Absolute Power

Addressing authority, God, the government, the Big Other in cinema is always a business of exposure, of the lack of it.  The spine- chilling climax of the ‘Testament of Dr Mabuse’ is an object lesson in management of the essential disappointment of power. As with Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, the scene of the cut-out dictatorial voice barking into a microphone in a concrete bunker is chilling in its emptiness, its resemblance to any lock-up garage.

So ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’ is on very challenging ground in its documentation of a group of men from Wisconsin, who attempt to bring to account the Catholic priest who sexually abused them while pupils at a school for the deaf in the 10960 and 1970s. The film- makers skillfully elide the more general collision between the spurious ‘statehood’ of the Vatican and its associated legal inward-looking mindset and inability to address any ethics not centred on its own preservation. The characterfulness of the sign language is endlessly engaging, and the commentary of the New York Times journalist who had an inbox-ful of abuse for reporting them sympathetically was instructive: ‘When I heard that some deaf guys from Wisconsin were handing out photo-statted flyers outside a cathedral accusing a priest of abusing them, I know there was a story that needed to be told’.

Incidentally, yesterday I heard John Humphreys interviewing a senior British Catholic regarding the way in which the church has responded to accusations of abuse; Humphreys used the word “flippant” to describe the responses he was hearing and didn’t get contradicted or challenged.

“No” is a far more mediated, but equally encased telling of the story of the encounter between a socially embedded and compromised character and the brute force of power. Gael Garcia Bernal is obviously totally watchable on a cinema screen; using 1980s TV news film stock, the narrative chases him through the Chilean referendum, which delivered a decisive rejection of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Bernal’s bemusement as the advertising strategies he clearly sees can be brought to bear on a political campaign, actually appear to work in the service of social goals he barely believes in, is wonderfully acted. Bernal doesn't so much as expose power in a revolutionary way, as throw into sharp relief just how mechanical and boring power is. 

Not so much as “speaking truth to power” as “being professional in the face of power”.