Song Without a Name

 

Opening today as Virtual Cinema is a deliberately understated, black-and-white, art film titled “Song Without a Name”. Its potentially explosive theme is about the theft of new-born babies in Peru during the late 1980s in order to be sold on the adoption black market. Slowly paced and staying close to the historical record, it has little in common with Hollywood conventions. If Stephen Spielberg directed such a film, there would be danger lurking behind every corner, especially when an investigative reporter is told that the people running the baby-stealing ring are very dangerous. Whatever “Song Without a Name” lacks in dramatic impact, it more than makes for in authenticity.

Georgina and her husband Leo are expecting their first child. They live in a village in the highlands made up of fellow Quechuan Indians, who constitute the base of the Shining Path. Despite being poverty-stricken and without much hope for a better future, they eagerly await the infant’s birth. Each day they descend down a mountain into a nearby village where both make their livings from potatoes, the Incan food that the conquistadores brought back to Europe. Leo works for a wholesaler lugging bags of potatoes around and Georgina sells some in the local marketplace. The money they earn is barely enough to keep them alive, but revolutionary insurgency is the last thing on their mind. They are steeped in Quechuan rituals and only hope to enjoy the company of their first-born.

One day as Georgina is hawking potatoes, she hears a nearby radio advertising free medical care for expectant women. Without thinking through the ramifications of anything free in a country where the capitalist class treats indigenous people like slaves, she shows up at the clinic in labor. As they advertised, there’s no cost in delivering a baby girl. However, they don’t give her the infant as promised. Instead, they escort her out of the hospital and lock the door behind them. The next day the clinic is shut and the staff and her newborn disappeared.

Georgina tries to file a report with the cops but they are totally uncooperative, a function no doubt of them being on the take. Growing more and more desperate, she barges into the newsroom of a major newspaper and begs to speak to a journalist. When told that she needs a pass to get to first base with a reporter, she breaks down sobbing with the words “they stole my baby” pouring out of her mouth. A reporter named Pedro Campos is touched by her grief and takes her aside to get the story. The remainder of the film consists of him trying to get to the bottom of the baby-stealing ring. As I said, this is not a detective story. Instead, it is a portrait of two people playing different parts in a society that has been marked by savage inequality since the days of the conquistadores. He is a righteous man standing up to the rotten and corrupt elites who hope for Shining Path’s defeat. You might even say that Pizarro’s colonial conquest was made easier by the feudal-like system of the Incas that included human sacrifice.

This debut film was written and directed by Melina León, a Peruvian graduate of the Columbia University film school. She is the daughter of Ismael León, a journalist who helped to found La República in 1981, a newspaper that broke the baby-theft story. The training she received at Columbia helped her make a technical decision that put its stamp on the film’s texture. As this excerpt from a press notes interview would indicate, she was influenced by the minimalism of earlier filmmakers of art films rather than by Stephen Spielberg. Of course, the irony is that Hollywood has ground to a halt, while the art films and documentaries are flourishing under Virtual Cinema.

With the black & white and the 4:3 frame, the film develops a very formal austerity. What made you and Inti Briones (the DOP) choose this sober style? Did you have influences to guide you? We really wanted to see the world as our characters saw it, so we figured that we needed to trap them. A wide landscape didn’t seem appropriate for those days when we felt so constrained. Since our budget was so limited, we didn’t have much control over locations so we figured we’d better use the format to achieve this feeling of entrapment.

Also, we felt that we needed to use every possible resource to contribute to transport people to the 1980’s and of course 4:3 was the TV format in those days.

The choice of black & white comes from my memory of the photographs in the newspapers of the 1980’s. They were not printing in color yet.

Inti and I watched films by Béla Tarr and Andrey Zvyagintsev and found our inspiration and common ground. We also talked a lot about Yellow Earth by Chen Kaige – which was shot by Zhang Yimou – and about the films of Jia Zhangke.

