山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Talissa Febraさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
The History of His Story: Silence Is a Falling Body
Talissa Febra (Indonesia)
Can the truth of a person’s life ever be known by other people? Truth is an elusive thing, and the closest we can get to a person’s interior life is to see it through their own eyes. Agustina Comedi uses old photographs and home videos of her father, Jaime, to pick apart the matryoshka of his truth and construct the facts the best way she can. Silence Is a Falling Body gently peels layer after layer, reveals detail after detail, guiding us to create an image of Jaime and to keep reconfiguring our interpretation of him as the film plays out before us. He is a loving father first, then a determined political activist, and a man-loving man after that, and also a happy husband to a beautiful wife.
Comedi was not the first person to find out about the part of Jaime’s life that was previously invisible to his family, but she was the first to piece it all together and lay it out, for better or worse. She doesn’t shy away from the film: she makes her presence known via voice-over narration and uses pauses and repetition to explain and emphasize. The film doesn’t just throw you little bombs of surprises to blow your mind, but it invites you into Comedi’s living room to watch these tapes in the dark with the family as they revisit the memories of a beloved son, uncle, brother, and father. Silence Is a Falling Body is about Jaime, but Comedi is the one who has control. Comedi is not interested in tidying up the story of her father’s life or protecting the image of him that she has in her head. She is curious to compare the Jaime that she knew and the Jaime other people knew, so she interviews his family and friends to find out which memories overlap, which ones contradict, and which can be perceived as a true description of Jaime.
Silence Is a Falling Body is a convergence of many things: a look at the fears and hardships LGBTQ+ people in Argentina faced in the ’70s, an emphasis on drag as not only a physical performance but a psychological one, and a commentary on leftists who claimed to be progressive but would throw their “overtly homosexual” friends under the bus, seeing them as a stain on the movement. To Comedi, presenting all of these moments might serve as the best approximation of the fullness of Jaime’s life. They help us create an image of Jaime from scratch, and at the same time they supplement her memory of her father with the parts of his inner life that she was never a part of and he never got a chance to tell her about — helping her adjust the truth that she’s used to.
Comedi built Silence Is a Falling Body upon something Jaime’s friend said, rather than a memory of Jaime himself. On her 15th birthday, Jaime’s friend told her that when she was born, something in Jaime passed away. Comedi lets us hold on to that sentence before coming back to it in the second half of the film. She prefaces her interpretation of its meaning with a recording of a performance of The Little Mermaid’s “Part of Your World.” The Little Mermaid is about a person who wants to belong and who sacrifices something essential to herself in exchange for something she thinks would bring the happiness she dreams of. It’s a story that mirrors Jaime’s: he had to hide and bury his queerness in order to fulfill his dream of having a child. Comedi gives us a clue about this revelation at the very beginning of the film, when Jaime’s camera shoots male statues in a museum before fixating on Comedi’s younger self: an encapsulation of what Jaime left behind before dedicating his life to his daughter.
The uncovering of a person’s secret life after their death in Silence Is a Falling Body calls to mind Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012). In her documentary, Polley tried to piece together her late mother’s life from interviews with everyone who knew her. Through the making of the documentary, Polley found out that she was actually a product of an extramarital affair her mother had. Each of these family-centered documentaries deals with the stories around a person’s life rather than providing a chronological account of that life itself. In Stories We Tell, Polley’s mother gave up being an actress to have a family; in Silence Is a Falling Body, Comedi’s father gave up a part of his identity to have a family. These are stories of people who are trapped by traditional gender expectations and of how some parts of them are taken away in the process. These are stories of the way members of a family change once some secrets get uncovered and they have to restabilize their perception of people who can no longer explain themselves, and how they rebuild the images of themselves based on those changes.
