Showing posts with label Sheffield Documentary Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheffield Documentary Festival. Show all posts

Wednesday 28 August 2019

BBC One's Who Do You Think You Are ? : Paul Merton

BBC One's Who Do You Think You Are ? : Paul Merton

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 August

BBC One's Who Do You Think You Are ? : Paul Merton



The image (by Stephen Perry (?)) seems more like
the
tristesse of Chris Patten than a resemblance to Merton ?








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 8 March 2017

All the raw edges, but with respect and compassion : Cameraperson (2016)

This enthusiastic response is to Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


8 March


This is a response – enthusiastic – to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), shown for International Women’s Day by The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Wednesday 8 March 2017





Kirsten Johnson’s film luxuriates spiritedly in the constructed status and quality of cinema, whose nature as artefact, even in documentary, is usually heavily disguised – although, on the borders, there is little divide between documentaries and feature films, e.g. Man on Wire (2008), or the astonishing Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) (screened in 2016 in the Chantal Akerman retrospective at Sheffield Documentary Festival (Doc / Fest, @sheffdocfest)).



It would not enrich a commendation of this excellent piece of cinema to distend it with an exact catalogue of the ways in which it works or has been assembled – though it possibly says too little that Kirsten Johnson works with juxtaposition and accumulation.

In a three-line inter-title at or near the start of the film¹, she tells us that the footage is taken from what she has shot for films during the last twenty-five years, but which was not used in the film in question. (Given that a documentary not untypically has more than a hundred hours of material – from which it is edited down to, at most, somewhere between two and three hours² - this is a large amount.) Johnson extrapolates from that fact to call the film that we are about to see, if not a testimony (one forgets her word), then at least describing it in such a way that we appreciate that it is far from being constituted as if it were any sort of demo-reel :

Johnson, rather, has graciously chosen what to show us not necessarily because it is technically best, but so that we can see, and appreciate, what she does, sometimes including, as she lines up or composes her shot, dialogue with her producer or other person in the production team (presumably actually recorded in situ from her camera’s microphone, which is how she asks us to perceive it).


Johnson shows footage, from which this is taken, for Derrida (2002), where she is negotiating how to film the group of people to whom Derrida is talking as he crosses the road


There are three broad ways in which, as we go, we are aware of Johnson working on documentaries, which are when she is filming on her own behalf, and so being the voice asking questions or engaging with the person on screen (even if through an interpreter), when – which is clearly Michael Moore’s film – working with him, on Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004), and somewhere in between, where the conversations that she is having as she shoots suggest that the film is co-directed, co-produced, or made alongside a sympathetic colleague. (On IMDb, Johnson has more credits as a producer than as a director.)


Marine Abdul Henderson and Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004)
In the footage shown, Johnson is talking to Moore about the technicalitities of arranging him, in relation to Henderson as his on-screen interviewee, and with The Capitol as a backdrop


Early on in Cameraperson, an assemblage of pieces of footage was presented at a great hurry, and which was also noisy (in the way that that sort of scratchiness of sound can be), which is very untypical of the film, because otherwise this work of editing (with film editor Nels Bangerter) shows that Kirsten Johnson wants to keep the rootedness and immediacy that she had when shooting, be it just a one-off attempt to film illicitly outside a prison for reasons of international interest, or where we see her several times, relating to who she is with and where that is. Nonetheless, it was a moment that suggested both the many places and people that are in her experience from close proximity, and, of them, the noise that news media seek to make for viewers.


Michael Koresky (in the helpful review for Film Comment, cited below - @filmcomment)) conveniently describes what also served as a very telling moment, and which shows what a cinematographer does to get a clear shot – and, naturally, reaching out with her hand, from behind the camera, where we can see what she is doing :


In Foca, the camera searches rural environs ; the voice comments on the patches of wildflowers ; a shepherd and his flock trail by. When she finds the right composition, a hand emerges from the left, reaches around to the front of the camera and pulls a few blades of grass from the ground, so they’ll sully the frame no longer.



The vivid, fresh water-melon that is cut up by a member of the militia (in Iraq ?), but the men are called away, joking – to one knows not what – before they can eat any of it : such an evocative image. Before, towards the end of the film, we hear someone speaking for dignity, and for it to be applied to injured and dead bodies in the media as ‘The golden rule’, we have already seen it enacted by Johnson in her practice.

