Film review

  • Cold Case Hammarskjöld

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mads Brügger (2019)

    Directors introducing their work at festivals tend to say they’ll let the film do the talking until the post-screening Q&A.  Not so the Danish documentarian and TV personality Mads Brügger.  Ahead of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, showing at the London Film Festival, Brügger told the NFT2 audience he was a firm believer in a maximum running time for any film of an hour and a half – in consideration of toilet needs.  He was sorry he’d simply had to make an exception in this case:  still, 128 minutes wasn’t bad going when the film could easily, he reckoned, have run five hours.  Brügger then started to talk about his subject.  He summarised the views of Harold Macmillan on the political situation in the Congo and its economic implications for Britain, at the time of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash in southern Africa in September 1961.  Finally and waggishly, Brügger warned us, anticipating the Q&A to come, that he was in ‘a rather emotional state’ because he’d given up smoking thirty-four days ago.  He left the stage a good few minutes after taking it, obviously not that bothered about weak bladders.

    The introduction was a taste of things to come.  Cold Case Hammarskjöld tells a compelling story in an infuriating way, largely because Mads Brügger, as much as the title character, is his film’s protagonist.  It’s not unusual, of course, for an investigative film-maker to appear on the screen but Brügger (whose earlier work I haven’t seen) obtrudes to an exceptional degree.  The basic narrative framework comprises sequences, shot in a South African hotel room, in which he dictates the film script to two female secretaries, who appear in alternate sequences.  He often breaks off from dictation to discuss with one or the other of them the issues the script is raising.   Throughout these sequences, Brügger wears white trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt because, he explains at the start, this was the virtual uniform of ‘the main villain’ of the piece.  The man in question is Keith Maxwell, head of an outfit that went under the misleading name of the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) and is a main focus of the film’s investigations.  Since we’re repeatedly shown a photograph of a white-clad Maxwell, why does Brügger need to dress up, except in order to show off?

    The inner narrative describes investigations carried out by Brügger and Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker whose late father gave him a metal plate that he believed to be a piece from the ‘Albertina’, the aircraft that flew Hammarskjöld to his death.  Björkdahl has long held the view that Hammarskjöld was murdered because of the stand taken by the UN in the Congo crisis that followed independence and the secession of the breakaway state of Katanga in 1960.  At one stage, Brügger and Björkdahl, who can rarely get a word in edgeways when the two of them are conducting interviews, attempt to excavate what they believe to be the burial site of other wreckage from the ‘Albertina’.  This includes Brügger doing comedy business preparing to smoke a cigar.  If he’d cut stuff like this and extraneous bits of the hotel room sequences, he’d have stayed much closer to his professed ninety-minute limit.

    When his plane came down near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Dag Hammarskjöld was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between UN forces stationed in the Congo and Moise Tshombe’s Katangese troops.  Hammarskjöld was one of sixteen people on the Douglas DC-6 airliner, all of whom perished.  Although the crash was initially blamed on pilot error, a subsequent UN inquiry, which reported a year later, judged the likelihood of pilot error versus intentional downing of the plane 50-50.  The most striking feature of footage of the crash scene is that Hammarskjöld’s body was intact whereas other bodies were burnt beyond recognition – and Brügger naturally asks why.  Unless I missed it, however, the conspiracy theory that Cold Case Hammarskjöld advances doesn’t suggest an explanation.  Brügger turns out to be more concerned with the card, visible on photographs of the corpse, which was tucked into Hammarskjöld’s shirt collar.

    All this was a long time ago … witnesses to the crash and its immediate aftermath are now few and elderly.  One of them is Norman Kenward, a Briton working as a photographer in the region at the time, who recalls being told (and sworn to secrecy) that the card was a playing card:  the ace of spades.  You believe what Kenward says.  In the closing stages of the film, Brügger learns that the ace of spades is the CIA’s ‘calling card’.  He presents this information as even more startling than Kenward’s testimony but it’s not the state secret that Brügger suggests.  The CIA’s Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, designed to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong, involved the use of ace of spades ‘death cards’ (as featured in a sequence in Apocalypse Now, among other Vietnam War films).