Stories live on because they keep being passed on from one generation to another. Closing Silence Is a Falling Body, Comedi passes her camera to her son, who then asks her to record him instead. She asks what is the most marvelous thing in the world for him, and he replies, “Seeing things for the first time.” Comedi pauses, letting us sit with the fact that seeing her father’s past clearly for the first time is an emotionally complicated thing — for us, and even more so for her. The tension produced by this insight is left unresolved, a loose end that fits the story it tells. Comedi knows she may never fully figure out her father, for the truth of a person’s life is reserved to that person only.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Satoko Tomishigeさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
A Journey through Home Movies: Agustina Comedi’s Silence Is a Falling Body
Satoko Tomishige (Japan)
Home movies have been becoming more and more visible as production material in filmmaking, especially for documentary and experimental films. This is partly because these small materials have the potential for amazing discoveries, although they are fragile and easily lost. Projected after being unseen for a long time, forgotten images flood over us and images provoke our memory in many ways. A case in point is Silence Is a Falling Body. Agustina Comedi found a pile of videotapes and films her deceased father, Jaime, left, and she decided to make a film from them.
This film seems to be an audiovisual journey to find the truth about Jaime, driven by a personal motivation arising from Comedi’s deep affection for him. The film explores his life before his marriage and after his daughter’s birth — namely, both what has been unknown and what has been known to the director. She uncovered many videotapes, contacted Jaime’s friends and ex-lovers to interview and shoot, and edited together a collage of archival and new footage. Perhaps because it was risky and uneasy for Comedi and for her family to reveal Jaime’s past, she has left many traces of the hesitations, shudders, and surprises they experienced in the course of searching. We can see these traces not only in the interviews in which they show their feelings, but also in Comedi’s deliberately staged acts of editing; pauses, rewinding, close-ups, and repetitions, accompanied by beeps, clicks, and other sounds of audiovisual equipment in operation. The film never ignores emotional responses, but rather preserves them one by one with each discovery. As a result, the film can sustain an intimate atmosphere without giving an impression of indecency, even when it approaches Jaime’s personal life most closely.
The journey this film attempts also pushes a way through the societies and cultures where Jaime had lived. The 1980s in Argentina were a politically stormy period with an awareness of diversity and individual freedom. The film finds Jaime’s active figure in social movements and glittering gay cultures. In some footage, he shot his friends as queens on the night stage; at other moments of the film, his friends tell how they spent time together in political meetings that he organized, or on a trip, which is shown in color slides. As the director gains more details of Jaime’s hidden life, suspicion causes the tie between daughter and father to loosen. In an interview, Jaime’s old friend, recalling how he eventually slipped away from their society after his marriage, says, “he was taking care of something else.” The next scene shows a girl playing a violin on stage: the filmmaker dares to post her image to that place. Now, the presence of herself as daughter comes into question – a progression driven by her painful but inevitable desire to ask what she meant to him. At this point, the search for him moves ahead but becomes more complex.Is she looking for the unknown face of Jaime? Or does she want to look for him still as her father?
The director divides an important scene in two, placing one part at the beginning of the film and the other nearly at the end. This is a nostalgic home movie shot by Jaime on a visit to a museum with his family. A shaky handheld camera slowly captures every detail of Michelangelo’s sculptures. The director lets the shot run longer than she usually does. This scene tries to present Jaime’s vision so that the viewer can experience it through his eye. The image captures almost precisely how he gazed at these sculptures, tracing his response to their physical male beauty, which he filmed with the very same hand that filmed his daughter and his family. Here the film reaches a crucial point of its journey, as the director struggles as a daughter with a crack in her father’s image. With which figure should she identify Jaime: as her father, or as an unknown man, whose life the film reveals?
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Risa Tokunagaさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
A Research Road Movie of a Collective Journey of Filmmaking: Golden Memories (Petite Histoire of Indonesian Cinema)
Risa Tokunaga (Japan)
Golden Memories is a collective work. The three directors—Mahardika Yudha, Syaiful Anwar, and Afrian Purnama—have been working with the Jakarta-based Forum Lenteng, a non-profit organization for cultural studies which has initiated various art projects, film festivals, study groups, and art publications. This 118-minute feature is a product of Milisi Filem, Forum Lenteng’s study group on visual arts.
The film is a great example of a trend in production of cultural knowledge in Indonesia, which values DIY ethos and autonomous initiative as well as egalitarianism and doing things collectively. The viewers get a sense of how the journey of the collective project is evolving through scenes of directors talking with each other and doing things together.
