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Our Beloved Month of August
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A Documentary Fantasy
It
starts like this: with a bunch of roosters running about together, watched
hungrily by a fox who eventually pounces, breaking up
the feathery gathering. A strange, off-hand, not-at-all ominous prologue:
nothing like the scorpions at the start of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), nothing
symbolic or allegorical or prophetic about it in terms of the human story to
follow. More like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s abrupt
pre-credit apparitions: what he called an im-sign, a floating, unstitchable piece of
brute camera-reality.
If
this opening is a key or clue to anything, it signals the incredible life that
teems through Miguel Gomes’ second feature, Our
Beloved Month of August: children, rivers, animals, old people, trucks,
dancing, motorcycles, a newspaper printing press, day breaking and night
falling … and, above all, stories and songs, re-told and re-performed for (no
doubt) the thousandth time.
It takes courage to make a film about popular
music not in its glamorously resistant, underground forms, but music of the
most everyday, ordinary kinds: religious parades, karaoke, a marching band,
all-night accordion parties, radio programs, and middle-of-the-road cover bands
who favour sentimental ballads of the Julio Iglesias style. But maybe even if
you don’t love this music before you see the film, you will admire it
afterwards …
There
is a production story that comes with this film, circulated in Festival
catalogues and press kits. We would call it a behind-the-scenes story, if what
is supposedly behind the scenes was not also in the scenes … and here something puzzling begins to take shape.
The
production story says that Gomes came to Arganil (in
Portugal) during the popular holiday season (August), with a massive script for
a fiction film (we see how big it is, there on a table), and a small crew.
Unable to fully realise his vision for this film, he nonetheless hung around
and began to film the real life of this time and place, like a documentarian or
anthropologist or ethnographer: following in particular (as I have indicated)
the ever-mutating trail of a folk musical culture, which expands to provide the
picture of an entire migratory world, full of tourists, visitors, strangers who
came and stayed … And it is this material Gomes eventually mixed with the
traces of the fiction that he managed to get on film. (1)
Is
this story true, or just too good to be true? We can never tell, very
precisely, where the fiction ended and the reality began in this process, or
even which of them came first. Certainly, everything to do with the ‘making-of’
(and of course the film project inside the film is also called Our Beloved Month of August) – what the
French call la fabrique – seems perfectly artificial, as in the droll scenes of confrontation between
the director and his irritated producer.
A
specific scene is emblematic in this regard: a local girl comes to visit the
members of the film crew, who are in the process of playing a game of quoits.
The girl (in a long shot/long take) goes from one person to another, seeking to
know “who do I ask?” to be an actor in the film (since a casting call has been
made public); she goes from the sound man to the production manager to,
finally, the director – but this social ritual is already a comedy, almost Tati-like, since all these people are standing very close
to each other to begin with. Eventually, the girl strikes a deal with Gomes: if
she can throw well as part of their game, she is in the film. That cues a
beautiful, momentous cut: the girl throwing, everybody around her intently
watching, the sound of where her gesture ends up signalling
an off-screen we will never see. But we know the result, intuitively:
she will be in the film they are making (indeed, she will be the heroine’s
‘best friend’ figure). It’s like a game of Snap: the trap or the lure of the
fiction suddenly seizes the unfolding fragment of reality – even if that
reality was completely scripted and staged to begin with.
It
doesn’t matter, ultimately, how the film came about, how natural or contrived
it may be. What matters is its brilliant game of pieces, of levels, of ‘panels’
as in a particularly ingenious art gallery installation or dispositif – where everything
that is cinematic in this set-up depends on the inventive art of transitions. The film is always moving
us along, jumbling us up, spacing us out in simple but ingenious ways, through
the de-phasing and superimposition of image and sound. A person tells a story
about their life, and about the music that is bound up in it; but usually, once
we hear that music (or not long after) the film switches to some other scene,
and the music continues to play over it for quite a long time (the radio
station scene, early on, provides for the matricial model for this switching-circuit).
Meanwhile,
intriguing, unforced rhymes and echoes between pieces proliferate: for
instance, the shadows of two teenagers goofing around in front of the lights of
a car is answered by the shadows of two filmmakers posing at dusk; the real
night sky is answered by the artificial one in a girl’s bedroom. The overall
effect is dreamy, hypnotic, fascinating, setting the heart and the mind racing
equally – and it lays the groundwork for the final, elaborate end-credit gag
(worthy of Frank Tashlin), when Gomes confronts his
sound-man for always recording (as in Godard’s Sauve qui peut) a musical soundtrack that
cannot be directly heard in situ.