    The association of the card with death goes back a very long way.  If you’d had someone killed and you were minded to leave graphic confirmation that the victim was a marked man, chances are you’d consider choosing the ace of spades.  None of this means the CIA wasn’t involved but Brügger’s over-dramatisation of the possible connection is typical of his approach.  Something similar occurs when he conducts a phone interview with Keith Maxwell’s widow.  He asks if her husband was violent towards her.   Her reply is that he wasn’t physically violent but perhaps ‘verbally, mentally violent’.  When Brügger relays the gist of the conversation to one of his secretaries, he’s much less precise in his description of Maxwell as ‘abusive and evil’.

    Brügger wants to put on a show.  About halfway through, he comes close to admitting as much.  He says he didn’t want to concentrate on Dag Hammarskjöld exclusively:  after all, the latter doesn’t mean much to younger generations so they’re probably not interested in him (an insulting assumption).  He describes Hammarskjöld as ‘a goofy character in a screwball comedy’ and shows a brief clip of news film to illustrate the point.  It doesn’t, and Brügger must know it doesn’t.  He must know too he’s closer to the mark at the start of the film.  He notes that Hammarskjöld, on his appointment as UN Secretary-General in 1953, was considered a ‘boring Swedish technocrat’ but that his subsequent emergence as a humanitarian with an idealist cast of mind and considerable pragmatic skills, took the international political establishment by surprise.

    Brügger maintains that what really excites him is the brew of political skulduggery he can bring to the boil.  The attention of Cold Case Hammarskjöld shifts increasingly to SAIMR activities decades after Hammarskjöld’s death.  A mercenaries-for-hire outfit as long ago as 1961, SAIMR, according to the film, had branched out by the late 1980s.  In cahoots with the apartheid regime in South Africa, they were pursuing genocidal ambitions (as well as taking out would-be whistleblowers).  Though not a medical doctor, Keith Maxwell opened clinics in South African townships, offering injections against the AIDS virus almost free of charge.  Brügger contends that the purpose of the clinics, which expanded into Mozambique, was to inject black African patients with the virus.  It becomes clear that Maxwell’s clothes, at first explained as an expression of his admiration for naval traditions, are the whites of a white supremacist.

    There’s a practical reason why Brügger has to switch the focus of his and Göran Björkdahl’s investigations.  It seems there’s a paucity not only of surviving witnesses to the events of September 1961 but also of relevant news film:  at any rate, Brügger repeatedly resorts to showing a bit of footage, sometimes in slow motion, of Hammarskjöld boarding the ‘Albertina’.  But the SAIMR narrative that takes over threatens to become a shaggy dog story; and Brügger’s eventual discovery of a supposedly key source of information in former SAIMR member Alexander Jones exposes, as much as anything, the director’s attention-grabbing shallowness.  After showing the interview with Jones, Brügger tells a secretary that the man seems credible albeit there’s no documentation to back up his claims of what SAIMR was up to.  It’s true Jones’s manner and lucidity make him plausible, and Brügger isn’t to blame for the lack of corroborative evidence.  Where he is at fault is in failing even to test Jones’s evidence through follow-up questions.  Brügger’s clearly reluctant to do anything that might detract from the supposedly sensational nature of Jones’s revelations (which include the CIA ace of spades thing).  It may be no coincidence that John Erik Kaada’s score for the film occasionally echoes chords in John Barry’s music for James Bond pictures.

    The secretaries take Brügger’s dictation not in shorthand but on typewriters that look old-fashioned, though hardly antique enough to explain the typeface, complete with typos, of the chapter headings and key lines from the script that regularly appear on the screen (as do animated sequences, dramatising the accounts of some of the interviewees).  Brügger says he doesn’t know why he opted for a pair of secretaries rather than a single one.  Like so much in Cold Case Hammarskjöld, this is disingenuous.  Saphir Wenzi Mabanza and Clarinah Mfengu are good-looking, differently photogenic and black.   They hold the camera to particular effect as they listen to what Brügger tells them about the SAIMR strategy to spread AIDS in African townships.