Golden Memories investigates the history of the cinema of Indonesia from a different perspective by focusing on the underrated genre of amateur family movies, which became a focus of Forum Lenteng’s research project on cinema and culture in 2016. Indonesian film history normally emphasizes prominent directors in the commercial film industry along with film footage recorded by the Dutch and manifesting a colonial gaze. Against the mainstream understanding of the film history of Indonesia, the directors ask a question: what can we know about the films and footage recorded by native Indonesians (bumiputra) since the introduction of a Cine Kodak 16mm camera to the Dutch East Indies in 1926?
A preliminary research
The story of the film highlights two amateur filmmakers, Kwee Zwan Liang and Rusdy Attamimi. Kwee Zwan Liang (1896-1959) was born in an elite Chinese-descent family at Jatipiring, Cirebon, West Java, and became the head of a sugarcane factory of the Kwee family in the same town. He made films by using a Cine Kodak camera from 1927 to 1940, and 12 hours of footage he shot have been archived at the EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam. Rusdy Attamimi, a former pilot currently residing in South Jakarta, made 8mm films since 1963 when he was studying in the UK. He shot events that took place around him, from family events to public events, including a protest on the West Irian case.
In its search for the history of the Indonesian films through the genre of amateur home movies, Golden Memories accomplishes a preliminary research on this subject. It introduces a new perspective on the Kwee family films as pioneering examples of amateur family films in Indonesian film history. However, Golden Memories does not go into much detail about Kwee Zwan Liang’s and Rusdy Attamimi’s films and their backgrounds, but remains an introduction to the topics it seeks to explore. For those who want to know the comprehensive picture, a recent publication of Dr. Peter Post (who was interviewed in the film), entitled The Kwee Family of Ciledug: Family, Status and Modernity in Colonial Java – Visualising the Private Life of the Peranakan Chinese Sugar Elite (2018, LM Publishers), can be a good reference.
Golden Memories brings a light on amateur family films and their intimate and honest sentiment. Many parts of this film are filled with a sense of nostalgia that relates to the family films, and I personally enjoyed being immersed to it. For instance, a scene of an Elmo projector which Rusdy brought out from his closet reminded me of the Elmo projector of my late grandfather, who loved making family films.
A significant amount of the film deals with the filmmakers’ visits to celluloid film enthusiasts in the Netherlands. This portion of the film relates to the theme of the culture of family films and touches upon the technological aspect of amateur family films. However, this rather lengthy part derails from the theme of the history of Indonesian film instead of convincingly making a point of how the nature of amateur family films, with their intimate sentiment, is connected to celluloid films. Or can we say that amateur family films have their aura, regardless of technological conditions, from the age of celluloid film up until the age of social media?
Who knows if there is a path?
In accompanying the filmmakers’ multi-sited fieldwork from Jakarta to Amsterdam, from the Hague to Jatipiring, Golden Memories is an interesting research road movie. (Though it is sometimes confusing to identify where the scene is.) The mission of the journey, as part of the film title implies, is to search for a “small history” (petite histoire) of filmmaking in Indonesia. The Indonesian filmmakers travel all the way to the Netherlands to find a petite histoire that is being archived professionally at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. In the Hague, the three directors visit the Kwee family and watch the Kwee family film which was shot by late Kwee Zwan Liang some 80 years ago, together with his children, who are now in their 80s. This scene of watching old family films in the cosy dining room of the Kwee family compellingly highlights how family films have an aura that invokes intimate and nostalgic feelings.
After the scene of the homely dining room of the Kwee family in the Hague, the research road movie hits the road to Jatipiring where the Kwee family once owned a sugarcane factory as well as their estate, and where the Kwee family film was shot. In contrast to the preceding scene, the attempt to trace a “small history” of the Kwee family film in Indonesia seems to get lost in the deep green sugarcane field as one of the filmmakers frustratingly says, “who knows if there is a path?” The filmmakers find something: an Indonesian local man recounts on camera the belief that the sugarcane factory may be haunted or that something is wrong with the land, because none of the succeeding businesses have gone well.
