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64 Die Versöhnung
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| Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.11.79 Frieda Grafe, A Journey into the Blue Der Tagesspiegel, 13.10.79 Peter Nau, In the South Seas DIE ZEIT, engl. Ausgabe 11.11.1979 Norbert Jochum |
| A
JOURNEY INTO THE BLUE Rudolf Thomes and Cynthia Beatts Film "Study of an island" |
| Frieda
Grafe (translated by Cynthia Beatt) Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.11.79 |
An
ethnographical feature film, a film in which ethnography plays a part
- the fictitious motives, the desire for adventure are incidental, the
dreams at the inter-woven roots of science are exposed through it. The
poor artists pay so often with a bad conscience because they can, only
with difficulty, prove their social usefulness. It does not matter what
a researcher pursues in foreign lands; he nevertheless renders something
for mankind. A broad field. Occasionally touched upon by film. This film
is three and a quarter hours long. Enough time to allow thoughts and eyes
to wander. Rudolf Thome is justifiably cross when one terms this film
anthropological. The story is the making of a book, the preperation for
writing it, for illustrating it. With other means. In no way interpretative
anthropology. Anthropolgy happens, on the spot, as the inventors of language
in politics and television say nowadays. Five young people act for the
film as travelling researchers, not like children who, more abstractly,
play at Indians. They actually do travel across the world to the south
seas. So simple is that today. Right to the shell-shaped crater island
of Ureparapara in the English-French Condominium of the New Hebrides.
One of those along on the expedition is an illustrator. "Captain
Cook and the other expeditioners always took an illustrator with them."
For this film, 200 years after Captain Cook, that is a serious reason.
There is also a surveyor, a botanist and two others take care of the languages
and custom rituals. They are joined by a white native, the brother of
the co-directress, who has already been on the island once. THE NEW HEBRIDES Those who have the chance should read,before or after the film, the May 1977 number of the Filmkritik which describes the project STUDY OF AN ISLAND. Not so that they can lay a spiteful finger on the broken dreams, on everything, which didn't work out, which isn't in the film. The distance between the project and the realisation of it describes the intentions of the directors. The way is the method, savs Jean Rouch. I believe Thome when he says that the film would not have been better for him if the people had got along better with one another, with less sickness, with less problems. The way it is conceived it could have been worse with people who harmonized. And certainly it would have been less dramatic on a happier, less over-hung island. It was a part of the project that all things occuring could find an equal place in the film. The old scheme of telling a story with beginning, middle and end is put out of joint. Events in the last, in the sixth month of their stay could very well have put everything that had happened so far in a new light. Right from the beginning the audience must have this straight: the images in the film are as realistic as those in the most artful of the commercial cinema. They are simulated, repeated for the camera. They play their own innocence. They contain the same naturalness as the TV images which install the great events of this world, full of life and vividly intimate, into our living rooms. This film reckons with the changes in seeing that TV has brought. It adapts itself to the new situation. It understands itself as a cinema possibility in the age of TV. It has taken upon itself to compete with the directness coming out of that small box every day. A directness,which, as everyone knows, has nothing to do with directness at all. Therefore, STUDY OF AN ISLAND is like looking through a lorgnette. The camera is always present in the images, but not the way it is in the films which one could say are its predecessors or relatives. It is not the participative camera of Flaherty nor is it the contact camera of Jean Rouch. It is like a fat studio camera which holds its distance. So, an unindividual, collective thing comes into being. The invisible man behind the camera is not the old author-god who always knew everything. He is, like Warhol, the registering machine who, equally apart from the old differentiation between fiction and documentary, has an eye for the minimal, the unplanned, which in the past fell out of the frame and consequently under the table. DISCOVERY AND REALITY Thome does not actually wish to change cinema procedures in his way of taking pictures, as Michael Snow does by changing the use of apparatus or as Costard does. He wishes to offer the camera other food, a free space for acting talent rather than stories. This means that the barriers between invention and reality are even more blurred than usual. And, one should remember, that was the crucial point for the first audiences of the moving pictures. Even if today a blase public makes out that they are a long way from that phase, the cinema, excepting experimental film, still lives from this basic constellation. The people on the island, under difficult and unusual living conditions, fought with one another. What we get to see of this is an intensely full but nonetheless selected portion. It is a reproduced piece of quarrelling, with a quality mixed in that does not exist in the usual feature film. In this film one is primarily able to assume as existing what one normally, as an orderly member of the public, refrains from realizing; that when Laren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart kiss on the screen it is not just for the audience. There are other indications that STUDY OF AN ISLAND, even though constructed differently, is an acted film. What is shown of the island always remains an exemplary, citated, living picture. What is spoken in the film is rendered in exactly the same way. It alternates between discussions, conversations and telling stories. The custom chief tells a legend. Brian Beatt a Munchhausen-style fish story, the botanist puts the whole undertaking in dream metaphors. The directors activate their characters in this way, connecting the spoken fiction and most personal in this way. This reminds one of Brice