 

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016

Tomorrow is opening night of the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York that includes two documentaries that I had an opportunity to see at press screenings a while back and discuss below. If they are any indication of the quality of the scheduled films, I urge you to take in as many as possible. If they are not exactly entertainment (as if anybody with an IQ over 75 could be entertained by something like “X Men Apocalypse”), they are compelling reminders of the need to support all those struggling for a better life.

On Thursday, June 16^th at 8:45 PM, you can see “When Two Worlds Collide” at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. As a rule of thumb, if you have tended to agree with my recommendations, this is one not to be missed. It is the chronicle of the struggle between indigenous peoples of Peru and the government of Alan Garcia over the 840 Law he rammed through in late 2006 that opened up indigenous territory to mining and oil extraction as part of a neoliberal blitzkrieg that began earlier in the year with a Free Trade Agreement with the USA.

If I were to write a narrative film, I doubt if I could come up with someone as villainous as Alan Garcia. Early on in the film you see him addressing an audience of potential investors from the USA about how Peru was welcoming foreign investment. To indulge in a bit of Marxist jargon, he is the quintessential comprador bourgeois.

This was Garcia’s second term as President of Peru. In his first go-round, he clashed with the guerrillas of the Shining Party, a Maoist insurgency whose dogmatic and repressive approach isolated it from the urban working class. Their members were Quechean Indians living in the highlands.

In his second term it was the Indians of the Amazon rainforest who got the shaft. Unlike Chairman Gonzalo of the Shining Path, the opposition to Garcia was led by Alberto Pizango, a member of the Shawi tribe who was committed to nonviolence but totally uncompromising when it came to the rights of indigenous peoples whose water was being fouled by the Peruvian state oil company pipelines and who feared that things would get much worse with the advent of Law 840. It allowed private investment in their territory and sacrificed their hard-won right to a modicum of sovereignty.

They say that the choice of a principal subject is key to the success of most documentaries. That being the case, co-directors Heidi Brandenburg and Mathew Orzel were fortunate to have complete access to Pizango as he rallied opposition to the multinational onslaught given red carpet treatment by Alan Garcia. He is a plain-spoken man but capable of stirring rhetoric when the circumstances call for it. He was exactly the sort of grass roots leader José Carlos Mariátegui must have had in mind when he founded the Communist Party of Peru in 1928 based on a program that synthesized Marxism and indigenous principles.

As it happens, Mariátegui only decided to become a Communist after becoming disillusioned with the APRA party in Peru in whose name Alan Garcia misruled. For APRA, anti-imperialism and “development” were to be pursued within the framework of capitalism even if it meant treating the indigenous people in the same way they have always been treated in the Western Hemisphere, as relics of a “savage” past standing in the way of progress and civilization.

Once the opposition to Law 840 began to develop a mass base and after it began organizing picket lines throughout Indian territory, Garcia and his cohorts began to refer them to as relics of the past who were defying the needs of the country’s majority. That, of course, is what inspired the film’s title.

The tensions between the ruling party and the indigenous peoples escalated until a pitched battle took place on June 5^th, 2009 when the cops began firing on pickets assembled on the “Devil’s Curve” jungle highway close to Bagua, a town in the heart of Indian country. Not long after the first Indians fell to the ground mortally wounded, others seized guns from the cops or used their own and machetes to strike back at the cops. One of the most moving parts of the film involves the father of one of the dead cops who returns to Bagua to get help from the Indians in finding his son’s corpse or more optimistically winning his freedom. After he discovers that he had been dismembered and thrown into a nearby river, he calmly states that he does not blame the Indians but the overall climate of violence created by APRA politicians.

Although I would hardly describe the film as “entertainment”, the directors had a bird’s eye view of the clash on the Devil’s Curve and were skillful enough to turn the footage into some of the most hair-raising scenes I have ever seen in a documentary. The struggle continues in Peru as it is likely that Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has won the recently held Presidential election. He is a former World Bank economist and co-chairman of First Boston, so that says it all.

