Monthly Archives: April 2020

  • Fire Will Come

    Old YorkerFilm review

    O que arde

    Oliver Laxe (2019)

    Although it doesn’t feel short as you watch, Fire Will Come runs only eighty-five minutes.  The first six are devoted to images of the movement and collapse of trees in a forest.  An hour into the film (available on Curzon Home Cinema), the promised conflagration of the title arrives.  In the mountains of Galicia, a hamlet and the surrounding area burn – for more than ten screen minutes.  No one is to be seen in the opening arboreal sequence.  There are people battling the inferno but the viewer isn’t encouraged to regard them in a conventional way.  You’re not concerned for the safety of the firefighters, who are upstaged by the visual power and beauty of a flaming night sky.  The length of these two episodes, combined with their focus on landscape and destruction of the natural world, gives an idea of where the writer-director Oliver Laxe’s priorities lie.

    This isn’t to say that human beings don’t matter in Fire Will Come (the apocalyptic flavour of the English title is absent from the Galician original, which translates literally as ‘that which burns’).   The two principals, in particular, are compelling camera subjects throughout.  But Laxe, whose third feature this is, and Santiago Fillol, who shares the screenplay credit with him, don’t trouble to explore the people in their story or pursue the suggestive thematic elements they give to it.   In contrast, Laxe’s image-making is meticulously detailed, including his images of people and animals – the middle-aged protagonist Amador (Amador Arias Mon), his aged mother Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez), her Alsatian dog, the three cows that Benedicta keeps on her smallholding in the mountains.  Mauro Herce’s lighting is perhaps even more remarkable indoors than out.  Shots of Amador and/or his mother sitting or eating in the kitchen of Benedicta’s home are like portrait paintings come to life.  These shots are often held for some time so the compositions are nearly still life too.

    In the tenebrous woodland of the opening section, a selva oscura if ever there was one, the trees’ motion is both disturbing and verging on comical – as they keel over, the trees look to be getting in each other’s way.   The tone changes sharply once Laxe reveals that a bulldozer is bringing them down.  He cuts from this opening to pairs of human hands handling a hefty dossier:  the transition brought to mind the university I worked at and the rueful I-see-we’ve-destroyed-another-rainforest joke that committee members made ad nauseam about their bundles of papers.  The one tree left standing at the end of the introduction is a eucalyptus, whose unique survival reinforces its sinister look.  Later on, Amador describes this Australian immigrant to the region as ‘a plague … worse than the devil’.  He’s unhappy too to discover that a local man called Inazio (Inazio Brao) is repairing tumbledown properties in the area with a view to attracting tourists.  There’s a persistent implication that Fire Will Come has something to say on environmental damage, including (like Mark Jenkin’s Bait) gentrification.  Yet Laxe persistently refuses to say it.

    That dossier appears to be a set of case notes.  As it passes from one pair of hands to another, voices on the soundtrack discuss Amador Coro.  An alleged pyromaniac, he has served two years in jail for setting ‘the whole mountainside on fire’ and is now being released on parole.  One of the voices, which presumably belong to police or parole officers, refers to Amador as a ‘poor bastard’:  there’s a hint here that he may not be guilty of the crime for which he was convicted, that he could be an undeservedly marked man.  He’s definitely a solitary one.  After getting off the bus he catches after leaving prison, he sets out to walk to Benedicta’s smallholding, refusing a car-driver’s offer of a lift.  (As he continues on his way, Amador Arias Mon’s lone/ly wolf gait is expressive.)  Later, he turns down Inazio’s offer of work, choosing instead to help look after his mother’s cows.  In spite of her remote habitation, Benedicta is more sociable than her son.  We see her at the well-attended funeral of a neighbour.  It’s she who suggests to Inazio that he offer Amador a job.  When the vet Elena (Elena Fernández) calls to treat one of her cows, Benedicta urges Elena to stay for coffee.

    The suggestion that Amador will be on the receiving end of give-a-dog-a-bad-name prejudice proves to be deceptive.  Others in the vicinity see him as an oddball but there are no signs of ill will towards him – not until, that is, a sequence both pivotal and puzzling.  This takes place in a bar in the town of Navia, where Amador drives one day.  You assume this is to meet Elena.  He first meets her when the cow that she later treats is stuck in water and Amador can’t single-handedly get the animal out.  As they drive back in Elena’s jeep, Amador, for the first and only time in the film, nearly smiles, during a sparse, halting conversation about the Leonard Cohen song (‘Suzanne’) that Elena has playing.  She also asks Amador if he ever goes to Navia and he says he sometimes does.  He puts on his best clothes for his visit there but as he sits alone, watching other people in the bar, Amador looks even more bereft than usual.  When Elena approaches, he says a glum hello and asks if people have told her about him.  She says they have but ‘you know how people are’.  Elena then asks how the cow’s doing and the scene ends.  Oliver Laxe has been elliptical throughout but this sequence is something else.   From the way it’s played, it’s hard to tell whether Amador and Elena had arranged to meet at all, let alone whether what Elena has now learned about Amador’s reputation and criminal record has changed her mind about spending time with him.

