The Craft of the Image

The Craft of the Image

Putting politics onto the screen is a business fraught with opportunities to blow the cinematic magic, leave the audience feeling hectored-at or patronised, or deliver something that really belongs on the television.

The House I Live In instantly curried favour with us, sticking the very unprepossessing head of David “The Wire” Simon on the screen at regular intervals, saying things that really out to be coming out of the mouth of a professional sociologist or political historian; I find it spectacularly hard to believe the film-makers couldn’t have found a voice from outside the media-sphere. Perhaps airing opinions on the ‘drug war’ in the US that don’t moralise or demonise is a really dangerous business. It’s an unashamedly campaigning film that gives a fair voice to all the interviewees; the small-town family-guy prison officer who opens the film getting his daughters out of the house on a school day, later gives some awe-inspiring near-Foucauldian analysis of the mechanisms of the prison industry. Even this Lester Freamon-wannabe was gobsmacked by the linkages drawn between the criminalization of opium smoking in California in the early 20^th century driven by fear of the Chinese, criminalization of marijuana provoked by fear of Mexicans, and finally of cocaine as part of the backlash against the civil rights movement. This is public-service broadcasting in the very best sense of the term.

Pussy Riot: Punk Prayer tried hard to do the same, but only with tired news-camera footage, and a character ensemble of activists in a punk music group who very clearly have no respect for the power of music: “We use any means we can to get the message across” they might as well have said. Their message is very admirable but the DIY anyone-can-do-it pranksterdom comes across as gauche and 6^th form for the most part. The film only really comes alive in the chaotic courtroom scenes, during which the room feels more like a crowded zoo than anything else.

In the same way that a music group must have a musical language that speaks with a voice a strong as their demagoguery to avoid the tone of a student demonstration writ large (The Clash are the exemplars here), a movie must have a visual language to rise above simple TV documentary: Nostalgia for the Light almost provides too much here: The crunch in the sand of sneakers, the Zen-like pronouncements of the astronomers (“each night, the centre of the galaxy passes over Santiago…”), the squeaking, straining brass of the telescope, the empty expanses of hot air and rock. The geologists, astronomers (“the past is at the core of our work”), archaeologists and children or sisters of political prisoners all seem to trying to tell a story the thread of which will not be grasped in its entirety. Loss of physical remains, loss of parents, loss of a memory which could take the form of a story all echo loudly through the testimony. There’s a gripping sense of dried, dessicated, barely-preserved experience, surviving almost arbitrarily in the Atacama Desert.