It’s the documentary of a fantasy …
It
takes a very long time – about 75 minutes – for the fiction, as such, to kick
in. It is the love story between the young singer Tânia (Sónia Bandeira) and her
guitarist cousin Helder (Fábio Oliveira), members of the band Estrelas do Alva – and
the constraining, ambiguous complications caused by Tânia’s close relationship with her father, Domingos (Joaquim Carvalho), who is also
the band’s leader. Before that point, we are introduced to the supposedly real
people of Arganil who play these roles: Tânia in her job as fire guardian in a tower, Helder as able sportsman and amateur rock musician.
And
we see the love story start here, on this level or register: and with perfect
corniness, as the amorous couple is seen through the binocular-vision
point-of-view shot previously introduced to convey the work of the roaming fire
brigade (the fire truck introduced, in a superb transition, by a child’s fond, heroising drawing) … But fiction, really, has been poised
to seep in, poised to strike (like that fox), from the very start, in
practically the first line of the first song we hear: “Oh, what saudade …” – that
particular form of Portuguese melancholia played out in the endless lyric tales
of love and loss, abandonment and betrayal, jealousy and death.
Our Beloved Month of
August is not so long by contemporary standards – a mere 147 minutes – but one will
still hear the usual normative grumbles that it’s ‘too long’, that it could
have been ‘tightened’, that it could have easily ‘lost an hour in editing’ and
still amounted to the same film. Not so. It’s a film that needs time to roam
between its different levels, to slowly find its fictional register (so subtly, just as it seems to have comfortably become a
documentary alone), to move in and out of its different zones (hence the
running gag of the making-of-the-film-within-the-film in all its fantastication or fabulation) …
Is
every important, progressive film of today a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943)? Almost
every Pedro Costa film, for instance, seems to return to it; and ghosts or
zombies of every material sort seem to stalk or sleepwalk through the work of
Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang, Béla Tarr … But Our Beloved Month of August takes us back to a very particular moment of Tourneur’s masterpiece: the scene
in which the previously subservient, glad-handing, guitar-strumming, nightclub
entertainer with the wonderful name of Sir Lancelot breaks his subaltern role
and strides forward to gleefully accuse the drunken, guilty white man with his
deceptively lilting ditty: “Woe is me / Shame and scandal in the family …”
Gomes
gives us a more raucous and combative version of this scene. Indeed, it is a
literal combat – a combat song (like a ghetto combat dance) phrased and
performed as a call-and-response epic of mounting drama and histrionics. With
true documentary intensity, Gomes renders this seemingly improvised performance
with a simple pan from one side of the war to the other, from one side of the
room to the other, within a long take: a drunken local man sings out his
provocations about the suspicious father-daughter relationship (and the missing
mother), cheered on by his tribe and backed by the accordion troupe we have
witnessed in an earlier part of the film, and is answered with a like-spirited
provocation. Sir Lancelot and his troupe in Tourneur’s film scampered away at
the split second when their taunting game stood to be revealed; here, however,
there is no such relief or escape route – at least until the drunkard is
unceremoniously evicted. It is an extraordinary scene – raising the temperature
and seriousness of the unfolding mosaic – ended only by Tânia’s abrupt, embarrassed exit from this space filled to bursting with music and
community tension.