It is there in not gratuitously giving us gruesome insights into the evidence that had been presented to a court-room about how a man came to be dead, but in very deferentially shooting a woman’s knees and hands as she talks, hearing a young man talk plainly about what happened to his injured face, and hearing those who were raped in the occupation of Bosnia, and those who have been investigating these war-crimes.


In the feature film As if I am not There (2010)³, concerning the fate of younger women during The Bosnian War, director Juanita Wilson based it on dramatizing stories revealed during the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague



Now, from colleagues at TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema), a review of Cameraperson on the web-site [with a comment from #UCFF]


End-notes

¹ Apart from captions that locate us in, say, in Foča, Bosnia, or Kabul, Afghanistan, Johnson usually tells us relatively little about what we are seeing, or why we are seeing it, and has left what she has chosen to put on the screen to talk to other material, not just what immediately preceded or follows it. For example, we are in Brooklyn, New York, a couple of times early on, but the significant and longer clip is near the end of the film, and which sheds light on all that we have seen in between. (The principal exceptions to saying little by way of context are such as for footage of her twins, or of them with her father, or of her deceased mother (and her mother's artefacts and memorial place those things into time).)

² Even though many film-makers will edit ‘the rushes’ as they go, to keep on top of the scale and scope of the film.

³ The film had funding from a number of sources, including The Irish Film Board [and appears amongst Fifteen fine festival films].




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 20 July 2016

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


20 July

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)














Next, engagement with the Every Film in 2016 review from Neil White (@everyfilmneil ~ http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk) :




More to come...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 19 June 2016

From Sheffield to Southwold* : Planning one's time... (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 June onwards




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Tippett & Britten II ~ Saturday 18 June at 3.00 p.m. ~ St Bartholomew's, Orford










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End-notes

* For, respectively, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Aldeburgh Festival** : in 2016, their respective 23rd and 69th incarnations (they bear a relation : for example, one is one-third the age of the other, one may note).

** No doubt (?), Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) would wish to insist that Aldeburgh is, properly, Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts ?




Judging, at any rate, by his word-wasting pedantry (please see below) in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass review – large as life and twice as phoney’, his a skatingly thin review of Alice Through The Looking Glass (2016)...



Bradshaw takes, that is, many a word (a sentence of thirty-four, in fact) to make yet another highly catty observation about this work (even if the film may not bear examination, as, for some, its Burton-directed predecessor did not...) : Using only the title and some characters from Lewis Carroll’s own 1871 sequel – in fact called Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There [The Agent’s emphasis] – this new movie is just machine-tooled CGI fantasy fare’.






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 20 August 2015

Useful footage on the Thatcher premiership – if you already know the contexts ?

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


20 August

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

The film was seen as a result of Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest), on Videotheque






Society does things – things happen – because of inequality.
Norman Tebbit (Lord Tebbit)





We’ve privatized industry after industry. Government ought not to control business – it doesn’t know how to do it, it interferes.
Thatcher





I don’t believe that economic equality is possible. Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy, and keeping up with the Joneses and so on, that is a valuable spur to economic activity.
Boris Johnson









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 15 July 2015

Containment - the vessel and the djinn

This is a Festival review of Containment (2015)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


15 July (account of the Q&A added, 16 July)

This is a Festival review of Containment (2015), which screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival on Sunday 7 June at 12.15 p.m., followed by a Q&A with directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison

This review started on 7 June has been a long time coming : not for want of what to say, but how to organize it (it failed, in every way, to write itself)




One could not fail to be struck, at the beginning of the film, by the graphics that directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison had commissioned for Containment (2015), which were based on the outcome of a US government project [the ‘far future’ consultation group], to engage viewers with another era, and with [fears about] what mankind’s knowledge-base* might be in AD 12,000 : as the film unfolded, it is ironic that it had been conceived that, at that remove, people might stumble across the thitherto undisturbed site of WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad (New Mexico), and of course, because one simply would just start digging through the surface there, not knowing what lay below.