Parrain in Godard's "Vivre sa Vie” where he, seeking to explain linguistic problems, tells Anna Karina the story of Porthos in the "Three Muskateers”. There are not only two worlds reflected in one another and portraying one another in this film - there are actually three. The small group of German speaking persons, whose accents alone differentiate them from one another so that one has the feeling from time to time that this could give rise to drama; then the dark-skinned islanders and last of all the two ‘colonialists’ lost between the cultures. One only gets to hear such a perfectly conserved English along with gestures, such an ‘over' as Brian makes the connection per radio telephone to his sister in hospital, from Hollywood B actors of Englis origin, from George Sanders or C. Aubrey Smith. I am walking in the light of God sing two youths as they march into the deep green forest to set a trap. It sounds like hulahula. The other songs that one hears have anglicised texts to strange, foreign music. The rhythm appears to come from another time. When they lived happily on another island which they were forced to leave by a hurricane. One sees this island as a long, glittering stripe on the horizon, a dream picture of an island in the sun. A wistful pan into which faraway music falls. In any case there was only a feature film to be made from this Ureparapara project because what it deals with is so far away. Definitely gone. |
| IN
THE SOUTH SEAS Rudolf Thomes and Cynthia Beatts Film "Study of an island" |
| Peter
Nau (translation by Cynthia Beatt) Der Tagesspiegel 13.10.79 |
In
May 1977 the "Filmkritik” published the script of the project
for STUDY OF AN ISLAND - "an ethnographical feature film" -
with text, photographs and maps of Ureparapara, a small volcanic island
in the north of the New Hebrides. "I never imagined the island like
this," - one of the participants takes the words right out of my
mouth as the ship moves through the deep blue sea towards a huge, black-green
mass of land. Greetings and farewells are the beginning and end of the
film. In exchange for their work the islanders propose a boat instead
of money. They make copra from coconuts and buy tobacco, sugar, matches,
soap, rice, biscuits, beer, tunafish and batteries with the proceeds.
A youth finds pleasure in a cassette recorder belonging to one of the
germans and pays for it in the end with shells. These children will be
badly missed, as will the lush greeness, walking down to the beach early
in the morning, the feeling of security - even in the midst of strangeness
- in the slow, sure rhythm of the islanders. The expedition consists of 4 women and one man. Their aim is to publish a book describing the island. Geography, language, customs, social conditions are to be shared and studied by these young people. The audience takes part in how they pose the questions. The same riddles exist for them as those puzzling the questioners: the tenacious wish to understand a custom that has to do with devils and a painted hat. Then the squeezing out of root rind and mixing of colors, decorating the hat, and in the buzzing of the insects, the pure present, the moment of filming. When they listen to the tapes back home with the crowing of cocks it will bring back the heavy air which made them ill. The islanders were happy on Reef Island before they came to Ureparapara. Why aren't they happy here? The conditions with which they live are 'low' - what does that mean? Here they work for money and only to begin from the beginning the next day. They live under an oppressive cloud. The sky closes itself over the people like the lid of a suitcase. the bay is a hole into which the wind sweeps and fouls. The 'customs', ritual customs were forbidden by the christian missionaries. The missionaries met an early death in this hellish climate. Now there is a party trying to help bring the old customs back to life. It is widespread through the New Hebrides and represents the rights of the natives. A bridal payment and then a wedding according to christian custom and according to custom ritual, overshadowed with sorrow like a burial. A custom dance. First of all a communal house is built for the strangers. A small child strips the rib from a palm leaf lying before her. Another child carries a trap into the forest. The children there don't have toys in our sense of the word. They make something and making it gives them pleasure. When a toy is finished it often holds no more value for them. The islanders do not appear to have a word for 'roof'. They speak of one 'side' as they do of the other side of a house. Some speak english. The New Hebrides are an english-french condominium. Those of the expedition whose mother tongue is english appear to be more spontaneous, affectionate and freer than the German speaking participants. The sweetest note in this intimacy is the scene where a small polynesian boy in a hammock snuggles against the brother of Cynthia Beatt. He has joined the others on the island. Joris Ivens did something in his China film which is relevant to "STUDY OF AN ISLAND”. He uncovered a world for the european audience which is far removed from ours, but in this otherness he, at the same time, saw the sameness which clearly binds us to the people of China. This is the opposite position to exoticism which exploits the strangeness, iso1ating its picturesque aspect. Beatt and Thome take this seriously as the people of Ureparapara take seriously those who have come to study them and their island. In this, in the way they express their methods of procedure, difficulties and conflicts, is reflected the film itself in the process of its development. And then again, there are the real pictures of this 'study'. A tree trunk which is brought on land through silver-green water, carved out and then used as a drum. The south sea music and the t-shirt of one of the drummers with the logo "Air Polynesie”. In the hair of another drummer two deep red blossoms,bright, burning points against the decaying green of the mountains. A dark face in the black of the night. Stories of evil spirits and lazy sharks. Diving in the green blue sea as in the mirro of densely forested mountains. "The ship is coming” says one who will remain at the end "when you leave, we shall stay here. That is all.” |
| RITES AND WRONGS ON A DISTANT ISLAND |
| Norbert
Jochum DIE ZEIT engl. Ausgabe 11.11.1979 |
Lap-lap
is one of the culinary delights of a small island in the South Pacific.
