Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Wake (Subic) 14:00-（single screening）
Wake（Subic）
YIDFF 2017 International Competition
Dir: John Gianvito / USA, THE PHILIPPINES / 2015 / 277 min
●notes
Following a 1991 decision by the Philippine Senate, the American naval base on Subic Bay returns to Filipino hands. However, after the US military’s long occupation, the bay area is subject to serious ongoing environmental pollution by chemical residues, heavy-metals, asbestos and PCBs. This film follows on from Vapor Trail (Clark), which screened at YIDFF 2011. Based on more than ten years of research, it vividly portrays how environmental pollution has made local residents suffer, and sympathetically follows the work of an NGO that assists them by launching legal action on their behalf. A rare film experience that focuses its gaze on the suffering, resistance, and history of repression of a people who lived under both Spanish and American colonial rule, while remaining faithful to their voices.
Wake（Subic）
●Director’s Statement
In the summer of 2006, I flew from Boston to Manila for the first time, intending to do preliminary research for a narrative feature, one brief segment of which I had envisioned would eventually be filmed in the Philippines. What I experienced in those very first days propelled the jettisoning of that fictional project and led to a long-term undertaking to bring attention to the on-going plight of the thousands of people living within the vicinity of the still toxic environs of the former U.S. military bases in the Philippines—the Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base.
Wake (Subic) completes the documentary diptych For Example, The Philippines; the first part of which, Vapor Trail (Clark), was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, both films are an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.
John Gianvito
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F) [Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library Friday Theater（June 14 Fri）
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business 14:00-、19:00-（screens twice）
Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business
YIDFF ’95 International Competition
Dir: Helena Solberg / BRAZIL, USA / 1994 / 35mm / 92 min
●notes
A filmmaker’s journey into the cross-cultural life and career of the most successful Latin American performer of all time, Carmen Miranda. For her, along with enormous wealth and fame as a Latin American icon, fabricated in the image factories of Hollywood, came professional distortion and personal damage. The film seeks to reveal the person behind the elaborate mask.
Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business
Memories and Dreams 15:50-（single screening）
Memories and Dreams
YIDFF ’95 International Competition
Dir: Lynn-Maree Milburn / AUSTRALIA / 1993 / 35mm / 58 min
●notes
Memories and Dreams chronicles the moving and poetic life of “Jo,” from the freedom and fantasy of childhood to the unexpected horrors of war up until her eventual escape from Czechoslovakia to Australia. Using a combination of film styles from classical documentary, animation, and experimental film, Memories and Dreams is a celebration and an exploration of the nature of personal memory.
Memories and Dreams
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F) [Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, presenting “For the Few, Not the Many: Linda Nursanti’s Seeking Justice for Lakardowo” by Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, a mentor of the workshop.
For the Few, Not the Many: Linda Nursanti’s Seeking Justice for Lakardowo
Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu
One might live without hope for a week, but one could not live without water for a day. Lakardowo, a small village in East Java, has been surviving without both for years. Seeking Justice for Lakardowo (Lakardowo Mencari Keadilan), a debut feature by Linda Nursanti, documents another episode of the masses being violated by the classes in Indonesia. The message is clear: in the struggle for public welfare, the privileged few has the law on their side.
The film makes no disguise of its political stance. From the very first minute, the screen belongs to the oppressed. Sama’ati, a middle-aged woman, complains about the chemical substance that’s been polluting the water in her village—it’s hot and toxic to the skin. Minutes later we see a man, Suhan, criticize how PT PRIA—the evil big corporation of the story—dump its waste on the village and bury the poison underground. In total, the filmmakers recorded statements from more than fifty people, with half of them coming from the dwellers of Lakardowo. With the film lasting around sixty minutes, that amounts to almost one person per minute.
Among the myriad noises, Sutamah takes the central stage, at least for the early half of the film. Through the roles she serves in the story, we witness the anatomy of collective struggle that unfolds throughout the film. At the beginning, we see her with her family, in her morning routines preparing her daughters who are about to go to school. Then we walk with her around the farming grounds, as she narrates to the camera about the development projects in her village, and the itchy skin that her people has been suffering due to the improper waste disposal of PT PRIA.
Gradually, toward the latter half of the film, Sutamah blends with the masses. We see her among her people—collecting donations, cajoling and consolidating her peers. Then many other characters flood the screen. We see Sutamah’s peers staging demonstrations, presenting data to the government, providing further explanations to the camera about the debacle. As the film progresses, the film is less about Sutamah and more about Lakardowo as a community in distress.
Lakardowo plays like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Throughout the film, we see the villagers stumble from one meeting to another meeting, from one demonstration to another demonstration. For every step forward the villagers made, the bureaucracy forced them to take two steps back. For every data they presented, the government and the corporation doubted them with their own set of data. In the end, there is no distance left to run—a political cul-de-sac.