    The UN, officially still investigating Dag Hammarskjöld’s death, presumably declined to comment on what the film claims has been a continuing lack of British and South African co-operation in their enquiries.  Brügger seems to conclude that a combination of colonialist and corporate interests, represented by SAIMR personnel, was behind the plane crash.  He relies chiefly on the discovery of what’s claimed to be the manuscript of Keith Maxwell’s autobiography – written in semi-fictionalised form – to provide the answer as to what really happened to the ‘Albertina’:  a bomb on board, which should have exploded shortly after take-off from Lubumbashi, eventually went off just before the plane was due to land.  It may be true but, by this stage, I’d become generally sceptical, thanks to Brügger’s evident lack of interest in assessing the evidence that comes his way.  It’s all grist to his storytelling mill – and poor investigative journalism.

    A couple of days after Cold Case Hammarskjöld premiered at this year’s Sundance (where it won a ‘World Cinema – Documentary’ prize), the New York Times published an article by Matt Apuzzo headed ‘Quest to Solve Assassination Mystery Revives an AIDS Conspiracy Theory’.  Apuzzo’s piece included a response to the allegations about spreading AIDS through contaminated vaccines from Dr Salim S Abdool Karim, ‘the director of Caprisa, an AIDS research center in South Africa’ and ‘a renowned AIDS researcher who was working on the disease in South Africa in the 1990s’.  According to him, ‘The probability [sic] that they were able to do this is close to zero’.   Apuzzo goes on to quote Karim’s view that ‘a laboratory alone would have required millions of dollars and an infrastructure on a par with what the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had at the time’.

    It’s possible the impracticability of what the film claims wasn’t enough to deter fanatics like Keith Maxwell from giving it a go but that’s beside the point.  Brügger, in effect, covers himself at the start of Cold Case Hammarskjöld by acknowledging that what he’s going to uncover could be the ‘craziest conspiracy theory ever’ (or words to that effect).   His view seems to be that if the theory is crazy, then so what?  That’s entertainment, of a politically right-on kind.  Mads Brügger is probably kidding when he dismisses Dag Hammarskjöld as a screwball comedy character.  A kidder is probably not the right person to make a documentary about either Hammarskjöld’s death or the epidemiology of AIDS.

    5 October 2019

  • Illustrious Corpses

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cadaveri eccellenti

    Francesco Rosi (1976)

    One of the best known and most memorably titled of Francesco Rosi’s films, Illustrious Corpses is part of the ‘Treasures’ (‘revived and restored from the world’s archives’) strand at this year’s London Film Festival – a good opportunity to see, very belatedly, my first Rosi picture.  In the opening sequence, an elderly man walks through a church crypt in Palermo.   Rows of mummified remains decorate the walls on either side[1].  The man looks hard at what once were human features and they seem to reciprocate.  Rosi’s camera, examining the man’s face more closely, reveals its great age:  he looks all set to join the dead.  Within a few screen minutes, he’s done so but not through natural causes.  He mounts the steps leading out of the crypt and walks into the streets above, where political demonstrations are taking place and the old man is shot dead.

    He is Judge Vargas, the first of several members of the Supreme Court to be murdered in the course of the story.  Charles Vanel, who plays him, is one of the film’s two most impressive faces.  (In his mid-eighties at the time, Vanel wasn’t himself quite ready to give up the ghost:  he lived to the grand age of ninety-six.)  The other outstanding face belongs to Lino Ventura, as the protagonist Amerigo Rogas, the police detective assigned to investigate the jufdge-slaying.  The last two dead bodies to feature in Illustrious Corpses are those of Rogas and the secretary-general of the Communist Party.  The two men have met in a museum, where a gunman (unseen, as the assassins are throughout) kills them both.  Marble busts, presumably of leaders and statesmen of classical Roman and Italian history, oversee the corpses, rather as the mummies observed Vargas in the crypt.  The authorities, in the form of the Christian Democrat-led government of Italy, issue a public statement that the police detective, under increasing strain, had been showing signs of mental instability, killed the communist politician, then took his own life.  Lino Ventura combines fine naturalistic acting with star magnetism.  He’s also an unarguably sane presence.  Spending two hours in his company reinforces our knowledge that the official explanation of Rogas’s death is outrageously untrue.