Therefore, the consultation group had been tasked with establishing means to warn those people, ten millennia distant, not to do so and why. The strongest emotional conception, built on the notion that somewhere that felt physically very unsettling would deter them from wanting to be (or stay) there, is used in the poster for Containment (as above). And yet talking about the project perhaps quite unnecessarily ? took up [what felt like] quite a bit of space in a running-time of 81 minutes (?)*

The reason is that there is a significant issue of balance with having included that topic [much as one knows, e.g. from the participation, in the film's Doc/Fest Q&A, of the script consultant of Match Me ! How to Find Love in Modern Times (2014), that some films need several strands ‘to work’] : containment, in the sense of rendering (and keeping safe) nuclear materials, even in its own terms (please see below), is such an unexplored (or poorly explored) area that to consider imagining that one had succeeded (both during and after the process of nuclear fission which is another widening of the film’s scope), and succeeded so well that 3,500 generations later maybe people knew too little about what had been done not to be at risk of harming themselves, seemed a leap**. Even more, an arbitrary one (regarding the remit of the project), since ten thousand years is not even what we are told is one half-life for Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), one of twenty radioactive isotopes of Plutonium*** (link to the Wikipedia® web-page).




In this connection, it has to be a fault of Containment (but an easily rectifiable one, by adding on-screen text, or a voice-over, at the first reference) that it does not take a moment to say what ‘a half-life’ is (i.e. the time in which, through radioactive decay, one ends up with a mass of the substance half that with which one started : that radioactive isotope will constitute 50% of the mass of the material, whatever isotope(s) of that (or another) element [radioactive or not] it may have broken down into) : as suggested by the words quoted in the Tweet above, to have assumed that all those watching the film will already know and understand the jargon takes away its power to present this topic widely and coherently, when the safety of keeping nuclear material is of obvious relevance to us all.

Actually, as mentioned, the treatment in this film of what might be meant by the theme of ‘containment’ is itself wide. (It is also arguably at least as conventional to use it in the context of nuclear fusion (rather than fission, the process that a nuclear reactor is engineered to induce), denoting how to contain [or the problem of containing] the matter to be combined at phenomenally high temperatures.) That said, we do not even know, from sequences that deal with WIPP, how much Pu-244*** it was trying to store, or how, because that isotope will necessarily be around for a very long time to pose a threat (yet, from the way that we see the waste physically handled (please see below), one would not know it).



Instinctively, though, one always thought that it was highly presumptuous to imagine that, far into the future, one would get to that position (please see below). (Not least in the light of the qualms about the storage for waste in France (a country that has made itself wholly dependent on nuclear power) that are expressed in Energized (2014) [to a highly overdue account of which that now links…] by the person responsible for its design : as one recalls, his concerns came to affect his health (which, in our world, served to undermine his credibility), but he came to regret what he saw as the faults in the methodology whose implementation he had overseen.) For picturing the far future assumed (a) the lack of any site-specific mishaps, let alone (b) the survival of members of the human race who might mistakenly intrude. (Watching Last Call (2013), the companion film (for review purposes) to Energized, does not exactly leave one hopeful on (b)’s account…).




A little impressionistically, the film takes WIPP as just one of several foci for the purposes of looking at containment, including a secret US government site on the Savannah River, and the Fukushima nuclear plant, in Japan, and the landscape around it that remains contaminated albeit not, seemingly, contaminated enough for a woman not to visit the nearby town, and the family restaurant there where she had last had lunch, or a man to go back to his former home most days ? (In the Q&A (in which Robb Moss and Peter Galison both took part : more on the Q&A below), the last, rather pointed question seemingly put by someone with expertise in these matters observed, having asked after figures for measurement of contamination in the area, that the film had simply not quantified the levels of radiation that surround Fukushima, or even made a comparison with Background Radiation (link to a definition from Wikipedia®)).

At other points in the film, we had had to wonder (as the film left us doing so) why a man was handling a turtle from the Savannah River whose shell he had said was contaminated with radioactive Caesium so he seemed to be saying, as Robb Moss had to agree, in conversation afterwards, it did sound [although Moss went on to interpret the turtle as having previously been contaminated (or that others like it had been ?)]. Or why thin rubber gloves sufficed to protect employees at WIPP from the vessels, containing nuclear waste for storage, with which they were working. In themselves, in the orthodoxy of scientific understanding, there might have been reasons why this is [thought] adequate protection / safe, but the film did not explain, and thereby (as it wants to tell us itself) hangs quite a tail about what anyone really does know of these matters :

* Containment gives time, just before showing us the turtles, to show us a minister of religion on a vessel on the Savannah River, commenting on the proximity of the site to where people from his church live (although he takes it that they are deemed not to be in enough numbers for them, or any risk to their health, to be a consideration ?), and how the warning notices about fishing relate not to privacy, but to radioactivity in the fish

* What happened at Fukushima, the result of a tsunami consequent upon an earthquake, had revealed the flaws in its design, in that the pools that contained the spent fuel-rods from the reactor had been deprived of supplies of coolant, and so the danger that was posed was as much from them overheating as from the reactor(s) doing so – though, as was commented in the Q&A, it appeared that the set-up would not have survived the smaller size of quake that it had been intended to withstand ?