This contrasting sequence from the Hague to Jatipiring visually manifests a postcolonial dislocation charged with entangled racial and class relationships: In the Netherlands the petite histoire of Indonesian film is found in professional institutions, and the migrant family of Indonesian-born people of Chinese descent enjoy their old family film, while in Indonesia the remnants of a small history of the Kwee family film are found in an obscure narrative of the haunted land. Such place-specific anecdotes can be interpreted in terms of the colonial memories of the common people who were arguably exploited by the colonial powers and had no access to technology for filming what they wanted to record for their family or community in the early 20th century. I highly appreciate this sequence for implying that searching for a history cannot be always nostalgic, but that we also need to deal truthfully with the uncomfortable part of the history.
Through this research road movie, we encounter a number of different people who value old family films in their own ways. The collective journey of searching for a small history of Indonesian films might seem to take a long time, yet it inspires us to appreciate a collective approach to filmmaking as well as an aura of the image of family films. We look forward to seeing how this collective journey of learning, searching, and producing by Forum Lenteng and Milisi Filem will evolve further, together with other filmmaking projects in Indonesia and beyond.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Permata Adindaさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
Tracing One’s Sexuality: Agustina Comedi’s Silence Is a Falling Body
Permata Adinda (Indonesia)
Sexuality is not always a fixed thing, recent studies suggest. Rather than being easily classifiable as either “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” or “bisexual,” sexual preference has proven to be more complex. It might change over a lifetime and be dependent on different situations. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Association state that sexual orientation may be fixed and continuous throughout the lives of some people, and is fluid, or changes over time, for others. Lisa M. Diamond, who wrote a book about sexual fluidity (Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire), argues that traditional labels for sexual desire are inadequate. Her research contains examples of women who identify as heterosexual but find themselves falling in love with women. The word bisexual does not truly express the nature of such a person’s sexuality.
Despite the recent updates in sexuality studies, such discoveries still have not been depicted very often in films. Many films that have addressed homosexuality mainly dwell on the process of coming out, or the identity and social problems related to the characters’ sexuality — framing sexuality as something that always stays in one path. Call Me by Your Name, a feature-length fiction film set in Italy in 1983, portrays the journey of a boy discovering and making sense of his homosexuality. God’s Own Country depicts a growing romantic relationship between two men who live in a conservative, homophobic society. There are also The Handmaiden, Malila The Farewell Flower, Moonlight, Thelma and many more recent films portraying homosexuality. Yet it is still difficult to find sexual fluidity acknowledged and depicted in films.
That is why Agustina Comedi’s Silence Is a Falling Body, a documentary that traces the life of an Argentine married father who had been keeping secrets about his sexuality throughout his marriage, is an important film. While the film looks for information about its central figure’s past life as homosexual, it also finds proofs of his love for his wife and daughter — a hint of his sexual complexity, matching the latest studies of human sexuality.
Jaime was a homosexual. The film makes sure we acknowledge that from the beginning. Silence Is a Falling Body begins with Jaime’s home-movie footage of a naked male statue, zooming on its intimate body parts: a hint of Jaime’s sexual attraction towards men. We also hear stories from people about his relationship history with men: about his first boyfriend, his 11-year-long relationship with a man, and his psychologist diagnosing him as gay. The film leads us to question his motive in choosing, later in life, to marry a woman, by whom he had a daughter. Did Jaime marry against his will; was it something he was forced to do, considering the homophobic social condition he was under at the time? Or was it something he did voluntarily and wholeheartedly?
We could argue that Jaime lived in an era that was difficult for LGBT, which influenced his decision to get married and to live in a normal way according to the society standard. Argentina had a long history of oppression and violence against the LGBT community before the 1980s, the era of Jaime’s generation. The film interviews people who had the experience of being discriminated against and tortured by the society and the state. One person had to make up things during a police interrogation to avoid being electrocuted. Another person was taken to a mental hospital and returned only to endure considerable trauma.