Sure, Lakardowo could be very overbearing in its message, that one might easily dismiss the film as a typical social-justice-warrior documentary. To be fair, the film does bear many tropes of political documentary in Indonesia. Scenes of children crying, check. Shots of protest banners, check. Protest songs playing over montages of demonstration, check. On-screen texts with fist-pumping messages about social justice, check.
For years, since the regime-toppling events of 1998 Reformation, political advocacy has been the raison d’être of the Indonesian documentary scene. Very little of the nation’s documentaries are personal. The preoccupation is with the social and Lakardowo is no different. What makes Lakardowo worth noting, especially in Indonesia’s current political climate, is its portrayal of the power relations. The filmmaker puts great care to humanize the oppressed villagers, and delve deeper into the structure of power in the region and how it influences the struggle of the masses.
Political documentaries in Indonesia tends to oversimplify social conflicts into two points: the victims and the state. Such narrative usually puts great emphasis on the number of people affected and declares that the state is responsible for them. Consequently, most documentaries about social conflict in Indonesia boil down to the absence of the state, yet fails to investigate how the power structures and their relationships to the people allow such tragedy to occur in the first place. Romanticizing the state, or its absence, is not only misleading but also socially irresponsible.
Lakardowo treads more carefully, more patiently. The filmmakers accompanied the villagers in every ring of bureaucracy they must went through, from local, regional, to national government. In every meeting, the villagers repeated the same data over and over again. It only led to the government suggesting more field investigations, that in turn incited more public protests. In one of the protests, the filmmakers managed to record the villagers negotiating with the police, which in turn threatened the village head. “Do you want your village to be safe or not?” said the authority. Moments later, the crowd dissipated.
Such subtle moments make the message of Lakardowo not only relatable, but also relevant. The state is never one coherent structure of power. Inside it lies a complex ecosystem of power struggles, which presents an endless and repetitive maze for the people who seek justice. By mapping the power relations within the state bureaucracy, Lakardowo makes the rebuttal of the villagers’ protest by the corporation even more powerful. There is one scene in the middle of Lakardowo where the villagers observed PT PRIA factory from their village. They are only separated by several meters of land and a wall. Yet, the villagers must go through several layers of state bureaucracy just to meet the corporation’s representatives and face a political dead-end.
Given the history of human rights violations in Indonesia, one might anticipate the people’s eventual failure, but the film’s narrative had done enough to contextualize the audience with the struggle. The film’s message feels earned, rather than imposed by the filmmakers, which is usually the case with other films of its like.
Lakardowo might never win any award for its artistic merit. Indeed, the most obvious criticism we could address to the film—and most political documentaries in Indonesia—is the awfully basic and rather blurry camerawork it employs. Lakardowo’s greatest strength lies not in beauty, but clarity. In the age of post-truth that we live in, that is more than enough.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, presenting “Marine Metropolitan: Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting” by Chris Fujiwara, a mentor of the workshop.
Marine Metropolitan: Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting
Chris Fujiwara
A sheet of multicolored fabric, pulled across a wooden post, forms a slanted ceiling. Under it, a woman and a small boy gaze out at a thin triangle of crepuscular sky. In this hallucinatory image near the beginning of Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting, the ceiling might be a sail, the dwelling a raft, and the mother and son navigators embarked on a voyage. Sea and land mingle in the world of the people of the film, residents of the seaside slum of the large container port of Tondo, Manila – a community to which Maranan devoted an excellent previous documentary, Tondo, Beloved: To What Are the Poor Born? (2011).
Inside the residents’ dwellings, Maranan catches peculiar haphazard framings created by their jerry-rigged interiors – how glassless windows reveal skies like Turner paintings or let in glimpses of some ongoing irrelevant movie of purposeful human activity. The world of the community is in flux: walls rustle or rattle, or (if of cement) will soon be knocked down. The government wants to get on with a large-scale construction project – the “claws” of which (to use the word of the title), menacing giant cranes, are the first things seen in the film – and has slated the area for clearance. Though presented to the Tondo residents as a benefit, relocation appears likely to worsen their lot, since they will be obliged to pay off government loans for their new housing, whereas as squatters in Tondo they live rent-free. At a meeting where they are told about the relocation, a group of mostly female listeners offer a tableau of silent faces to the camera, each expressing a personal variation on the theme of So-how-are-they-going-to-screw-us-this-time.
Mostly female: in the community as Maranan depicts it, there are men, too, but they are passive, unwilling to talk, sometimes hardly mobile. Preoccupied with television and eating, they have surrendered initiative to the women; the adult males with fight in them must have all fled or been taken away. Perhaps one way to read the enigmatic title is to think that the next century will be a century of women. In any case, Maranan makes it clear that for her, the women of Tondo are not victims, but the heroes of the film. One woman, told that her application for relocation will be disapproved if she can’t present a house for demolition when the wrecking crew comes, gets up and exclaims: “Disapproved? I’ll go berserk before the chairman.” Maranan immediately cuts to something else; the anti-sentimental cut makes of powerlessness a political stance, a potential suspended in non-realization.