    This is a turning point in the story, nevertheless.  Back at the smallholding, Benedicta calls in vain for the Alsatian dog that wanted to follow Amador when he drove into Navia.  (The animal is never seen again; there’s no indication of what happened to it.)  As he drives homewards, Amador passes fire engines heading in the opposite direction, sirens blaring.  He is then absent from the action throughout the night-long struggle to control the blaze.  None of those fighting the fire voices suspicion as to who might be responsible – if anyone is:  Laxe seems to leave open the possibility of a purely natural event in the intense summer heat.  The following morning, there’s nothing to suggest that the police are investigating the fire.  It’s left to Inazio, whose renovated cottages were destroyed in the blaze, to take the law into his own hands and beat up Amador.  Inazio’s pals eventually persuade him to stop.  Once the men have gone, Benedicta approaches and asks Amador if he’s OK.  He silently gets to his feet.  Mother and son walk off together.  The film ends.

    As might be guessed from the shared forenames of characters and those playing them, the cast are not professional actors.  In a short but instructive Sight & Sound (April 2020) interview, Laxe gives the following answer to Jonathan Romney’s question about how he found his non-professionals:

    ‘Through auditions, mainly.  Benedicta [Sánchez] emigrated to Brazil in her twenties, worked as a photographer, then came back.  She’s 95 now, and basically a hermit.  Inazio [Abrao] is a carpenter.  Elena [Fernández] really is a vet.  I always want to work with the person more than the character.’

    That, at least, is clear from Fire Will Come.  Laxe has assembled a collection of arresting faces and physiques, gets some fine naturalistic acting from his cast but shows no interest in penetrating appearance or behaviour.  We never know if Amador is an eccentric eco-warrior, an antisocial scapegoat or someone else.

    The fires in the film are real ones that raged in Galicia two consecutive summers.  These are perennial acts of God rather than arson although, in the second year, after unprecedentedly heavy rainfall, Laxe and his crew had to wait a long time for them to start.  I assume that Fire Will Come‘s most distressing sight, a skinny horse stumbling through a field in the aftermath of the fire that has left the creature burned and blind, was something the film-makers actually saw.  The animals in evidence are sometimes as eloquent as the landscape.  As Laxe also explains in his S&S interview:

    ‘I wanted to represent the ineffable.  In that [opening] sequence, you have the forests and the machines, but there’s something else behind them – the machines aren’t just machines, the trees aren’t just trees.  I wanted to make people feel that behind the world of exterior forms is another world of subtle forms. …’

    Laxe realises the natural world with such skill and visual imagination that those first images, and some others, do have an almost animistic charge.  It’s frustrating that his people remain opaque.  This slow-moving film is often impressive but it’s more interesting to read and write about than it is to experience.  Unlike another recent fire-themed enigma, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Fire Will Come is a mystery that’s less involving than exasperating.

    10 April 2020

  • Crip Camp

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James LeBrecht, Nicole Newnham (2020)

    This documentary premiered at Sundance in January and is now streaming on Netflix.  The first part consists of archive footage of an early 1970s summer camp for youngsters with disabilities, and recollections by some of those who participated.  James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham then describe, again through a combination of news film and interviews, the disability rights campaign that culminated in the passing, in 1990, of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Several Camp Jened alumnae/i became activists in the long-term national campaign.  Crip Camp‘s narrative comprises, then, two largely distinct parts but LeBrecht and Newnham never lose the thread connecting them.

    LeBrecht, born with spina bifida, was himself a ‘Jenedian’.  A native New Yorker, now based in Oakland, California, he’s had a successful career as a sound designer (first in theatre, then in film) beside his activist work.  He and the Emmy-winning documentarian Nicole Newnham (who is not disabled) have collaborated before.  LeBrecht’s own journey from East to West Coast reflects Crip Camp’s.  Camp Jened was located in the Catskills.  By the mid-1970s, the Center for Independent Living at Berkeley was a nerve centre of American disabled rights activity; people who first got to know each other at Jened had converged there.  In the spring of 1977, the San Francisco Office of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare was the site of the 28-day ‘504 Sit-in’, which LeBrecht and Newnham cover extensively.  It was led by Judy Heumann, a wheelchair user as the result of polio in childhood and another Jenedian.  Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, although it made provision for disabled access to public buildings and other spaces, wasn’t actually being implemented.  The 504 Sit-in changed that.

