The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais)

THE MAN ON THE SHORE (L’Homme sur les quais)           A                    

aka:  The Man By the Shore

France  Canada  Haiti  Germany  (106 mi)   1993  d:  Raoul Peck

All sea animals eat up men, but only the shark has a bad reputation.
—Sarah (Jennifer Zubar)

A film on my short list of all-time favorite films, rarely screened and never released on DVD, distinguished for being the first film from the Caribbean ever screened at Cannes, where it may still hold the distinction of being the best film ever made from that region.  Peck was born in Haiti during the reign of the Duvalier dictatorship and his armed militia, the Tontons Macoute, who terrorized the population, where his father was arrested and jailed for trying to unionize farmers, so at the age of 8 his family fled the country and he was raised in the Congo, educated in France, Germany, and the United States, briefly serving (several years “after” making this film) as Minister of Culture in the Haitian government (1996–97) until he resigned his post in protest.  He currently runs the Parisian film school La Fémis and will serve as a Jury member of the main competetition entries at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.  Peck wrote the film during the brief period of optimism of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s initial reign as Haitian president, following the U.S. led exile of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, where Aristide attempted to carry out substantial reforms, bringing the military under civilian control, firing the head of the Army, initiating human rights violations, and bringing several Tontons Macoute to trial, all of which lead to his quick ousting by the military.  Peck integrates autobiographical scenes of his childhood in this fictional but unsentimentalized period piece that tells the repressive and murderous story of the “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime in Haiti during the 60’s as seen through the eyes of an 8-year old child Sarah (Jennifer Zubar). The depth of this film is surprising, co-written by the director and André Graill as it plays out in novelesque fashion, fully developing many characters, where the camera’s constant slow pan becomes a character unto itself, as it brings the audience into full participation with a historical place and time, allowing them to non-judgmentally observe.  This also plays out as a memory piece, as these are the recollections of someone thirty years older now who survived to tell the tale.  The initial impressions are the colorful buildings painted with bright colors, giving Haiti a cheerful look, also the women’s clothing that are saturated in sunny colors.  Actually shot in the Dominican Republic by cinematographer Armand Marco, due to the continued military uprisings in Haiti where it was initially scheduled to shoot, this has the feel of Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), as it actually took them three years to shoot this film in what amounts to a foreign location, continually altering their schedule and having to wait for more money to continue.  But this has an extremely personal feel to it, as it could be anyone’s family.   

Told out of sequence, moving back and forth over two years time, the film details the changing behavior when the local police lose their authority to the brutal methods of the Tontons Macoute, Duvalier’s militia thugs with guns who rule the neighborhoods through intimidation and fear.  The chief enforcer is Janvier, Jean-Michel Martial, a wickedly sadistic madman who doesn’t look at people so much as stare holes through them, usually accompanied by bloody beatings, and to the extreme, shootings and disappearances.  But at least initially, he is still under the authority of the police, Sarah’s father, who doesn’t condone those methods, but when he tries to intervene, “Don’t tempt the devil” would be Janvier’s response, where he and his gunmen would resort to gangland style violence, eventually taking over, demanding blood money from everyone.  Her mother and father flee to Cuba while Sarah and her two older sisters are forced to hide in their grandmother’s attic for two years, never showing their face under fear of arrest.  Initially they lived under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, but they soon became host to continual site inspections under the threat of guns.  In this closeted, dreamlike world, all people had were photograph albums and memories of a life they used to have.  Sarah was confused why the militia wore the same uniform as her father, thinking they must be working together, and after his extended absence, she began associating her anger over his absence with the hostility people had for the Tontons Macoute.  This is contrasted, however, with the proud and dignified images of her grandmother (Toto Bissainthe) and Aunt Elide (Mireille Metellus), both of whom are impressively dressed and have income from running their own clothing and fabric store, so they represent the educated aristocracy who are among the most intelligent citizens in Haiti, where more than 50% of the country remains illiterate and mired in poverty.  Their faces, however, are the real face of Haiti, proud, stubborn even, yet always strong and dignified, where throughout the film one thing is clear—they command respect.  The psychological power games between the crude and sinister methods of Janvier and these defiant women who refuse to back down couldn’t be more riveting, especially when it’s sexual capitulation that he’s looking for.  Rarely do films stare terror in the face like this one, where the results are shattering. 