* Towards the end of the film, we hear how there has been an explosion at WIPP (in 2014 ?), which is not only attributed to human error in the design of the vessels constructed to hold waste (in making them, the word ‘organic’ had been misinterpreted for ‘inorganic’ (or vice versa ?), which led to using constituents that, combined, gave rise to a chemical reaction : the simple mistakes that threaten great consequences), but also proves that the underlying assertions about how geological layers, between which the storage is taking place, and which are supposed to work to guarantee its integrity, are simply wrong since radiation did, after all, escape to the surface


The last that we hear is that operations at WIPP have been suspended as is usual in life, or politics, it takes a mistake to displace [over]confidence such as that of The Mayor of Carlsbad, and the claims of the geologists, which would otherwise be accorded credence : all that thinking about how to alert people to the existence of a secure facility that has been discovered not to be secure…

In essence, the film contains a lot of material, as well as reminding one vividly of the situation of Meryl Streep, Cher, and Kurt Russell in Silkwood (1983) : one does have to ask oneself how far we have really come since then, or, indeed, how close is the world of that film, still, in terms of our competence, of what we really understand about dealing both with nuclear waste and what our experiments with nuclear fission have done with Earth (and left us with*) ?


Detail that emerged in the Q&A (and later…)

In the Q&A, it was put to Moss and Galison when asking about the ‘far future’ project that they had given space to this aspect, but had also, by contrast, not chosen (or chosen not ?) to pre-date the circumstances of Fukushima by referencing what had (or could have) happened at Chernobyl (or Three Mile Island) : with little explanation of what this actually meant, Containment just told us that there had been ‘three meltdowns’ at Fukushima (another tacit assumption of knowledge on the part of the viewer ?), albeit it suggested that the situation had very nearly been much worse (yet without saying in what way, or how).

Although it seems to turn out that the scenario first envisaged by Ralph Lapp in 1971 (and retained by the world of film in The China Syndrome (1979)) is more of a fictional one, and that, if this popular description is therefore used (in the nuclear field), it denotes a lesser catastrophe, one asked, for example, how close to that syndrome events at Fukushima had been (and the rest of the Wikipedia® article goes into detail about such nuclear meltdowns, which, in their answer, the directors did not).

They said, but without a complete explanation for not doing so, that they had considered talking about other sites, such as Chernobyl (and may have said that they had been there), but that they wanted to look at linguistic and sociological aspects of the subject, by making part of the tone of the film to imagine the future, too to suggest a measure of distance on what was being shown. As well as having an artist realise some of the designs, they achieved this aim with and through stylization (e.g. we see an animated sequence both of naive discovery, and of deploying an earth-boring machine that is distinctly reminiscent of The Mole from Thunderbirds).




In the event, the question that was mentioned above (about contamination at Fukushima, compared with that at Chernobyl), elicited nothing from them in terms of units (or doses), but generalizations : although the mountain area was further away, it had higher levels than a flatter one that was nearer, because of the direction of the wind, which had changed twice at the time.

In the bar afterwards, some viewers were heard (who must clearly have approved of the film), critiquing the questioner for having challenged the film-makers (presumably because of the enquiry about Background Radiation) as if in the same breath as those who had (once) advocated dumping nuclear waste in the oceans (which he was not remotely proposing)… ?

Before that, in the space just outside the screen, there was a lot of chat going on with Messrs Galison and Moss, which is where that query about the turtle was made (please see above). As to the handling of containers at waste at WIPP, Moss made the puzzling assertion (which then had to be checked please see below) that one can hold a piece of Plutonium with no ill-effect, because the danger is inhaling its dust into one’s lungs. One’s knowledge of radiation, though one could not grope for the word isotope (in the depths of one’s memory), suggested that a substance, almost by definition, had to emit, at the very least, alpha-particles to be radioactive : as one recollects, one did blurt this out to Moss, to which he countered, by saying that a piece of paper will stop them.

