[English] Toby Lichtich/Wen Shi Xi Zhen/Translation
Character determines fate, but also determines the story. Whether it's a documentary or a TV series, a political film or a romantic comedy, it's the same thing. Even prose films, which have nothing to do with personal emotions, require a certain degree of humanity to maintain the narrative and keep the audience interested. So "access" is a magical word for documentary filmmakers. Its meaning is to approach people and their stories.
The success of James Bluemel's documentary series Once Upon a Time in Iraq, directed by James Bluemel and aired by the BBC in 2020, reinforces these clichés. The film's rich and diverse interviewees — including soldiers and civilians in different positions during the 2003 conflict and its subsequent history — transform what might otherwise be a banal narrative of the folly of the war on terror into a gripping, nuanced narrative of a country torn to pieces and its people (it also succeeds in reminding us of how bad Iraq under Saddam Hussein was, while showing how much has happened afterwards). It's a combination of great reporting—finding the right people, asking the right questions—and great storytelling: embodied in the overall structure, in the hierarchy of archival material, and in the patience that allows respondents to reveal their different stories and present their respective characters.
Once Upon a Time in Iraq
Of course, there are other ways to make political documentaries. Adam Curtis's penchant for voiceover drives discussion and reinforces drama through editing of images and sound clips, mainly from the BBC archive, rather than directly filming "real people", a tendency that has run through his career. Argumentative and rhetorical effects take the role of the character. But then again, rhetoric is still a key component of personality. There is a central character in each of Adam Curtis's documentaries: Adam Curtis himself.
In the 2021 BBC aired six episodes of Curtis's documentary Can't Get You Out of My Head, the central character appears as a knowledgeable bar conspirator who, in his brief moments of sobriety, talks about everything from artificial intelligence and Watergate to oral and stables (spoilers: it's all about power structures – though this "everything" remains elusive). As with many of Curtis's recent works, polemics have become a deposition of information, and what is archived retains is a rich variety of distractions: only rhetorical tricks, no discussion. It was as if we were authorized to enter the paranoid subconscious of this very unique filmmaker and be trapped there wandering for eight hours: the experience wasn't artistically uninteresting, it was just that you had to be willing. Adam Mars-Jones recently wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: "The biggest weakness of [cinema] is its inability to photograph ideas. Curtis was quite close, but his thoughts were messy.
If cinema loses to literature in terms of its ability to enter the brain, then cinema has the advantage of its entry into the senses: sight and sound. Documentaries have an advantage over fiction in terms of authenticity; fiction is by nature completely free. It doesn't have to worry about whether to "get close" to people and their stories. In other words, this "proximity" can be constructed from the void through writing and performance. The resulting authenticity is sometimes enough – or even better. In Jasmila Žbanić's new film Ida, What's Wrong? (Quo Vadis, Aida?) – In a detailed description of the Massacre of Srebrenica in July 1995, we see a group of Bosnian adult men and teenagers being herded into a pickup truck and asked to kneel with their hands on their heads. They were then lined up and escorted into a hall. We saw with our own eyes their doomed expressions and knew they were dying. A very similar episode appears in "Once Upon a Time in Iraq," including pickup trucks and faces engraved with doomsday expressions, this time with Iraqi men and teenage teenagers captured by Islamic State soldiers. Both scenes are incredibly powerful; neither of them feels superfluous or merely thrill-seeking in their respective contexts. The closeness of the "real" shots in Once Upon a Time in Iraq is fictionalized in Zhibanić's film, a perfectly paced, emotionally profound ninety-minute play that takes us to understand the characters and the context.
Ida, what's wrong? 》
By contrast, the documentary at the end of Kevin Macdonald's eerily tedious new film, The Mauritanian, destroys everything that precedes it — proving that the fictional plot in this case is not commensurate with the facts. The clips depict the protagonist, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, being interviewed in his hometown, listening to Bob Dylan's songs, and flipping through his memoir, The Diary of Guantanamo (published in 2015); he was gentle, smiling, and charismatic. What we've seen in the previous two hours is that after 9/11, Slavhi was held in Guantanamo prison for fourteen years without charge, tortured, intimidated, and humiliated. But the film itself never fully expresses who he is. It ignores his inner being. The characters in the film always lack a sense of subtlety. We are only truly drawn to the real Slavic when we see them.