Next Wednesday at 8:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater and 9:15pm in the IFC Center in the Village you can see “The Crossing”, a powerful chronicle about a group of Syrians fleeing Assad’s reign of terror and taking a risky boat ride across the Mediterranean to Europe in search of political asylum.

It puts a human face on the ordeal facing millions of Syrians that is now only an abstraction in the mass media or—worse—a target of nativist violence and state-sponsored blockades through much of Europe.

If there is still a question of what drives refugees to flee Syria, all you need to do is listen to the journalist Angela—a Christian–who along with her husband and journalist partner was forced to flee the country when she became a target of the security forces in 2011 after writing articles in support of the Syrian revolution. She was arrested once and worried that the next time she might be killed.

You can also hear from IT expert Rami who was working in the UAE. When he was arrested at demonstration in support of the revolution by the emirate’s cops, he was ordered to leave the country. Since going back to Syria meant arrest or being killed, he opted to join Angela and about 20 others in an uncertain sea voyage.

In 2012, director George Kurian was working as a photojournalist in Syria in the thick of the battles while buildings were being bombed to pieces. That led to the decision to make a film about the efforts of some to leave this hell. He put it this way:

“The Crossing” is about Syrian people speaking for themselves. Through it, we hope to join the debate about our electoral policies…Islam and its branches of fundamentalism will always serve as flashpoints in any discussion…[but] it’s these ideas that have kept us from acting. These concepts make us see refugees as a problem rather than a people who have a problem and who need our help.”

Although it is not part of the HRW film festival, I also urge you to watch the six-part series of nine minute videos about another group of Syrian refugees on the New Yorker Magazine website (http://video.newyorker.com/) directed by Matthew Cassel and executive produced by Laurie Poitras, who made the Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden. Poitras is affiliated with Glenn Greenwald whose views on Syria are questionable at best. I am glad that he obviously had no influence on this film.

Unlike “The Crossing”, Cassel’s film, titled “The Journey from Syria”, does not address the question of what drove people to mostly walk from Istanbul to Macedonia to flee the horrors of Syria but you might suspect that it was the regime rather than jihadists that was responsible especially since they refer to bombing. As is obvious at this point after 5 years of war, it is the Syrian air force that is creating genocidal conditions, not the lightly armed rebels.

For an excellent review of Cassel’s film, I recommend Idrees Ahmad, one of the most committed and tireless defenders of the Syrian revolution we have:

The Journey, however, is more than the chronicle of an exodus. It is a human story about ordinary lives disrupted by extraordinary circumstances. Its protagonists are normal people—a jeweller, a hairdresser, and a schoolteacher—who have to face dilemmas that jewellers, hairdressers, and schoolteachers do not normally face. The film is well constructed and tells its story with minimal editorialising. Through its relatable protagonists, it offers viewers a mirror to consider the choices they might have made had similar circumstances been thrust upon them.

This context is important for the kind of debate currently raging in Europe. The last segment of the documentary shows movements like Pegida and demagogues like Geert Wilders stirring up xenophobia. The refugee exodus has served as a boon for the European far right. Across Europe, far right parties are now ascendant. Refugees are routinely demonised.

But if the left has failed to challenge this wave, it is because they, just like the right, have been unwilling to address the root causes of the Syrian conflict. The organised left across much of Europe has shown little sympathy for Syrians fighting oppression. Some have tacitly supported the regime; others, such as the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, have backed Russian military intervention while opposing safe zones for civilians. (Some of the tropes the right has used to stereotype refugees were first used by the left to demonise Assad’s opponents, painting them all as “extremists” and “jihadists”)

Read full review

Episode one of “The Journey from Syria” is on Youtube:

The Pongo’s Dream

The Pongo’s Dream

by José Maria Arguedas

(Arguedas learned Quechua as a boy from servants in the household of his stepmother and his father, an itinerant lawyer. Until his suicide in 1967, the novelist and anthropologist was perhaps more responsible than any other Peruvian for the impassioned defense of the Incan tongue and cultural autonomy for millions of Quechua speakers, challenging the powerful ideologies of “modernization” and “national integration” predicated on the erasure of Peru’s indigenous past. Although there was a strong utopian strain in Arguedas, he was not just interested in indigenous traditions. He also wrote about the challenges of migration and modernity, and proclaimed himself an “hombre Quechua moderno,” a modern Quechuan man, reflecting his desire for a cultural pluralism for Peru that would go beyond a retreat into a narrow traditionalism. An adaptation of a story Arguedas heard from a Cusco peasant, “The Pongo’s Dream” captures the rigidity of the feudal order that still prevailed in many parts of the Andes in the mid-twentieth century. But the denouement, where the world turns upside down as in the Inkarri myth, suggests the existence of a spirit of independence and opposition, which was to fuel the peasant movements of the 195os and the break-up of the landlords’ rule.)

*******

A little man headed to his master’s mansion. As one of the serfs on the 1ord’s estate, he had to perform the duty of a pongo, a lowly house servant. He had a small and feeble body, a meek spirit. His clothes were old and tattered. Everything about him was pitiful.

The great lord, owner of the mansion and lands surrounding it, could not help laughing when the little man greeted him in the mansion’s corridors.

“What are you? A person or something else?” the lord asked the little man in front of all the other serfs. The pongo bowed his head and did not answer. He stood frightened, eyes frozen. “Let’s see!” the lord said. “With those worthless little hands, you must at least know how to scrub pots or use a broom. Take this garbage away!” he ordered.

The pongo knelt to kiss his master’s hand and followed him to the kitchen hanging his head.

The little man had a small body but an average man’s strength. Whatever he was told to do he did well, but he always wore a slight look of horror on his face. Some of the serfs laughed at him, while others pitied him. “The most orphaned of all orphans,” a cook of mixed blood once said upon seeing him. “His frozen eyes must be children of the moon wind, his heart must be all sadness.”

The little man rarely talked to anyone. He worked and ate quietly. Whatever they ordered him to do was done obediently. “Yes, papacito, mamacita,” were the only words he uttered.

Perhaps because of the little man’s frightened look and his thread- bare, filthy clothes, or perhaps because of his unwillingness to talk, the lord regarded the pongo with special contempt. He enjoyed humiliating him most at dusk, when all the serfs gathered to say the Hail Mary in the mansion’s great hall. He would shake him vehemently in of the serfs like a piece of animal skin. He would push his head force him to kneel, and then, when the little man was on his knees, slap him lightly on the face.

“I believe you are a dog. Bark!” he would tell the pongo.

The little man could not bark.

“Stand on all fours,” the lord would order him next.

The pongo would obey and start crawling on all fours. “Walk sideways like a dog,” the lord would demand.

The little man had learned to run like the small dogs inhabiting the high moors.

The lord would laugh heartily. His whole body shook with exhilaration.

“Come back here!” he would yell, when the servant reached the end of the great hall.

The pongo would return, running sideways, arriving out of breath.

Meanwhile, some of the other serfs would quietly say their Hail Marys, as if their voices were a wind hidden in their hearts.

“Perk up your ears, hare! You are just an ugly hare!” the lord would command the exhausted little man. “Sit on your two paws. Put your hands together.”

The pongo could sit in the exact same prayerful pose that these animals take when they stand still on the rocks, looking as if he had learned this habit while in his mother’s womb. But the one thing he could not do was perk up his ears. Some of the serfs laughed at him.

With his boot, the lord would then knock him to the brick floor.

“Let us say the Our Father,” he would then say to his Indians as they waited in line.

The pongo would get up slowly, but he could not pray because he was not in his place, nor did any place belong to him.