As, by now, the lateness of the hour had made one abandon plans for what to watch next and (after making notes, and coffee, in the bar) head for a drink****, the word ‘Becquerel’ came stumbling into one’s mind (a standard measure of radiation). Over a pint, one was soon checking – on the Internet (when the source of information about isotopes (above) was found) what had been claimed about Plutonium (apparently, according to Wikipedia®, first made by bombarding U238 with deuterons) :

The web-page confirms that Plutonium 238 (Pu-238, with a half-life of 88 years) emits alpha-particles, and talks about the significance of the spontaneous fission of Pu-240 in connection with terms such as ‘weapons grade’ Plutonium. Thus, ’Supergrade plutonium’, with less than 4% of plutonium-240, is used in U.S. Navy weapons stored in proximity to ship and submarine crews, due to its lower radioactivity.

Somehow those statements about safely holding a piece of the element begged the question what sort of Plutonium one was talking about…






Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* And, having said that, some of its ideas had saved – as if it has an inherent, rather than a given, meaning the symbol on a yellow ground with a round core, and a triangle of pulses that, almost sonically, emanate from it (pictured below, in one of several versions). If we have, in these postulated far-off generations (and we saw endless scenarios that had been envisaged), forgotten about nuclear waste, why, then, will that symbol signify ? (Surely, a fantasy that we will be nuclear free, with the States and others so keen on their arsenals ?)



** As an abiding problem, only briefly touched upon as [the idea of] the safety and integrity of WIPP was talked up by Carlsbad’s Mayor (as well as addressed, in general terms, by Allison MacFarlane who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014, and who seemed to have more questions than answers).

*** Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), with a half-life of 24,110 years, may have to be seen as a major headache that the twentieth century has caused, but others are far more persistent : the half-life of Plutonium-242 is more than 15 times longer (373,300 years), and that of Plutonium-244 a staggering 80.8 million years.

**** For those interested, The Sheffield Tap (@SheffieldTap) was a good discovery at Doc/Fest :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 27 June 2015

Doublethink in Mecca : being devotional despite inflicted modernity ?

This is a Festival review of A Sinner in Mecca (2015)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


27 June (29 June, Post-script added)

This is a Festival review of A Sinner in Mecca (2015), which screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 on Tuesday 9 June at 6.15 p.m.

This remains the most perplexing film from Sheffield Documentary Festival, with its themes almost at poles away from each other (please see below) having tumbled around in one’s head, in search of supremacy, throughout the screening. Although, in fact, none ultimately found any, and one’s hopes for a considered response were then jostled by a good deal of immoderately detailed criticism, and even hostility, in the Q&A* (so what one first wrote please see below was not an ideal appreciation) : it was painful that there was the palpable affront to, and taken by, director Parvez Sharma (@parvezsharma) at being asked why he had made A Sinner in Mecca, and what it was about (as he pointed out, to these people who had just watched his film, there was insult in so doing).

These themes in the film [its official web-site is http://asinnerinmecca.com], which refuse to stay together and be quiet, are fairly simply stated (though it is not intended to be reductively done) :

(1) The desire to complete a Hajj to Mecca and show that one is a good Muslim

(2) How the traditional elements of a Hajj (specifically the environment and manner in which they are carried out) have been influenced or even changed by the Islamic tradition to which the ruling Saudi royal family adheres (the Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam)

(3) A prohibition on filming at Mecca and the other religious sites (whereas we have footage, and much contemporary audio, of everything that Sharma does to complete his Hajj)

(4) Recent executions, by beheading, of men just for being gay


It is partly in the interaction of themes (1) and (2) that tension arises within the viewer : Sharma is clearly sincere in wanting to carry out the traditional steps of a Hajj, and seek acceptance from God for his pilgrimage, but he in no way refrains from doing so and at the same time pointing out how a shopping-mall, for example, complete with a branch of Starbucks, is a matter of a few hundred metres from the most sacred Islamic site, The Kaaba (or Ka’aba), in the mosque Al-Masjid al-Haram [the link is to the Wikipedia® web-page]. It feels like a remarkable doublethink on Sharma’s part, trying to engage with the significance of all these ritual acts (and their meaning to him), but at the same time as criticizing what the ruling family has done to holy sites (or, later in the film, seems to have allowed to happen to them).