    The black-and-white film of the summer camp was shot by what LeBrecht has described to the Guardian as a ‘”radical, early video coalition of hippies’” who stopped by the camp in the summer of 1971, strapped a camera to his wheelchair, and directed him to film’.   The collective called themselves the People’s Video Theater.  LeBrecht and Newnham managed to track down one of its members, who happened to be ‘in the process of digitizing the group’s five and a half hours of footage from the camp, which now composes most of Crip Camp’s first third’.   The television news and other footage at the heart of the subsequent two thirds makes for an absorbing narrative but it’s the People’s Video Theater archive material that is Crip Camp’s USP.   It’s amazing to watch although the understandable focus on it has consequences for other aspects of the documentary.

    Summary text on the screen near the end of the film records that Camp Jened ran annually from 1951 to 1977, when it folded because of financial difficulties.  I’d have liked LeBrecht and Newnham to tell us more than they do about the camp’s inception  They make very clear that an out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude towards disability was distressingly prevalent in the early 1970s:  that’s why the unconstrained atmosphere and routines of Camp Jened made the place, for those recalling it now, extraordinarily liberating.  The isolation/institutionalisation of disabled children had presumably been even more acute twenty years previously.  The creation in 1951 of a summer camp where disability was normal must have been, at the time, quite exceptionally progressive.  The film-makers are keen to emphasise the influence of the 1960s counterculture on the Jened ethos:  by 1971, marijuana and making-out sessions were available to campers.  This bolsters the film’s portrait of the camp as a kind of mini-Woodstock (the actual Woodstock took place geographically close to Camp Jened) but this comes at the expense of information about its founders[1].  You assume, from what a couple of contributors say about how they looked forward to returning to Jened, that campers went there repeatedly; but LeBrecht and Newnham might have said a bit more on this too[2].

    The film takes its title from Jened’s affectionate name among campers and their counsellors – and Crip Camp is at its strongest in capturing the experience of disabled life.   It illustrates how the camp allowed teenagers with different forms of disability to appreciate disorders other than their own, gave them a larger sense of camaraderie.  Among a collection of formidable characters, Judy Heumann and Denise Sherer Jacobson stand out.  The latter and her husband Neil, who both have cerebral palsy, are as amusing as they’re incisive.  They describe the contemporary hierarchy of disability:  those with polio, who sounded normal, were at the top, CP sufferers at the bottom.  Neil Jacobson recalls his mother telling him she understood his wanting to ‘marry a handicapped girl but why not a polio?’

    Crip Camp also conveys its subjects’ appetite for self-assertion – even self-justification – by doing things assumed to be out of bounds to them.  Soon after enrolling as a student at the University of California at San Diego, James LeBrecht rode and crashed a friend’s motorbike.  Denise Sherer first had sex because ‘I didn’t want to die a virgin’.  Not long afterwards, she suffered acute stomach pains and was taken to hospital with suspected appendicitis.  When Denise came to, she learned that her appendix had been removed but found to be healthy.   An astonished doctor diagnosed gonorrhoea:  Denise remembers the momentary excitement she felt at being told she had a sexually transmitted disease.  The film’s most impressive able-bodied contributor is the journalist Evan White, who covered the 504 Sit-in like no one else.  He describes how a strike by TV technicians and consequent shortage of news material proved a godsend for the sitters-in.  It resulted in White’s reports from San Francisco, which had previously aired only locally, suddenly being used by news stations across the country.

    Watching the Jenedians still around today, now in their sixties or early seventies, has a powerful effect because of what it conveys about a lifetime of disability.  It’s humbling for two main reasons.   You’re awed by how much Judy Heumann has achieved in close to half a century of work with governments, non-profit organisations and so on, in developing human rights legislation and policies benefiting the disabled.  Denise Scherer Jacobson expresses more intensely a sense of sustained, undaunted struggle.  A colossal effort is needed for this woman to form and produce every word she speaks.  You wonder at the strength of will and sheer stamina she has needed to keep on speaking – year after year, decade after decade.  Yet she’s evidently loved life.  When Denise laughs, which she does plenty, she seems to be telling us she’s well aware what she sounds like.  She seems to be laughing at her disability too.

    5 April 2020

    [1] The Wikipedia article on Camp Jened  – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Jened – is more informative.

    [2] Wikipedia helps here also.  The entry for James LeBrecht says that he ‘began to attend Camp Jened’ when he was fourteen years old.  According to her entry, Judy Heumann attended ‘every summer from ages 9 to 18’.

Posts navigation