Our Beloved Month of
August builds to an amazing, climactic moment of cinema: after the love story has
reached its point of dramatic crisis, we see Tânia from the back, next to her father, as Helder gets on
a bus, leaving her life forever. Then she turns, and she is crying; but, almost
as soon as we have registered the deep, searing pathos of this, her tears turn
into a kind of mad, uncontrollable laughter. This is not only a triumph of mood
mixture, a profound emotional switch worthy of Jean Renoir: as the laughter
continues, it is not only this woman who transforms, but the fiction itself
which dissolves. Leaving only those thin, permeable barriers which will take us
once again through a documentary im-sign (the
printing press, but one that ‘prints the legend’ as Gomes says in homage to
John Ford and Liberty Valence), to the final comedy of the filmmaking process
itself, as the credits identify in turn each member of the crew involved in the
fancy of arguing about the phantom sound …
I
have heard the complaint that Our Beloved
Month of August is not real cinema, but an instance of a odd,
disconcerting, perhaps dissatisfying new form of paracinema,
namely: cinema of the art gallery, destined (or maybe better reworked) to be
arranged across the variegated panels of digital photo-stills or computer
display screens. This has been said, in various ways, of the cinema work of
Philippe Grandrieux (‘a series of beautiful startling
images – but where is the cohering cinematic structure?’), of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (which
also wanders between the conjured levels of documentary and fiction, film and
video, before-the-camera and behind-the-scenes, in Syndromes and a Century and Worldly
Desires) and, a little earlier, of Abbas Kiarostami (in Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us) – all filmmakers
who have indeed taken the step (alongside Ruiz, Akerman,
Costa and others) of moving from cinema into gallery works and back again.
Doubtless,
such impatient evaluations of Our Beloved
Month of August are prompted by the background information that Gomes is
part of Portugal’s current ‘experimental auteur scene’ (alongside Sandro Aguilar – his producer here – and João Pedro Rodrigues, channelling the departed free-radical
spirit of João César Monteiro),
and that he has dabbled in film theory and criticism. But such complaints miss
what is innovative, indeed revelatory, about this great new film.
The
great Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser once mused (in his book The Shape of Things, about issues of design) on the difference
between a screen wall and a solid wall – for him, the convenient key (like so
many mundane, everyday phenomena, of the kind that Gomes also alights upon) to
understanding our civilisation and its discontents. The solid wall marks, for Flusser, a neurotic society – a society of houses and thus
‘dark secrets’, of properties and possessions. And of folly,
too, because the wall will always be razed, in the final instance, by the
typhoon or the flood or the earthquake. But whereas the solid wall
gathers and locks people in, the screen wall – incarnated in history variously
by the tent, the kite or the boating sail – is “a place where people assemble
and disperse, a calming of the wind”. It is the site
for the “assembly of experience”; it is woven, and thus a network.
It
is only a small step for Flusser to move from the
physical, material kind of screen to the immaterial kind: the screen that
receives projected images, or (increasingly) holds computerised, digital
images. From the Persian carpet to the Renaissance oil painting, from cinema to
new media art: images (and thus memories) are stored within the surface of this
woven wall. A wall that reflects movement, but itself increasingly moves within
the everyday world: when I was a little child and once dreamed of taking a
cinema screen (complete with a movie still playing loudly and brightly upon
it), folding it up and putting in my pocket so I could go for a stroll, I had
no idea it was a predictive vision of the future, the mundane laptop computer
or mobile phone.
For
a long time, cinema has seemed to be inextricably wed to the solid walls of
halls, theatres, cinematheques, and now hi-tech home
theatres. Wed to dark rooms and their Gothic dark secrets, to assemblies and
pre-programmed public events. Our Beloved
Month of August, in its own, remarkable vision of an ‘expanded cinema’, a
cinema of multiple panels or screens interacting in space and time, frees the
viewers’ minds and lets their emotions roam: through documentary and fiction,
through music and travelogue, through drama and comedy, through the plaintive
directness of eternal pop culture and the Baroque convolutions of modernism and
postmodernism. Of course, it is literally not a museum installation, not a new
media piece. It’s an old-fashioned film that gets projected from start to end
in a linear fashion, that truly takes you on the passionate journey that every,
lesser movie promises to do – but also manages to multiply that journey and the
entry-points that we, as spectators, take into it.
Moreover
– and this is key – Our Beloved Month of
August matches its form to its subject in a startlingly rich way: in this
film about music and family (as well as about itself), what counts as liberatory is not the wall that shut things in and gives
them an illusory fixity and identity, but the fluctuating experience that
happens when people “assemble and disperse” (as they literally do, dancing, in
a long-held early image), and when the wind is mobilised, calmed and unleashed
by the ‘soft machine’ of cinema.
Dedicated
to the memory of Nika Bohinc (1979-2009), who commissioned it for her final issue of Ekran (Slovenia).
(1)
There are many ‘big lies’ wrapped up in this production story, as Gomes
helpfully explains in this interview.
MORE Gomes: Tabu © Adrian Martin November 2008 |