Mauritanian begins with "This is a true story," which may be accurate in a way, but it has lost ground in respecting the facts. Next, in this rough legal drama, we can follow (played by the sympathetic Tahar Rahim) Slavhi, starting with his family wedding in Mauritania in 2002, passing through Jordan and Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay. The cells there are painted bright green, and for those who like high-purity satire, signs warning inmates not to hurt hyenas are hung there. In Abuquirk, Nancy Holland (played by Judy Foster) takes over Slavic's case. Foster won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for this role, and she maintained a calm expression and poured out a savior-like cliché, which may be well deserved. Her opponent in court is military prosecutor Stuart Couch, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who nearly recreates dominic Cummings, who played Dominic Cummings in 2018's Brexit: The Unreasonable War, who, although they have different accents, are equally convincing in terms of graphic comparison. Cooch's line includes: "When can we start!" And later, after the torture to which Slavhi was exposed, "everything done here is reprehensible!" At one point, he asked Nancy, "Don't you feel annoyed?" Defending such a person? ”
The Mauritanian
Slahi is stoic, Nancy is tenacious, and Kuch is respectable (he refuses to proceed with the prosecution after the torture is revealed). They are three simple heroes of a complex era. The villains in the play are the hateful jailers (one of whom is not bad, and Slavs still has a connection with him) and those who sign up for Slavic's plight: the system. And Osama bin Laden. Maybe the Russians. The plot has no impetus, the use of flashbacks is poor; the soundtrack interferes with the narrative and is cheesy. The politics of the background are also unclear. We know nothing about Mauritania, nor about Slavs's past, except that he was a good student ("a little Einstein"), who loved his mother, and who loved him. Apart from the brief and insatiable scene, we know very little about why this young Mauritanian man felt so much attraction from Al-Qaida, and why that loyalty was disturbing, ever-changing, accidental, and intractable (he had been with the organization since the early 1990s, and his cousin was a close associate of bin Laden; Slavhi had used bin Laden's satellite phone to take his cousin's phone— an act that became important evidence of crime). Still, the raw material (including Slavhi's diary) is undoubtedly powerful, and the Mauritanian's exhilarating testimony in court is hardly untouchable (Rahim performed the testimony well, though possibly obscured by high-pitched strings), which helped him obtain a habeas corpus. The Obama administration later appealed the verdict, leaving him in jail for another seven years. Macdonald's film concludes by reminding us that only five of the seven hundred and ninety-nine prisoners who were held at Guantanamo were convicted.
Despite Slavhi's eventual release, Mauritanian, while facing its own dramatic defeat, still underscores the powerlessness of international law when certain countries choose to ignore human rights and interfere — a theme explored by Bryan Fogel's excellent documentary, The Dissident, which follows the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the country's embassy in Istanbul in October 2018. The film begins with a powerful start, three months after the assassination, Khashoggi's friend, compatriot and journalist colleague Omar Abdulaziz said on the phone that he was going to seek the truth – and take revenge. Soon, we see Abdelaziz receiving a message warning that he too will soon be murdered. Abdelaziz is now in exile in Canada. He told us he couldn't connect with his loved ones back home. He is another Khashoggi who is about to take shape: provocative, angry, and there is no reason not to be paranoid. Capturing him at this moment is a big project of "approaching".
Abdelaziz commented that "in Saudi Arabia, having an idea is a crime" – a phrase that was later adjusted to "having an idea and having a large following is a crime". Khashoggi used to have them both. Through interviews with people close to him (another friend of his, his fiancée Hattis, colleagues at The Washington Post), and a series of precisely selected analysts and officials, we learn about the victims' previous close ties to the Saudi royal family; the role of hired journalism in a country where journalists resemble court poets; and the dance of self-censorship that people dance while knowing the limits of their digging. Another friend of Khashoggi said he was "more of a reformist than a dissident." But he was fueled by the Arab Spring, which identified saudi funding behind counterrevolutionary momentum. He also publicly criticized Donald Trump. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned him to put down his pen.