By the term “form of life,” Giorgio Agamben designates “a life that cannot be separated from its form,… a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.”1 Determined to show the life of her heroes in just this way, as pure form and possibility, Maranan finds in this life an essential innocence. The people of Tondo are engaged only with their own existence, with the few things they own and the materials they can salvage and sell. They hurt no one; they don’t even expect anyone to help them, although they know they need and deserve help.
Amid the turbulence of their lives, a stability is affirmed – in the human gesture as the expression of a will to focus, to hold something. This gesture takes various forms: the calm of a midwife during the endless minutes before a childbirth; the intentness of the pregnant woman as she lights a candle. Because of this gesture we are forced to say that these are not people who are adrift, who belong nowhere, and who are simply subject to being moved around at the will of the powerful.
The unattributed epigraph to In the Claws of a Century Wanting reads (in the English subtitles’ translation of the Tagalog text): “For is it not true that the times have a mind, and all that lives a time is lived by this time, too?” This impersonal consciousness that apprehends, thinks, and expresses itself through the beings that compose it is the subject of the film, and the film is this consciousness before it is anything else – before it is, say, a narrative of events that succeed one another as causes and effects. The continuity of the film is almost entirely the work of the soundtrack, an oneiric tapestry of offscreen speech and noise, whereas the images are fragmentary and self-contained. Unlike the brightly colored city of containers, which Maranan films in extreme long shot to show its abstract nature, the scenes of the Tondo dwellers never connect up into a total space: each image retains the singularity of a moment that was lingered over and that has been preserved.
Maranan is one of the documentary filmmakers (with the Pedro Costa of In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth or the Wang Bing of Three Sisters, for example) who prove that to document is not something instantaneous and impulsive, but an act that gains in intensity over the time that it takes. In the continuity of the fragments she captures, Maranan evokes such a strong and precise sense of human freedom that it’s possible to believe that the heroes of her film are equal to the struggle with catastrophe that continues to be their everyday life.
________________________
“Form-of-Life,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4.
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Self Portrait: Birth in 47 KM 14:00-、19:00-（screens twice）
This film depicts the lives of an old woman and a young woman in a small village in the mountains of China. The old woman is shown at length walking with her back hunched, telling stories of her seven children and the terribly difficult life of poverty they had lived. The young woman speaks of her school, of leaving for work, and of her boyfriend. The film is youthfully experimental, with the director herself joining hands with the old woman, and performing with the women moving their bodies. From this parched landscape—the filmmaker’s fond gaze pierces us to the core.
Self Portrait: Birth in 47 KM
●Director’s Statement
This is the seventh work in my “Self-Portrait Series.” I made it during my sixth visit to the village known as 47 KM. That winter, I witnessed the village’s abandonment, downfall, and death. I wondered to myself why I had returned to that location again. A certain 21-year-old girl gave birth to her second child that winter. Will this one new living being bring some sign of life back to this village?
A new mother. Another mother, advanced in years. They plead with me about survival and child-rearing. The river of their sweat and tears flows without stopping. Even the land about to die still reflects a radiance. I will not be silent
Zhang Mengqi
Self Portrait: Birth in 47 KM
Self-Portrait with Three Women 16:10-（single screening）
The 23-year-old director, fresh out of university, lives at home with her mother and grandmother. She rebels against them but also tries to understand the generation gap between them. While she gets angry and questions their expectations of her as a woman (i.e., to marry and have children), she also gropes for the meaning of real love. Along with her mother and grandmother, the three women wring out their loves and hates with explosive strength. The director in her performance piece uses her own body to project the images of her mother, turning her lost loves into springboards, practically jumping out of the screen so she can shout with all her might.
Self-Portrait with Three Women
●Director’s Statement
This year I turned 23, the age when women become pregnant with dreams. Yet, even while nursing our own dreams, we must carry the burdens of two other women’s dreams as well. This film began with my own search, then delved into the lives of my mother and her mother, following the blood that has flowed through three generations, in these women who grew up in such different times. As a victim of an oppressive marriage, my grandmother held hopes that my mother would enter a beautiful, perfect marriage. When my mother became a victim herself, she transferred those hopes to me. Marriage may be every girl’s dream, but it is also the murderer of those dreams.
Zhang Mengqi
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F) [Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “Order in Chaos: Ieva Ozolina’s Solving My Mother” by Vema Novitasari.