However, while it could be true that Jaime married because of the conditions of his society, we know that he also had a happy marriage. Many of the home movies Jaime made were about his daughter — playing violin, singing, dressed in costume, playing with other kids. He even filmed the naked body of a pregnant woman in a highly intimate way, indicating his love for his wife. A person who was close to him reveals his growing habit of buying women’s jewelry and looking tenderly at baby’s clothes in a store before finally buying them, indicating his intention to marry in the first place. His wife even still brings a photograph of him everywhere — even though she found out about his homosexuality at one point in their marriage — revealing the romantic affection they have between each other.
Instead of arguing that he was sexually repressed throughout his marriage, the film provides no explicit statement or conclusion regarding Jaime’s sexual state. It also does not perceive Jaime’s situation as an unfortunate thing. Through the images he filmed and other people’s impressions of him, we instead see Jaime as a loving person who loved to hug people in the open street and smile at the camera. Filmmaker Agustina Comedi, who is Jaime’s daughter, distances herself from the film, letting the recordings of her father and the people who were close to him speak about him.
Jaime’s behavior as portrayed in the film — that of someone who seems to be enjoying his marriage rather than feeling forced into it — is actually in line with the results of Diamond’s latest study in 2014 about men’s sexuality. Sampling 300 Salt Lake City residents who were equally divided among those who self-identified as homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual, the study shows that 31 percent of self-identified gay men reported having developed romantic feelings for women in the previous year. The study also reveals that 40 percent of gay men reported some attraction to the opposite sex in the previous year, and 20 percent of gay men reported wanting to have sex with a woman during the previous year. Jaime’s life also has parallels with the case of Chirlane McCray, an American writer and political figure who married a man in 1991 — 34 years after writing an essay about her coming out as a lesbian. She stated that she is more than just a label — indicating her reluctance to be identified as “bisexual” or “heterosexual” — and that she did not consider herself sexually attracted to men, but rather attracted to her husband only.
The view of Silence Is a Falling Body regarding sexuality might also be implied in the words of the filmmaker’s son at the end of the film: “To be free means not having to be trapped in a cage.” The scene is the only one in the film to be shot in the 16:9 ratio. While the 4:3 ratio of all the previous scenes might imply the intention to blur the difference between which images were shot in the past and which ones are in the present — creating the illusion that all of them belong to the same era of people’s lives, the 16:9 ratio might mean another generation, a new hope for freedom of sexuality’s expression, and an era that does not have to bother with labels and rigid classification.
Silence Is a Falling Body may begin with a statement that Jaime is homosexual, looking at how he filmed a statue of a male body and how his camera zoomed in on thighs, buttock, genitals. However, as the film goes on, the scene seems more a tease to the audience than an indication of Jaime’s sexuality: how could you base a verdict on one’s sexual orientation only on footage of a male body? The film answers along the way, providing evidence that it might be more complicated than that. The film depicts and accepts all Jaime’s contradictions, portraying him as humanely as possible.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Linh Doさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
A Hard Case of Family Dysfunction: Ieva Ozolina’s Solving My Mother
Linh Do (Vietnam)
In Solving My Mother (2017), Ieva Ozolina presents a serious and difficult case of a dysfunctional family that begs for help. The 104-minute documentary follows Raitis Ozols, a 34-year-old mathematician in Latvia who accuses his mother of abusing him. The film starts with humor, builds up to a shocking climax of domestic violence, then subsides into an unresolved ending, effectively capturing a troubled mother-and-son relationship. This documentary isn’t comfortable to watch, but the issue it raises is important, because a similar act of violence may happen again between the mother and son. So who is Raitis Ozols, who is his mother, and who actually abuses whom?
Raitis Ozols is complicated. He is both endearing and dangerous. It’s important to give him credit where it is due because he needs forgiveness. On the one hand, Raitis is a funny man with an idiosyncratic obsession with math. At his birthday party, the man even solves math problems over his birthday cake, which is decorated with geometrical patterns. He tends to rationalize life in lengthy monologues, a trait that brings to mind Woody Allen’s persona in his movies: a neurotic, abstract man who is worried that the universe is expanding and will end some day, making his existence meaningless.
