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Other Cultures, Other Worlds
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17206 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
2,366 Words |
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Paul Coates
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In recent years several much acclaimed Western films have not only been set in Third World countries but have examined their politics. Such are the projects of Under Fire, The Year of Living Dangerously, and The Killing Fields. In each case we are invited to identify with a Western journalist as he penetrates an alien terrain (whose language he never speaks). It is clear why: The journalist's professional mobility means that in identifying with him the viewer is able to leave the country in question, at the film's end, with the same lack of compunction most journalists display when their story has run its course and their noses - or new assignments - lead them elsewhere. The implication is that Western involvement with Third World countries is only passing phase: When the Westerner leaves the country the people will be able to proceed with their business as independently as before penetration or colonization.
The Third World setting is an exotic backdrop, often selected because labor costs are lower than in the First World and workers far less unionized. Directors such as Werner Herzog or Peter Weir may be drawn to the Third World by its "otherness," but its registration on film translates it into a metaphor for the filmmaker's mystical alienation from his own society. The otherness becomes an enigma we are under no obligation to comprehend. We are free simply to look: The scopic drive receives its fullest gratification through contemplation of the bright colors, the strange vegetation, and, yes, the noble savages. In both The Killing Fields and The Year of Living Dangerously (only for a year is the Nietzschean injunction obeyed) the Western journalist's Asian guide is sentimentally idealized. Their pairing involves a splitting: The guide is guardian of the humane impulses the journalist's trade often for bids him to follow - a walking conscience.
Voice of the Exotic
Voce-over has traditionally been one of the major resources of the "poor cinema" -serving both to distract the viewer from the impoverished images and to indicate that poverty is a sign of richness elsewhere, by diverting resources and emotional investment from the image to the soundtrack. The voice-over ranges beyond the immediate present of the image. It may conduct a reverie upon the image. Often it may embody a level of coherence beneath the surface discontinuities of the editing (and so directors who are interested in editing tend also to have a passion for the voice on the soundtrack - from Resnais to Godard and Kidlat Tahimik). The withdrawal of investment in the image can be a sign of suspicion of appearances. The film may criticize itself as it proceeds. An interesting, little-known example of such self-criticism is Von Sternberg's Saga of Anatahan, which is simultaneously vitiated by an unabashed chauvinism.
The voice on the soundtrack of The Saga of Anatahan explicitly questions the legitimacy of what the camera shows us. Perhaps so as to justify its own presence and aggrandize its own territory in the war of the senses. On several occasions the narrator says we cannot imagine events as the actually happened, only reconstruct them in model form: hence the blatantly typical characterization. He adds that the only justification for looking at the lives of others is that it may help us comprehend our own similar fates. Voyeurism is strictly punished; The sailor who peers at Keiko and her husband through the window of their hut comes to a sticky end (the camera eliminates its rivals). Interestingly, although the narrator repeatedly
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