During my first attempt at this documentary I made it through about forty minutes, finally too uncomfortable with the sleazy sort of free for all of social misfits, most of whom appeared to be semi-literate. Their living conditions were appalling, filthy and unsavory like the family in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “Deliverance.” I knew of course that the documentary was about incest, but I had imagined that it would be a complicated and wrenching story about a family’s long and difficult journey to enlightenment and justice: that it would consider incest as a social problem and offer some kind of coherent reaction to this atrocity. Instead, the documentary presented a family of visibly unwell, both physically and mentally, forty or fifty-something people, accusing not only the bizarre lunatic patriarch of the family of incest, but also each other. Furthermore, the only male in the large group (besides the ludicrous, cud-chewing Melvin) asked two of his half sisters to marry him, and then expounded on why he thought that there was nothing wrong with loving your sisters. The documentary played into every sad stereotype about small towns wherein everyone is related to everyone else, presenting us with a freak show rather than a serious consideration of this very serious issue. This is why I initially refused to continue watching – I felt exploited, I felt like a voyeur.
I could not imagine what to make out of this documentary that first time around. But I eventually returned because I wanted to see how the director finally set the material up as a social critique. Where would the fault lie? With society? I should have known better. The director, who during the documentary pretends that his purpose was to bring Melvin to justice or see him dead and help his family heal, intersperses the odd carnevalesque family scenes with clips of himself taking part in a series of be-sequined tv dancing contests, he and his partner flying through the air in back handsprings. We even saw a video of his wedding, with his bride back flipping her way down the aisle. If people don’t get us, the director notes defensively, that’s okay.
No, it's not really okay if people don't get you. The documentary is supposed to be about incest. We didn't tune in to form an opinion on the director’s wedding – who cares? So, one assumes, the comment applies to the family in general – the film is supposed to be about them, after all. And if the director doesn't care if we get them, why does he want us to watch them?
More fundamental, in addition to being asked to rely upon this wannabe tv entertainer for a serious exposé on incest, we are asked to believe that the charges being flung around by the family members are true, without any evidence whatsoever. As a viewer I have no reason either to believe or disbelieve that these wildly gesticulating very large people were the victims of the grotesque Melvin. Why not? But, on the other hand, why should I believe it? Much later in the film we learn that Melvin was in fact convicted of incest and served eight years (which raises the question of why the director wanted to bring Melvin to justice when society had already exacted its justice – did he think that Melvin should have served longer? If so, he doesn’t tell us that). So it appears that the incest story must have been true. But a murder charge is also flung about, without a shred of evidence. The children claim to have witnessed Melvin pound a nurse on the head with an andiron. But why was the case never brought to trial if a group of about eight witnesses saw the old bugger beating a woman to death in the living room? The film is filled with frustrating innuendo and no conclusions, no guidance as to what we are meant to understand.
Most frustrating of all, we are told that one of the many sisters, fed up with forced sex with Melvin, turned him in to the police. The police showed up, questioned everyone, went to their school, questioned, questioned, and the children all denied the charges. The police, therefore, had no case. Many years later, several of the girls corroborated the story, and this time he was flung in the slammer. But what are we meant to understand? Is this a critique of the police? If so, how? Should they have pressed forward without any witnesses? If so, the director does not tell us this.
Truly disturbing are the accusations of one of the sisters, this one with terribly deformed legs (we are shown many detailed pictures of the problem), accusing the now wheel-chair bound Melvin of recently having paid her a dollar to have sex with him. This is clearly a fantasy, given that Melvin is immobile. Or, if it is true, why did she comply? It isn’t as if he could have forced her. Once again, what are we to understand? Equally stomach turning is the shot of the group of large middle-aged women visiting Melvin in his rest home. They dash down the hall, squealing with excitement to see him. And these are the women upon whom he perpetrating decades of sexual abuse? Why are they visiting him, telling him how good it is to see him?
Bizarre showcase for the handspringing director, this documentary does a disservice to efforts to bring incest to the light of day. Without any context for understanding the visible instability of this family – are they insane because of the incest, or did they cook up the incest because they are insane – we cannot reasonably be expected to separate truth from fantasy.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Roma Città Aperta (1945)
Before viewing “Roma Città Aperta” I watched Martin Scorsese, narrating “My Voyage to Italy,” laud this exemplar of neo-realism to the heavens. Over and over, he marvelled at the way it presented a piece of real life. Cut to more sophisticated takes on the film – of course these harp on the film’s melodramatic aspects.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
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