On the other hand, Raitis is unjust to his mother, Silvija. He blames her for everything. He accuses her of emotionally manipulating him and even reports her to the police. She bosses him around, swears at him, and threatens suicide. She only cares about her career and avoids conversations that would resolve conflict. It isn’t only Raitis who thinks so: his father, who abandoned him at birth, his younger brother, and his maternal grandfather all agree that Silvija is a difficult woman. Is she?
In interviews, Silvija, an accomplished university professor and mother who has single-handedly raised her sons to professional success, appears to be a reasonable woman who has the right to be proud and self-righteous. However, at a family gathering on Easter, Silvija reveals her true self. As the conversation in the grandfather’s tiny kitchen heats up between Raitis, his mother, and his younger brother, Silvija demands that Raitis apologize first before answering his questions; and before giving satisfying answers to her sons, she changes the topic to get back to what she considers more meaningful and less vulgar: painting Easter eggs. Silvija’s attitude is so cold and proud that anyone can feel angry with her.
To feel angry inside is part of daily life, but to act upon it is another matter. For all Silvija’s faults, the violence that Raitis is provoked into committing against his mother is shocking. He hits her. The film blacks out this scene, replacing it with a note to explain what has happened. In this pivotal scene, the camera has to do challenging work. As the kitchen is so tiny, the camera shoots from above the characters. This is a wise angle, because not only does it give a comprehensive view of the situation, but its higher position also suggests that the documentary wants to be objective, disentangle itself, and rise above the conflict. When it hides the heinous act, this is just the humane thing to do to spare all concerned: Raitis from something that he may deeply regret, his mother from something that she doesn’t deserve, and viewers from visual attack.
Using a hand-held camera, Ieva Ozolina offers a number of scenes that neatly capture the documentary’s topic and create symbolic value. One is the shot of Raitis at the beginning of the movie. Raitis stands in the middle of his messy room, blaming his mother. This scene immediately introduces the character’s problem. Half-way through, another shot frames Raitis sitting on the edge of the bed in a hotel room with his face turned away from a date who is reclining seductively on the bed. The shot emphasizes how awkward he is in relationships with others, especially women. Toward the end, the camera pauses before Raitis and his mother, who are sitting at a table in an outdoor museum. The mother is working at her computer, Raitis is talking to himself, and between them stands a wooden pillar which symbolizes their unresolved separatedness.
The soundtrack which features the music of one of the most famous arias in Giacomo Puccini’s classical opera Tosca (a staged performance of which is also seen during the film) matches the intense, larger-than-life conflict of Raitis’s family. Set against Napoléon Bonaparte’s invasion of Rome in 1800, Tosca tells the tragic story of a young painter, Cavaradossi, who faces the death penalty for helping a political prisoner. Cavaradossi sings this aria on the morning before he is executed. The use of Puccini’s opera might be said to make the film contrived, rather than realistic. Indeed, Raitis’s dramatic personality makes him as much a fictional character as a real person. However, what the film captures – the inherent difficulty in understanding and communicating with another human being, and the violence that may ensue, especially in a claustrophobic space – is real.
Solving My Mother isn’t the first film in which Ieva Ozolina has dealed with intelligent but morally questionable college professors who suffer mental breakdowns. Her first documentary, My Father the Banker depicts her own journey to find her father, an economics professor-turned-banker who abandoned his family, engaged in illegal financial operations, fled Latvia to avoid arrest, and years later ended up in a mental asylum in Malaysia. In both films, then, documentary filmmaking seems to be a way for Ozolina to analyze troublesome father and mother figures. In Solving My Mother, the mother doesn’t abandon her family. Yet she is so proud and distant that she drives her son to terrible violence. Domestic violence is a stark physical act, but its cause turns out to be a subtle build-up of psychological discontent.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Epoy Deytoさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
Solving My Mother: The Documentary as Satire
Epoy Deyto (Philippines)
Ieva Ozolina’s documentary Solving My Mother focuses on a family of local academics in Latvia whose members are equally renowned within their own fields. Raitis, the eldest sibling in the family, fresh from his thesis defense with the highest recognition, bears with him years of conflict with his mother, Silvija, which he’s now trying to resolve. This conflict is complicated as it is rooted in several factors concerning Raitis’s personal development. The film’s treatment of this conflict, however, seems to make light of the situation.
