Cinematic Overtures

by Annette Insdorf

  Before the action begins, an epigraph is printed against a dark sky and spoken by a male off-screen voice: “With a shriek birds flee across the black sky, people are silent, my blood aches from waiting.” The quotation comes from Yugoslav writer Meša Selimović’s novel Death and the Dervish and sets the film’s tone of impending violence. The opening sequence is a rich introduction to Manchevski’s internal rhymes (see clip). The hands picking tomatoes from the grounds of a monastery in the mountains turn out to belong to Kiril. After he slaps his neck, killing a fly, an older priest predicts, “It’s going to rain. The flies are biting.” As they leave with the ripe tomatoes, a group of children play with a ring of twigs, which they set on fire around a live turtle; then they throw bullets into the circle, setting off the sounds of warfare. Even though the priest says, “Time never dies, the circle is not round,” the children’s game introduces a sense of violent and implacable entrapment. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The construction of Manchevski’s story is intended, then, to demonstrate the futility of its ancient hatreds. There are two or three moments in the film … in which hatred of others is greater than love of one’s own. Imagine a culture where a man would rather kill his daughter than allow her to love a man from another culture, and you will have an idea of the depth of bitterness in this film, the insane lengths to which men can be driven by belief and prejudice.”3

  Internal rhymes heighten the sense of cyclical bloodshed. Before the Rain begins with fingers picking tomatoes, and later a close-up of the doctor’s hands delivering baby goats in part 3 accompanies his quote from Macbeth about hands never being cleansed of blood. An allusion to Shakespeare surfaces in each of the film’s sections: Romeo and Juliet is the apt source for the line in the first segment, “Deny thy father’s home.” In part 2 Aleksander quotes from Hamlet in the back of a taxi, “Thus does conscience make cowards of us all.” And while the priest says, “It’s about time,” at the beginning, Aleksander repeats these words in the last section. Zamira’s first gesture—and her last before dying—is one of silence, putting her finger to her lips. Just as she appears to Kiril in his sleep, her mother Hana later seems to visit Aleksander as he sleeps. A barred shadow on his dormant face evokes Kiril’s visage, which was marked in the same way in part 1.

  FIGURE 7.2  From Before the Rain

  Embodying the film’s intense physicality, a character vomits in each section—Kiril, Anna, and Aleksander. The children burn a turtle in the opening sequence, and the tank of the London restaurant traps another turtle. Imprisonment is indeed expressed through circular patterns, including shots of the moon above the monastery, Anna’s shower drain as well as her magnifying glass, and the two bullet holes on Aleksander’s shirt that leave circles of blood at the end. Each section closes with a dead body horizontal under a tree (even the London restaurant has a bonsai plant). Manchevski’s internal rhymes inform the film’s structure, as the first section turns out to be a continuation of the third. (The chronological sequence is part 2, part 3, and part 1.) This enclosed universe presents a loop with minor variations, corresponding to a line spoken by Aleksander’s cousin Mitre when they pursue Zamira, “It’s time to collect five centuries of blood.” As the director acknowledged in interviews, Balkan culture manifests the historical grip of repetition more than the Western idea of progress. Before the Rain offers a tragic vision of characters more likely to be killed by their own family than by the enemy. Even children seem locked into the pattern, as evidenced by the little boy (with a naked bottom) holding a gun and those who torture the turtle. Is innocence even possible? Not in a world where Zamira is presumed guilty only because the children said they saw her with the shepherd. She hardly seems capable of the murder by pitchfork that the Macedonians claim.

  The graffiti on a London wall reads, “Time never dies. The circle is not round,” the same words spoken by the priest in the opening. But his words at the end—“Time does not wait, and the circle is not round”—diverge just enough to suggest the possibility of an opening, a way out of the vicious cycle. In this regard, when I asked Manchevski who could logistically have taken the photos of Kiril and Zamira that end up on Anne’s desk in London, he replied (in an e-mail on April 24, 2016), “They were taken by the police. There are a few policemen in some of the photos. Of course, these photos—and Kiril’s (unidentified) phone call to Anne’s office, looking for Aleksandar—are the two kinks in the plot. They mislead us into thinking that the story is circular, but they are also the kinks that make it impossible—like an Escher drawing.”