In the darkness, the serfs would leave the great hall for the courtyard and head to their living quarters. “Get out of here, offal!” the master would often order the pongo.

And so, every day, in front of the other serfs, the master would make his new pongo jump to his demands. He would force him to laugh, to fake tears. He would hand him over to the other workers so that they would ridicule him too.

But . . . one afternoon, during the Hail Mary, when the hall was filled with everyone who worked and lived on the lord’s estate and the master himself began to stare at the pongo with loathing and contempt, that same little man spoke very clearly. His face remained a bit frightened.

“Great lord, please grant me permission. Dear lord, I wish to speak to you.” The lord could not believe his ears. “What? Was that you who spoke or someone else?”

“Your permission, dear master, to speak to you. It is you I want to talk to,” the pongo replied. “Talk… if you can.”

“My father, my lord, my heart,” the little man began. “Last night, I dreamt that the two of us had died. Together, we had died.” “You with me? You? Tell all, Indian,” the master said to him. “Since we were dead men, my lord, the two of us were standing naked before our dear father Saint Francis, both of us, next to each other.”

“And then? Talk!” ordered the master, partly out of anger and partly anxious with curiosity.

“When he saw us dead, naked, both standing together, our dear father Saint Francis looked at us closely with those eyes that reach and measure who knows what lengths. He examined you and me, judging, I believe, each of our hearts, the kind of person we were, the kind of person we are. You confronted that gaze as the rich and powerful man that you are, my father.”

“And you?”

“I cannot know how I was, great lord. I cannot know my worth.”

“Well, keep talking.”

“Then, our father spoke: ‘May the most beautiful of all the angels come forth. May a lesser angel of equal beauty accompany the supreme one. May the lesser angel bring a golden cup filled with the most delicate and translucent honey.'”

“And then?” the master asked.

The Indian serfs listened, listened to the pongo with a limitless attention, yet also afraid.

“My owner, as soon as our great father Saint Francis gave his order, an angel appeared, shimmering, as tall as the sun. He walked very slowly until he stood before our father. A smaller angel, beautiful, glowing like a gentle flower, marched behind the supreme angel. He was holding in his hands a golden cup.”

“And then?” the master asked once again.

“‘Supreme angel, cover this gentleman with the honey that is in the golden cup. Let your hands be feathers upon touching this man’s body,’ ordered our great father. And so, the lofty angel lifted the honey with his hands and glossed your whole body with it, from your head down to your toenails. And you swelled with pride. In the splendor of the heavens, your body shone as if made of transparent gold.”

“That is the way it must be,” said the lord. “And what happened to you?”

“When you were shining in the sky, our great father Saint Francis gave another order. ‘From all the angels in heaven, may the very least, the most ordinary come forth. May that angel bring along a gasoline can filled with human excrement.'”

“And then?”

“A worthless, old angel with scaly feet, too weak to keep his wings in place, appeared before our father. He came very tired, his wings drooping at his sides, carrying a large can. ‘Listen,’ our great father ordered the angel. ‘Smear the body of this little man with the excrement from that can you brought. Smear his whole body any way you want and cover it all the best you can. Hurry up!’ So the old angel took the excrement with his coarse hands and smeared my body unevenly, sloppily, just like you would smear mud on the walls of an ordinary adobe house. And in the midst of the heavenly light, I stank and was with shame.”

“Just as it should be!” crowed the master. “Keep going! Or is that the end?”

“No, my little father, my lord. When we were once again together, changed, before our father Saint Francis, he took another look at first at you, then at me, a long time. With those eyes that reach the heavens, I don’t know to what depths, joining night and memory and oblivion. Then he said: ‘Whatever the angels had to with you is done. Now, lick each other’s bodies slowly, for all eternity.’ At that moment, the old angel became young again. His wings regained their blackness and great strength. Our father entrusted him making sure that his will was carried out.”

(From “The Peru Reader“, edited by Orin Starn, Carlos Degregori, Robin Kirk)