Forced to leave his homeland, separated from his family, khashoggi went into exile in the United States, where he wrote regular columns for The Washington Post. His criticism of the Saudi crown prince has become more direct; the Saudi royal family has responded with a systematic smear campaign. Dissidents brilliantly depicts the Saudi tennis army, where thousands of government agents on Twitter try to win the social media war, drive trending topics and influence public opinion. Abdelaziz led the counterattack with peculiar technology. Khashoggi helped fund the operation. He is no longer a reformist, but a dissident, a wanted man. When Khashoggi hesitated to go to the Istanbul embassy to get some documents, an official inside asked, "Have the victims arrived?" ”
There is no doubt that Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents (the embassy was eavesdropped, the killings were recorded), and the orders came from the top, which is almost beyond doubt. Dissent brilliantly exposes this brazen display of violence and the fact that it remains untethered to this day. Two of Abdelaziz's brothers were imprisoned in Riyadh without charge, and he and twenty-three other friends were treated the same way. At least one of them may have experienced torture and lost his tooth. (There's an audio clip in the film of a heartbreaking phone call from Abdelaziz's brother in prison: "The only way you can help me is to shut up.") However, Saudi Arabia has not been subject to any sanctions.
One of Fogel's interviewees, the United Nations special rapporteur Agnès Callamard, was tasked with investigating the murder; her 100-page report, which she called "an international crime, is an international crime." The Saudi response has been insidious: Just last month it was reported that Mr. Karama herself had received "death threats" from "a senior Saudi official" if she was not bound by the United Nations.
The incompetence of the United Nations mentioned earlier in this article in Ida, what's wrong? again. The film tells the story of Ida Thermanagi, a former teacher of the United Nations translator Ada Thermanagi, and her family (husband and two grown-up boys) flee after Ratko Mladic's Serb army presses closer to their hometown of Srebrenica (long besieged and supposedly a protected enclave). The family took refuge with thousands of others in a Dutch-run United Nations camp on the outskirts of the city. Ida continues to work as an interpreter, giving her access to critical information while working to protect her family.
Zhbanic's film opens with Colonel Karemans, commander of the United Nations Forces in the Netherlands, who assures the mayor of Srebrenica that his people are "safe". As soon as Mladic's army entered, the mayor was shot first. Bosnian refugees have had some arguments about whether it would be safer to stay in a UN camp or flee to the woods ("Are you crazy?"). They can't touch the United Nations"). Intense negotiations took place between the Dutch and Mladic and his party, seemingly to guarantee the welfare of the refugees. The real-life footage of the extraordinary meeting can still be seen on YouTube, where Mladic insists on mulling with a nervous Karemans with white wine mixed with soda. Zhbanić added a wonderful twist to his elaborate fiction, allowing a Bosnian civilian representative to recognize a Serbian commander. They used to attend the same school. The communication between them is very warm.
Back at the camp, Mladic's assurances turned into a smokescreen as the Serbs broke in. The Dutch army in bright blue shorts looked like a small boy scout. Performer Mladic distributed chocolates on the arrival of an empty bus convoy and delivered another soothing speech. They then separated women and children from men and teenagers: women and children got on buses and pickups. Ida's U.N. position protected her, but she couldn't convince her boss to let her family impersonate fellow officials. Eventually, her husband was given safe passage. But their sons didn't.
Ida, what's wrong? Brings us deeply into contact with an atrocity that is well-known but often not understood on a personal level. The main plot takes place in a short and highly tense horror, but what is particularly impressive are the passages that cross to Srebrenica when it was just an ordinary town. The film flashes back to a party in the town a few years ago, when the ragged refugees suddenly become lighthearted and charming; they dance with those who will become their killers. At another moment, outside the United Nations compound, a soldier recognized Ida as his former teacher. Much later, we see Ida returning to Srebrenica after the atrocity and becoming a teacher again. The children were performing a show. Bosnians and Serbs sat together. A kind father watched from the sidelines. We can be shocked to recognize that he was once a terrible henchman under Mladic.
Yasna Jolicic brilliantly played Ada, shuttling between different roles, one moment being a calm UN employee, the other a desperate savior, and the other a stern mother who didn't like to see her children smoking. Refugee groups are given individuality, and victims are given dignity through virtue of their individuality. With the support of a good script – with Christine M. Christine A. Maeir's keen photographic lens captures these characters who transform this politically complex but often generalized event into a nuanced, soul-stirring, and deeply moving story.
(The original article was published in the Times Literary Supplement on April 30, 2021, with the author's permission to translate and publish)
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Luan Meng