  The music is an integral component of the film’s tone, which is both archaic and modern. The syncopated, percussive minor key score by “Anastasia”—three Macedonian archivists—seems to either foreshadow fatal actions in all three sections or mourn them. At other moments, diegetic music functions in a lighter fashion, as when Aleksander whistles “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” while riding a bicycle. The song from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid provides an allusion to the western genre, which extends the opening sequence’s homage to The Wild Bunch. Moreover, a shot from inside the barn as Aleksander approaches it in part 3 brings to mind The Searchers, which—like Before the Rain—is a western about honor as well as racial hatred. Manchevski confirmed in his e-mail, “Yes, the shot towards the end of the film is an homage to [John] Ford. There is something in the old west ethos (at least as seen in the mid-century westerns) that the character of Aleksander relates to. He is like the cowboy coming into the small town to dish out justice and sacrifices himself in the process.”

  Aleksander’s final words are, “It’s raining.” The landscape of Before the Rain is indeed expressive throughout, beginning with the rumble of thunder in the opening scene and culminating in the downpour at the end. A metaphor for bloodshed, the rain descends on the Macedonians’ avengers while the sky is still sunny at the monastery. But this calm is only a temporary pause before the storm.

  Ajami shares with Before the Rain a misleading circular narrative (as well as a collective protagonist). And because the fractured chronology shows a few of the same events from different vantage points, both films lead the viewer to acknowledge the partiality of our perception. While it is impossible to generalize about the richness of recent Israeli cinema, films like Ajami, Disengagement, Jellyfish, Policeman, and Lebanon embody the search for a cinematic language appropriate to the dynamic struggles of Israeli identity in the twenty-first century. As of 2009, when Ajami was made, there were more than one million Arab citizens living in Israel. The film is cowritten and codirected by Scandar Copti—an Israeli Arab, who also plays the extroverted cook Binj—and Yaron Shani, who is Jewish. The setting is a neighborhood in Jaffa, a multiethnic area of Tel Aviv that has high crime and unemployment rates. In Hebrew and Arabic, the film interweaves volatile relationships between Israeli Arabs and Jews, Arab Christians and Muslims, and West Bank Palestinians and Bedouin. Unfolding in five chapters, with unannounced flashbacks, this drama makes us realize in the last two sections how little we might have understood in the first three. Five plotlines revolve around a drug deal in a garage; when the scene is presented a second time, the apparent villains—including Dando, a Jewish policeman—are humanized. And the handheld camerawork throughout the film has a nervously realistic quality, appropriate to the present tense of Israel.

  Ajami opens with a hand sketching in pencil on paper (see clip). It belongs to thirteen-year-old Nasri, an Arab boy whose drawings will later chronicle the violence around him. He becomes our guide visually as well as aurally: his introductory voice-over invokes “two weeks ago,” with flashbacks of revenge. He will turn out to be an unreliable narrator: like all the other characters—and the audience—he sees only one perspective. Chapter 1 focuses on his older brother, Omar, who works in the restaurant of Abu Elias. Because a rival Bedouin gang shot a neighbor—mistaking him for Omar—he seeks the help of Christian Arab Abu Elias, who is able to broker a cease-fire, culminating in a Bedouin judge adjudicating a settlem
ent sum of $57,000.

  Nasri is not the only chronicler, as we see recorded footage of a woman in a hospital bed. This videotape is presented to Malek—a Palestinian who secretly works in Abu Elias’s restaurant—as a sixteenth-birthday gift, so that he can see his mother, the woman on the tape. Her needed surgery will cost $75,000, of which the Palestinian Authority will pay one-third. In gratitude Malek plans to give a pocket watch to Abu Elias: we do not know the provenance of the watch in his plastic bag, and we learn at the very end that it belonged to a man kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian militants. He was the brother of Dando, who—upon seeing the watch in Malek’s possession—assumes the worst and aims his gun at the boy in the climactic shoot-out.