As a subject, Raitis’s mere presence in front of the camera is already interesting. The filmmaker does not need to frame him from a specific angle to see his personality. His personality overflows from his stutters and from the anxious gestures of his hands and upper body, which suggest a kind of internal malaise. The irregularities in Raitis’s observable behavior give clues towards what is being explored in the film. Throughout the runtime, Raitis claims that these behavioral irregularities are traumatic effects of his mother’s verbal abuse.
The first instance when Raitis makes this claim is followed by a sequence where Silvija is being interviewed. She warmly recalls Raitis as an adorable child. The shift of focus from Raitis to Silvija raises questions about the nature of their relationship as mother and son and casts suspicion on Raitis’s claims.
Having planted this suspicion, the film unfolds with a hint of distrust toward the main subject, in a tragicomic way. Though considered a genius, Raitis is often seen as unreliable. At the billiard bar, he can’t even be relied on by his friend Boriss to help him hide from the latter’s fiancé as Boriss flirts with other girls. There’s also one memorable scene in the corridor of the tenement where Raitis lives, where he’s trying to avoid the feng shui expert brought by his hypnotist to rearrange his home for him. Raitis, finding too many excuses, makes his hypnotist mad and causes him to walk out.
The way that the film delivers its comedy in the sequences mentioned above seems too familiar, as if the film’s aesthetic treatment had taken inspiration from MTV-produced reality shows, complete with handheld shots, multiple cameras, fluid editing, and people reacting in the kind of “natural” manner which could easily be mistaken for performance. Solving My Mother functions successfully not in its expository character as a documentary, but in its tendency to be satirical. It is a satire of Raitis’s claims. As the film throws shade on Raitis’s claims of being abused, it also captures the contradictions in his personality between this highly rational man of science and this overaged kid with an overcharged oedipal angst. On the hypnotist’s couch, Raitis talks about his mother and how he thinks she has affected his life negatively. His storytelling is interrupted in the middle of his talking as the film abruptly cuts to a sequence wherein the hypnotist seems to be casting a spell on Raitis to make him fall asleep. The film’s comedic character relies on these absurdities which it would be weird to laugh at, even though the situations are highly ridiculous.
As the film sways between exposition and comedy, so its ethical boundaries seem to sway into dangerous zones. While capturing intimate and tense moments, the presence of the camera seems to intensify the tension further, triggering happenings as it rolls. In the scene wherein Raitis and his mother visit the house of his grandfather, the camera does not seem to be a passive entity. It’s as if it were working with Raitis towards an eventual explosion of tension in the family’s supposedly peaceful Easter lunch. In their confrontation, Silvija questions why she only hears of his complaints now. Though Raitis may be justified in his grievances (he says that his mother did not seem to be interested whenever he reached out before), the film makes his exposition seem contrived, as if Raitis, his voice cinematically stuttering, were behaving this way because he’s in front of a camera.
The more Raitis projects himself, the more unreliable he appears, and the less seriously the film seems to take his conflicts. Even when actual violence occurs, its aftermath only shifts the satire into a dark comedy of errors. Because of this satirical aspect, the film walks an ethical tightrope. The uncomfortable concluding section makes the film’s method still more questionable. In the face of an obviously manipulative person, knowledgeable of his capability for abuse, the camera remains distant. As if waiting for another hilariously awkward moment to happen.
本作は、デジタルビデオが一般消費者向けに販売され始めてすぐの1996年から97年に撮影した。デジタルビデオの到来と共に、私はすぐにそれが持つ可能性の大きさに気付いて、それ以来フィルムを使うことはせず、デジタルビデオだけで撮影することにした。デジタルビデオがかなりの低価格で提供されたおかげで、膨大な素材を撮影することが可能になり、同時に、長いショットを撮ることも可能になった。デジタルビデオの他の特徴と共に、セルロイド映画制作とは異なる審美的な効果をあげ、『ロンドンスケッチ』（1997）や『Nas correntes de luz da ria formosa』（1999）、『シックス・イージー・ピーセス』（2000）、『ウイ・ノン』（2002）を見ればわかるように、私は手法を探求する道に入っていった。
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