One is reminded that, in the Christian tradition, all four Gospels have accounts of Jesus driving the money-lenders out of the Temple (e.g. Matthew 21 : 1217, 2327), and Islam has equivalent passages of zeal for God’s house :

At the culmination of his mission, in 629 CE, Muhammad conquered Makkah with a Muslim army. His first action was to cleanse the Kaaba of idols and images.

Narrated Abdullah: When the Prophet entered Mecca on the day of the Conquest, there were 360 idols around the Ka'bah. The Prophet started striking them with a stick he had in his hand and was saying, "Truth has come and Falsehood has Vanished.. (Qur'an 17:81)"

Sahih Al-Bukhari, Book 59, Hadith 583


Since, from what Sharma says in the film, we do not know whether theme (3) is a religious prohibition (or an administrative one), and in the light of a harsh state religious penalty from theme (4), one might imagine and hence be anxious that he risked execution to take his footage (please see below). Here lies what appears to be a further conflict : even if a person decides for himself, irrespective of such a penalty, that a good Muslim can be gay (or lesbian), why would he (or she) flout a prohibition not to film in sacred places ? As with the pull between themes (1) and (2), so, in that between (1) and (3), one spends time not quite fathoming why Sharma has chosen to film his Hajj and that gnaws at one, as one watches the film :

Is he if a real distinction is being made here filming it as proof for himself that he did it, or to show us ? (Although, if he is showing it to us, we may not (easily) understand what this series of acts means to him spiritually, especially the final one, which is alarming.) If he had not filmed, of course, there would not be a documentary (not in this way, at any rate), but does the film, as we watch, leave us with the uncertainty how he can be both sincerely pious and simultaneously documenting his experience, if (and we do not know) filming is against a religious ordinance ? Or do we maybe need to throw ourselves into a world such as that of Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (or of Gide’s Les caves du Vatican), and not try to separate religious experience from humanity from human nature ? (With the example of Jesus and Muhammad, after all, we see how they concentrate on what is holy about the Temple / the Ka'bah, and dismiss the unworthy human additions : does the pilgrim, too, undertake certain steps to reduce his or her unworthiness ?)


Quite often (maybe through not being a Muslim ?), one wonders whether Sharma must be ‘going through the motions’ in his Hajj (or, in part, feel that he is ?), since he is commentating so pointedly on what has become of its elements in modern Saudi Arabia that, though, does not quite identify our question, but is an attempt at understanding what it must be like to be in locations that have now been ‘reinterpreted’ so radically (not his word, but a euphemistic analogy). For example, Sharma tells us of the history that gives symbolic significance to the activity of running between two mountains (and we are shown a moment of animation) : they are mountains, now that the space has been enclosed, that we cannot see, but only what resemble (again, not his word) ‘soulless’ modern corridors.

Using the word ‘soulless’ is not, of course, at all meant to denigrate the inherently sacred nature of this spot (for Sharma himself indicates that he does not relish what has been done here). It is an attempt to say what it looks like, as a space that one would think lacked significance, and even much humanity as when we castigate planners for giving us an unwelcoming underpass, or a corridor that we have to tramp down to get to platforms on an Underground line. Sharma, however, must somehow keep everything holy in his soul and heart, despite the fact that this and other settings for elements of the Hajj have been changed so much that we wonder how the religious acts themselves can remain. (Likewise, he shows us what disgusts him in traffic-jams on a coach that last for hours, and in having to make devotions in a city full of discarded rubbish that no one deals with.)

Somehow (or mentally somewhere : as if in a minimal area of overlap between themes (1), (2) and (4), in a Venn diagram ?), despite being critical that Saudi cemeteries / monuments have been destroyed (because the Wahhabi faith of the royal family discredits praying to idols), Sharma sees himself as capable of making a Hajj that is acceptable to his God yet, in so doing, rejecting / critiquing what has now been done to the religious centres, including the fact that his sexual orientation stands condemned and that filming is banned (theme (3)). This seeming confusion of attitudes is why, early on and for the round-up portal-page for Doc/Fest coverage, this comment was made :

Despite director / cinematographer Parvez Sharma’s hope that his film was not self indulgent, and the insights that he wished to share through going on a Hajj about Mecca and other holy sites, and the ruling Saudi dynasty and its attitude to the past, how he pursued, and attained, the object of his quest seemed to stay very personal to him and his experience


