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