  In chapter 3 Arab neighbors initially spar in a friendly way with Jewish neighbor Aryeh, who complains about the noise of their sheep. But passions escalate, and he is fatally stabbed by one of the young men. As Aryeh’s daughter screams, Dando gives CPR to Aryeh in vain. Earlier we see Nasri bathing his paralyzed grandfather, and Dando later gives a bath to his little daughter. One of the ways that this five-part tale retains its coherence is through such internal rhymes, especially related to brothers. (Aryeh was stabbed by the brother of Abu Elias’s engaging cook, Binj. Nasri and Omar try to protect each other.)

  It seems at midpoint that Dando shoots Malek—which we perceive as a heinous act—before his own story unfolds in the fourth chapter. At the very end of Ajami we learn that the gunshot came from thirteen-year-old Nasri, who was aiming at Dando. And Malek is clearly not the assassin of Dando’s brother: from the film’s beginning, violence is enacted on the wrong person (is there ever a right person?) because of misperception or mistaken identity. Similarly, we hear that cops murdered Binj, presumably because they searched his place for drugs. But when we see the actual events later, it turns out that Binj died of a drug overdose. The conclusion of Binj’s story reflects how Ajami’s tragic events stem from misunderstanding or miscommunication.

  The film’s interweaving of relationships between brothers has a biblical resonance, especially given the Israeli setting of Ajami. In the religious history of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, the “original” brothers are the sons of Abraham—Isaac (by his wife, Sarah) and his firstborn, Ishmael (birthed by a surrogate, Sarah’s Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar). While Isaac is the ancestor of the Jews, Ishmael is considered the patriarch of Muslim people. Israel’s contemporary tensions concerning contested territory and rights can be traced back to the schism between these siblings: Hagar and Ishmael were exiled after Sarah—who miraculously gave birth to Isaac—assumed her child would be Abraham’s sole inheritor.4

  Ajami was a first feature for both directors, who developed the screenplay over a seven-year period. They cast nonprofessional actors—for example, a Bedouin judge as his fictional counterpart—and held workshops for almost a year, allowing actors to improvise their reactions to specific dramatic situations. The film was shot in sequence without using a traditional script. (Although the directors had a screenplay, the actors did not.) Yaron Shani recalled in an interview, “After we shot the movie, we came to the editing room with over 80 hours of footage; because the actors were improvising for the most part, we spent 14 months just editing this film.”5 As in Before the Rain, the vision is cyclical and despairing, focusing on how violence begets violence. Whatever their ethnicity, the characters die or lose brothers, dramatizing a waste of human potential on either side of the conflict. Ajami is ultimately a bracing cautionary tale. Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The last thing you see in Ajami should be the first thing on your mind about this compelling new film from Israel. That would be the closing credits, written in both Hebrew and Arabic, separate but equal, side by side, mirroring the creative process behind this potent work and the story it has to tell.”6 Moreover, as Columbia University student Samuel Rimland proposed in an unpublished paper, “By making the tragedy of partial perspective manifest at the level of form, the filmmakers highlight the prime role played by limited knowledge in perpetuating conflict in Israel-Palestine.”7 The last line of Ajami is instructive: Nasri’s voice-over says, “Open your eyes.”

  If Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) remains the most famous cinematic exploration of how to manipulate point of view, subsequent American films—notably Under Fire, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation—reference and embellish it, reflecting their own volatile times. “I don’t take sides, I take pictures,” declares the photojournalist in Under Fire (1983), a drama about the power of images. To what extent such objective professionalism might be possible—especially amid the turbulence of 1979 Nicaragua—is one of the many questions posed in this taut political movie. Written by Clay Frohman and Ron Shelton, it uses the background of the populist uprising against Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to explore intervention—whether of the American government in Latin America or of a camera that can transform what it records. Nick Nolte plays Russell Price, an American who has been coolly detached from the violence around him. But in the course of the film he gets involved—with a woman, a political cause, and a moral quandary.