The more reflective step, before starting to analyse the film’s themes (as attempted above), was to consider the case of Arthur Koestler, who (in the summative Bricks to Babel, which probably excerpts an earlier work for this material) reported his experience of being so far ‘inside’ the ideologies of both first Communism and then Christianity that objections to them could be heard, but never penetrate to or undermine belief : the internal logic of each belief-system had a self-sustaining answer for everything that challenged it. Here, one needs to come to a realization that none of the negative associations involved in what we see of Saudi such as the Wahhabi accretions / rulings / modernizations affect Sharma’s core relationship to his faith, and, more importantly, what he ends up telling us that he has nevertheless taken from the Hajj : He feels accepted by his God, and he is vindicated as a Muslim who is also gay.

However, for us as viewers, that part of what happens in the film is utterly internal to him, with (especially, again, if we are non-Muslims) only his words as mediation between his experience and us not least if we do not relate to the notion of, or what is needful in, a blood sacrifice [in the tradition of Ibrahim / Abraham]. Moreover, the path that Sharma is shown having chosen, to travel to Saudi (despite being gay), and intending to film, is a very narrow one : on account of a sequence at the opening of A Sinner in Mecca, which, quite from choice, seemed to front-end what followed, but never to be returned to**, one was left, as one watched (despite the fact that, flesh and blood, the film-maker had introduced his film), more and more anxious at the risk that he had run to make it (and whether there was still a possibility of reprisal, against him or those who screened his film ? on which, please see the Post-script).


In the event, perhaps it could have helped one focus on other aspects of the film, if one had known beforehand what one came to learn in the Q&A : one device that Sharma had been using to film had actually been confiscated, and what he had filmed was deleted (so he had had to replicate it later on), but nothing worse had happened***. Even so, it may be that the nature of the themes that Sharma is handling here (as teased out above) just inevitably mean that it feels in conflict with itself, and that we are likely to stay external to his understanding of himself in relation to Islam and his God ?


Post-script

Synergistically with working on the above review, and en route to and from The Stables for a folk gig last week, Richard Thompson’s album The Old Kit Bag was being replayed.



One had forgotten that, in part two (The Pilgrims Fancy, titling tracks 7 to 12), was a song called ‘Outside of the Inside’. It begins provocatively with God never listened to Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker lived in vain, and calls his jazz ‘monkey music’, and him ‘Blasphemer, womaniser’ the first of several take-downs of Western figures such Albert Einstein, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Van Gogh and Botticelli.

Towards the end, we have these rather chilling lines :

I’m familiar with the cover
I don’t need to read the book
I police the word of action
Inside’s where I never look



The review of the film that appeared in The Guardian (by Safa Samiezade’-Yazd), now read, tells us : Parvez, who is gay and Muslim, has had death threats for making the film, leading to increased security at the festival screenings. (In retrospect, then, the search of our bags in the way into the screening at Doc/Fest had been nothing to do with trying to restrict pirating…)

As the review also has a short interview, at the end, with the reviewer as a sympathetic questioner, it is well worth a read to give the film’s director a chance to talk about A Sinner in Mecca, without (as we had twice in the Doc/Fest Q&A) a point-by-point insistence on the ways in which he had misrepresented Islam and its tenets, for example :

This is a film about the change that needs to happen within Islam. It’s a direct challenge that has never been mounted to the Saudi monarchy. It’s a call to action to all Muslims to take back singular authority over their faith.





Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* Except that one did not wish to get caught up in the emotion behind these harsh comments, and see a film-maker who has brought a film be attacked, was it possible that the fact that, in themselves, they were being made almost provided sufficient justification for having made A Sinner in Mecca ?

** A little stagily, though, in fact, the staginess proved to help convey the sense of fear and desperation of the director’s correspondent, and thereby to leave one, later, in trepidation for his safety.

*** Even so, the fact that he had made A Jihad for Love (2007) connected him, as a film-maker, with being gay, so he had clearly heightened the risk of being identified, when in Saudi Arabia, by filming. (And, as was put to him in the Q&A, his film had been open about his marriage to his gay partner in New York City at the start of film, but, in some parts of the States, legislation against same-sex marriage was being passed, so the negative attitudes were close to home.)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)