Order in Chaos: Ieva Ozolina’s Solving My Mother
Vema Novitasari (Indonesia)
A man looks worried, stuttering sometimes, claiming his current condition is “because of my mother.” In a room that almost looks like a garbage dump, with trash and coins scattered all around, Solving My Mother introduces us to Raitis, a gifted 32-year-old Latvian mathematics scholar facing a hard time getting through his adulthood. While other men of his age are married already, Raitis has problems getting along with women. Solving My Mother follows Raitis’s struggle to resolve his difficult relationship with his mother, Silvija.
Solving My Mother begins by indicating Raitis’ hoarding disorder, but as the camera reveals more aspects of his life, hoarding proves to be not the only problem Raitis is facing. While other people in the frame seem relaxed, Raitis makes awkward gestures, speaks fast, stutters, has difficulty maintaining eye contact, and barely seems comfortable. The camera approaches Raitis in a calm and patient manner, inviting an intimacy that Raitis never seems ready to accept.
As if intentionally making a contrast, the filmmaker cuts directly from the scene of Raitis’s hoarding in his room to the introduction of Silvija. A single mother of two sons who left her professional career to take care of Raitis and his brother, Maris, Silvija seems more balanced than Raitis. She speaks of him smilingly, and the tone of her scenes is warm. Her brown blouse well-suited to her hair colour, in a room with warm lighting, she is portrayed as a responsible and loving mother. Again and again throughout its first three quarters, the film reveals the contrasting convictions of Raitis and Silvija. Raitis blames Silvija’s rude and pushy behavior and her threat to commit suicide for his inability to get along with others. But it is questionable if Silvija is actually responsible for Raitis’ condition.
Irony is the main feature of Solving My Mother. Raitis desperately files a report to a local police station to “tell my mother to stay away and not shout at me again.” At such a level of desperation, asking the authorities to back him up to solve a domestic problem, Raitis’s own power compared to Silvija’s becomes obvious. Probably the best response to such a request from an adult man would be smirks and awkward laughter.
More irony is apparent in the ensuing Easter holiday scene. While continuing to argue, Silvija insists on painting Easter eggs; she tries to bring the family together while at the same time she shouts stubbornly at them. Whereas earlier the film has followed Raitis and Silvija separately and listened to each of them individually, now the opposing sides are in the same scene, shot in a way that feels similar to a reality show. The camera angle feels like peeking, as it now captures more sensitive and crucial matters than just hoarding and awkward gestures.
For at least 45 minutes, the focus on Raitis-versus-Silvija feels quite frustrating. As the film widens out and steps back a certain distance to add more of a sense of irony, it becomes clear that, despite the title, nothing has been “solved.” The best way to approach Solving My Mother is probably to see it through the concept of order in chaos. Through this basic idea, Henri Poincaré proved that some problems have no analytical solution. No fixed patterns or mathematical reasoning allow us to explain or predict the weather, stock markets, and various kinds of natural changes. The universe is never smooth, but rough, twisted and intertwined. These qualities are the essence of how a thing is.
Raitis’s obsession with order and solving his problems has to be measured against the reality that not every chaos should be answered by order and completion. Such a viewpoint is also found in Hirokazu Koreeda’s films. Frequently, his depiction of reality provides no solutions. In After the Storm, Koreeda introduces us to a single father’s difficulties in supporting his child while he longs for his ex-wife. The storm mentioned in the title brings no definitive resolution to the conflict. The hero’s gambling on lotteries is like Raitis’s meetings with his psychiatrist: in both films, opportunities and struggles fall into nothing.
Solving My Mother somehow provides a liberating experience in reminding us how irony, failure, complexities, and unpredictable results exist as things to be accepted. The film doesnot bother to offer any encouragement or to harmonize the absurdity of life, instead providing a sharp depiction of how humans make decisions and react to situations. The lack of solution makes the film very moving in its absurd and raw approach to capturing reality.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “The History of His Story: Silence Is a Falling Body” by Talissa Febra.
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.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “A Journey through Home Movies: Agustina Comedi’s Silence Is a Falling Body” by Satoko Tomishige.
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?
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “A Research Road Movie of a Collective Journey of Filmmaking: Golden Memories (Petite Histoire of Indonesian Cinema)” by Risa Tokunaga.
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.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “Tracing One’s Sexuality: Agustina Comedi’s Silence Is a Falling Body” by Permata Adinda.
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.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “A Hard Case of Family Dysfunction: Ieva Ozolina’s Solving My Mother” by Linh Do.
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.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop has taken place during the YIDFF since 2011. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival. Co-presented by YIDFF and Festival Film Dokumenter, the Film Criticism Workshop moves to Jogyakarta. It’s a 6-day class filled by learning how to write film criticism with two mentors: Chris Fujiwara (USA/JAPAN) and Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu (Indonesia) during the Festival Film Dokumenter in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, 6 – Tuesday, 11 December 2018. The final essay written by the seven international participants are introduced on this website. Here, “Solving My Mother: The Documentary as Satire” by Epoy Deyto.
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.
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