It consists of potatoes mashed against a tree branch, stuffed in rubbery
leaves, and cooked between hot stones. The process of making lap-lap is a common enough task, and is featured in a film about the island of Ureparapara, which is in the northern part of the New Hebrides group. A team of four women and one man spent six months making the film in an attempt to illustrate the life of the islanders, social organisation, rites and cultural traditions. But is not the story told in the film. Rather the story is the film itself; the film is not only the end-product of their work but at the same time a record of that work. Berlin film-maker Rudolf Thome, the film's director, says the production is not based on manufactured scenes. There was no script, and the daily subject of filming depended very much on how the team felt that day. "Description of an Island" (co-directed by Cynthia Beatt) is closely related to Rudolf Thome's films "Made in Germany and the USA" and "Tagebuch" ("Diary"). Yet a new quality has been added: the ethnographic method used in every film here becomes the subject. The film is about the difficulty of asking the right questions when we are talking to one another. And the confusions that produce answers to questions that were not asked. It is about how we can understand what we see. And how we can see what we do not understand. In the opening sequence of the film the team approaches the island in a boat: shaped like a giant horseshoe, it is a mountain covered with forest, inhospitable and eerie. Six time in the film we get a total view of Ureparapara. On the one hand this periodic insert scene emphasises the rhythm both of the film and of real time. (The film lasts three hours and the team spent six months making it.) On the other hand, it points to the identity of the object things portrayed and their portrayal, of content and form. Above all, this view has the effect of a commentary on what is happening: it underlines the distance, the gap which despite all attempts cannot be bridged. A film (24 images a second) on the difficulties of painting a picture. Anna, a painter who is one of the team, complains at the beginning about the difficult conditions under which she has to work: she needs a table, decent light, needs to concentrate; tensions upset her, as does the constant swaying of the palms, which changes the light. At the end the film shows the beautiful and precise pictures of fruit she painted. But a boy tells her that the name she gave the fruit is wrong. There are things for which no name exists: in the film we see the house in which the group is to live being built. Then the men from the village put tree trunks tied together on the top to form the roof. One of the group asks the villagers what the word for roof is. It turns out there is no word roof, only for side. How can Cynthia understand the Tamat cult even though she tries so hard. She has made a list of the various terms and now wants the custom chief to explain what they mean to her. Whenever she thinks she has understood ("I think I've got it now") and then asks for the meaning of the next word she goes back to square one because the next word transforms the meaning of the previous one. So one cannot understand what one sees. The custom chief, when making the tamat hat, first makes a brush from a twig by beating one end till it is fibrous. He stirs the paint and paints the hat with it, changes the colour by adding leaves, then paints on. But what does it mean? On the other hand the group's mechanisms for understanding one anothees problems are over-developed; the y hold talks on relationships typical of the communal breakfast in an old Berlin flat. There are some interesting anecdotes. The chief tells of Qas, a devil, who carried off two girls from the village because they had tried to light a fire from his burning head in the night. They only managed to escape by frightening him with a tame pig. Another villager tells of Vittandre and Vittlemoa who made such a powerful leap on to one side of the island that the circle opened to become a horseshoe - a story which is taped on a cassetterecorder and then played to another villager. He translates it and she writes it down. But this work too is just one of many mosaic stones which when put together still do not produce an image. "Abroad, the only exotic person is the stranger; and the native, apart from his own necessity, has a wish for the strange", wrote Ernst Bloch. One of the villagers told Cynthia why he did not feel good on Ureparapara. Wherever one looked, all one saw was mountains; the wind got caught in the horseshoe and kept turning and rotting. He said he would prefer to live on another island. And the camera pans to show the palm-lined beach of a South Sea island. |