    Rosi includes, by way of a cutting postscript to the action, a brief conversation between the new communist leader and the journalist Cusan (Luigi Pistilli), who writes for a left-wing newspaper and was a friend of Rogas.  The politician says the party won’t react to what the government has done.  Cusan asks if this means that ‘the people must never know the truth’.  The reply, also the film’s closing line, is, ‘The truth is not always revolutionary’ – a sardonic play on Antonio Gramsci’s maxim that ‘To tell the truth is revolutionary’.  The screenplay, by Tonino Guerra, Leonardo Sciascia, Lino Iannuzzi and Rosi, is adapted from Sciascia’s novel Equal Danger.  This was published in 1971 but Illustrious Corpses was even more up to date with Italian politics.  In 1973, the Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer sought an accommodation with the Christian Democrats, led by Aldo Moro, in what became known in Italy as the ‘Historic Compromise’.  Rosi’s parting shot seems to take aim at contemporary communist politicians’ very qualified interpretation of the meaning of ‘revolution’.

    In other words, Illustrious Corpses is an example of the politically engaged Italian cinema of the period, whose leading exponents included, as well as Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo.  It also calls to mind paranoid thrillers emerging from Hollywood in the light of Vietnam and Watergate – films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Alan J Pakula’s The Parallax View (both 1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975).  Explicitly political film-making tends nowadays, on both sides of the Atlantic, to take the form of smugly sarcastic biopic – Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) and Loro (2018), Adam McKay’s Vice (2018), and so on.  Many people will regret the passing of the more intellectually serious approach that Rosi’s work exemplifies.  I suppose I’m one of them in principle but have to admit that I didn’t regret Illustrious Corpses reaching its end.

    According to Wikipedia, the film’s title:

    ‘… refers to the surrealist game, Cadavre Exquis, invented by André Breton, the participants draw consecutive sections of a figure without seeing what the previous person has drawn, leading to unpredictable results, and is meant to describe the meandering nature of the film with its unpredictable foray into the world of political manipulations, as well as the (“illustrous [sic]“) corpses of the murdered judges.’

    There’s no doubt Rosi builds up a disorienting web of double-crossing intrigue.  He and Lino Ventura show that Rogas is smart enough to fathom what’s going on but ill equipped to subdue it.  Each of the assassinations is prepared for in a visually imaginative way and impressively staged (the cinematographer is Pasqualino De Santis).  Yet lllustrious Corpses also seems, in some ways, dated in a negative sense.  There are an awful lot of thugs cloaked in suavity but whose significant glances instantly give them away.  The presence in the cast of the likes of Fernando Rey (as a government security minister) and Max von Sydow (as the president of the Supreme Court) gives proceedings an international-star-cast flavour.  Von Sydow is saddled with the script’s most extended (and stagy) philosophical monologue, as he explains to Rogas that, when a judge administers the law, his doing so is, by its very nature, unchallengeable – just as the Catholic priest’s celebration of the Mass is unchallengeable.

    This kind of talk gets boring – so is a sequence in which political epigrams get hurled from one side to another of a banquet room.   There are a few less de luxe clichés too.  Late on in the film, Rogas, making his way through a public park for his latest secret tryst, walks past a blind man sitting with his Alsatian dog.  The man isn’t really blind and the dog’s collar contains a bugging device which, when the animal obediently trots off in Rogas’s direction, picks up his private conversation.  Any detective who’d seen a few thriller movies would have spotted this pair a mile off.

    10 October 2019

    [1] These are the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, described by Wikipedia as follows:  ‘Palermo’s Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the 16th century and monks began to excavate crypts below it.  In 1599 they mummified one of their number … and placed him into [sic] the catacombs. … The bodies [of other monks] were dehydrated on the racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar.  Some of the bodies were embalmed and others enclosed in sealed glass cabinets.  Monks were preserved with their everyday clothing and sometimes with ropes they had worn as a penance. … [I]n the following centuries it became a status symbol to be entombed into the Capuchin catacombs’.

     

Posts navigation