me, is the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. I have written about his work earlier in this column. He is the most well-known Iranian film director outside Iran and is regarded as a master of world cinema.

He has been making films since the 1970s and has won wide critical claim for his work. His film Taste of Cherry won the top award at the Cannes film festival. Abbas Kiarostami is the author of such works as Koker Trilogy, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Close-up.

Over the years he has fashioned a distinct style for himself which I wish to characterise as a poetic realism. He combines documentary and feature film styles with remarkable ingenuity and points the way forward for further innovative experimentation

Abbas Kiarostami has made a deep impression on world cinema. His film Close-up was widely applauded by such diverse and distinguished filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese. He has also directed a French film titled Certified Copy which won high praise at the Cannes film festival.

I invoke the name of Kiarostami in connection with a discussion of You Are All Captains for three reasons. First, he excels in films dealing with the experience of children. I can scarcely think of another film director who has displayed such a remarkable empathy for and incisive understanding of the world of children. Indeed this is one of his trademarks. Second, his films present a compelling blending of documentary and feature film making, and concomitantly fact and fiction. Third, closely connected to the second feature, Kiarostami combines the use of long-shots and close-up in an interesting way generating a distinct rhythm and set of contrapuntal visual registers. .All these three features are discernible in the work of Oliver Laxe.

Reason

I chose to invoke the names of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami for another reason as well. That is, the high admiration in which he is held by the cutting-edge philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy is one of the most important modern French philosophers.

He combines the themes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille to pursue his own specific philosophical problems. His privileged themes include community – experience – freedom – justice – sovereignty – individuality – globalisation. Apart from philosophy, Nancy has written on art, literature, music and film. His short book titled The Evidence of Film, in my judgment, is one of the most important contributions to modern film theory. Here he develops his idea of evidence.

Jean-Luc Nancy says the following. ‘Cinema presents – that is to say shares (communicates) – the intensity of a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel….it is part of it precisely because it has contributed to its structure as it is now.’ The interconnected ideas of presentation as opposed to representation, and evidence are central to Nancy’s conception of cinema. Indeed, this concept furnishes us with a useful framework with which to assess You Are All Captains. Now what is interesting about this book on cinema by Jean-Luc Nancy titled The Evidence of Film, is that it is based not on the work of European or American masters of cinema; it is based on the work of Abbas Kiarostami. He focuses on Kiarostami’s film Life and Nothing More that was made after the devastating earthquake that hit Iran.

It is both a documentary and feature film; it is what Nancy would call a document about a fiction. It is this combination of fact and fiction, intimacy and detachment that characterises Oliver Laxe’s film as well. In that sense, Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of presenting the world and displaying the evidence are extremely germane to the understanding of You Are All Captains.

Fiction

Commenting on Kiarostami’s film Life and Nothing More, Nancy made the following observation. ’It all looks like reporting but everything underscores that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact Kiarostami shot the film several months after the earthquake) and that it is rather a document about fiction.’

The phrase document about fiction carries deep resonances for the topic we are discussing. Jean-Luc Nancy strikes me as a philosopher of cinema who would like films to test themselves against perceived impossibilities and push themselves into unchartered territory. A dense cover of clichés has a way of clouding the art of cinema and Nancy is determined to pierce it.

Nancy’s concept of cinema serves to focus on two intersecting ideas. His notion of the evidence of a film grows out of them. First, how do we look at the world? In other words what is the nature of the gaze? Second, what conception of the world guides that gaze? As I stated, these two are interconnected. When we examine a film like Life and Nothing More by Kiarostami or You Are All Captains by Oliver Laxe, these ideas of Nancy can prove to be of great evaluative significance.

I stated at the very beginning that You Are All Captains is not an entertaining film in the traditional sense of the term.

The director does not want the film to think for us; he wants the film to encourage us to think for ourselves. This film makes another interesting point, namely, that order redeems the world but it is also order that stands in between us and the world.

This duality, this interplay is central to appreciating the full cinematic force of this work. You are All Captains is the kind of film that does not conclude with any degree of finality. In other words the film continues beyond the film.

I chose to comment on this film not because many Sri Lankans are likely to see it, but rather because it seems to raise a number of issues related to the understanding of the medium of cinema, the responsibilities of the director and the ever expanding circles of film interpretation. These are the questions that aficionados of cinema should engage in a sustained manner.

There are different ways of making a film as indeed there are different ways of reading a film. Oliver Laxe’s You Are All Captains may not be totally successful as a work of art. However, it has the potentiality to persuade us to confront unflinchingly some of the central issues connected to the art of cinema.