  As Under Fire begins, in 1979, Russell is photographing war-torn Chad (see clip). After written titles that establish the overthrow of Somoza by Nicaraguan rebels, we see a calm field in color and hear a tense note held by strings, as well as the sounds of insects and birds. Suddenly a soldier with a rifle emerges from the earth, then another, and finally a group. An abrupt black-and-white photo freezes the image—while they don’t know they are being watched, we have a privileged perspective—supported by the whir of a camera on the soundtrack. After the rebels ride out on elephants, a second still momentarily immobilizes them, then a third, before a helicopter attacks from the sky. The fourth photo, in color, precedes the introduction of Russell. Under Fire thus makes us aware of invisibility—whether that of the rebels who were camouflaged by the landscape, the hidden photographer, or the film viewer’s status—before revealing a helicopter swooping down implacably with no human faces visible. The progression of sounds is equally gripping, from grasshoppers to a soldier’s whistle, to helicopter blades whirring before the explosion unleashed by the flying object. This self-conscious opening viscerally juxtaposes shots of guns with shots of a camera that abruptly freezes—and drains of color—what it captures. Because we do not know whose furtive lens we are identifying with, the very act of filming is potentially loaded with danger. Will these images be used to harm the subjects? After all, a freeze-frame conveys the stasis of death. Should we feel guilty for potentially being complicit with a lethal lens?

  The second scene addresses the difficulty of telling—much less taking—sides as Russell rides a truck filled with rebel soldiers. His old buddy Oates (Ed Harris) is part of the convoy, mistakenly assuming they are government troops. Although the film seems to celebrate the Chadian rebels over the corrupt dictatorship, it introduces a darker ambiguity through this American mercenary fighting on the side of the dictatorship. While Oates hides under the truck, Russell fearlessly stands to photograph an approaching plane—taking some of the same risks as the rebels in order to get the shots. Russell’s vivid images end up on the cover of Time.

  FIGURE 7.3  Russell (Nick Nolte) in a mirror in Under Fire, and the rebels carrying a photo of Rafael

  Along with his friend Alex (Gene Hackman) and Claire (Joanna Cassidy), the woman Alex loves, Russell goes to Nicaragua, where the three journalists will cover the Sandinista insurrection. This fictional tale, which alludes to real incidents, explores his transformation after seeing American troops murder civilians: the aptly named Price realizes there is a cost and consequence to his activity and places his lens in the service of the rebels.

  He even stages a photo after Rafael—the leader of the revolution—is killed. In it Rafael’s eyes are propped open and his corpse is seated as if he were alive. Although Rafael is physically dead, the fabricated photo reveals a different “truth”—his
spirit lives. Russell’s camera is initially promiscuous, taking things in rather indiscriminately, a kind of shield from direct involvement. Subsequently, the camera holds up a mirror to brutal acts. Finally it is used as a political tool. Upon finding the rebels’ massacred bodies, Oates tells Russell, “No pictures please, it might look bad.” The photographer asks bitterly, “Do you get paid by the body or by the hour?” He answers, “I get paid the same way as you do, pal.”

  When the camera is committed to intervention, it is also lethal. The sharpness of the photos Russell stages belies the ambiguity of their content. A more overtly political film than Blow-Up, which examines similar themes, Under Fire explores the capacity of the camera to both reveal and trick. The film’s duplicitous images include leaflets dropped from the air—they turn out to be CIA propaganda—and Russell’s manipulated image of Rafael. By the end, his photo of a journalist being shot changes the war. Spottiswoode invoked an actual incident that inspired his film: “He’s a non-political character who, at the beginning of the film, hardly cares which country he’s in, and gets caught into doing something for a revolution,” he said about Russell. “But it goes completely wrong: the people he tries to help get killed and, as a further irony, it’s Russell’s photo of a journalist being shot that changes the war—just as it was a photo of an American journalist being killed that ended the war. Carter stopped the arms shipment, refusing to send $25 million in arms, after Bill Stewart’s death.… Perhaps you can’t get involved in other people’s wars. Even when our sympathetic main character takes a [staged] photo—an act of goodness so fewer people will die—it doesn’t work.”8