There’s a national unity celebration filled with loud speaker pronouncements from President for Life Duvalier to his citizenry, a street procession of raw, authentic Haitian music, much like Best haitian music Webert Sicot Crab mazorey (3:41),  ORCHESTRE SEPTENTRIONAL (6:57), or even Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz - Guede Zaina (3:10), with posters of Duvalier lining the streets, and red and black flags all around when Duvalier announces an amnesty.  All Haitians who fled are urged to return, as the country needs to generate needed capital and it was the rich that had the means to flee, where Duvalier actually brokers an agreement with the Pope where the Church and State become inseparable, where Sarah and her sisters could finally come out into the open, but what people are subjected to is continued harassment and raids by the Tontons Macoute who don’t follow any laws, but simply brutalize and murder anyone they don’t like on trumped up charges, proving repeatedly that anyone could be suspected of subversive behavior.  No proof is necessary, only guns.  There’s an interesting character, a brain-damaged invalid named Sorel (Patrick Rameau), who feels like a simpleton character out of August Wilson plays, the stuttering Hambone from Two Trains Running who continually shouts out the same words throughout the entire play, “I want my ham.”  Whenever he sees the Tontons Macoute he stands at attention and salutes, calling them chief, mimicking the shooting of a rifle, but he’s simply a street beggar who takes on the role of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an idiot savant, but also a protector of children.  He plays a big role in the film as the audience identifies with what he goes through, as he is arrested, beaten and sexually brutalized with a nightstick, a tortured character who is traumatized by listening to the endless machine gun shots by the shore near the police holding center. This is one of the most eloquently powerful films describing life under such a repressive regime, where it all plays out like a nightmarish dream, where one wonders how this can actually happen, where all human resistance is simply liquidated.  Unlike THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), no one is trying to overthrow the government here, yet every citizen is viewed with derision and contempt.  The finale to this film is profoundly moving, beautifully set on the gorgeous shores of the turquoise ocean, young girls riding bikes under the swaying palm trees, a picture of serenity ultimately violated in the most obscene way, but the director chooses not to sensationalize and uses a long shot, where the audience can see what happens off in the distance before that continually panning camera comes to rest on an idyllic shore.  The setting is Haiti, but we’ve seen this kind of wretched terror inflicted on citizens before by Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of others, where genocide is a historical reality, but this film brilliantly puts a human face on the reign of terror.  THE MAN ON THE SHORE has a searing intensity that is expressed through a poetic realism, where the beauty of the island landscape and the proud dignity of the people who inhabit the country are the centerpiece of the film, where a Pandora’s Box opens wide to spoil and nearly destroy this Edenesque lost paradise.         

The Battle of Algiers

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS                       A                    

Italy Algeria  (123 mi)  1965  d:  Gillo Pontecorvo

God be with you.                     

 —Jaffar (Saadi Yacef ), FLN military chief as he sends women with explosives in their baskets to bomb French targets

It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.         

—Si Ben M’hidi, FLN leader

Legality can be inconvenient.            

—French reporter at a news conference, commenting on the methods of torture used by Colonel Mathieu

Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.       

—Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) in 1957, followed by a montage of graphically horrific methods of torture, shown to the music of a Bach organ Prelude 

Often imitated, but never equaled, as bold and raw a film as one is ever likely to see, a thrilling, in-your-face examination of the last bloody vestiges of the French colonial occupation in Algeria in the 1950’s, street by street, house by house, shown with such realism that it resembles a documentary.  This strikingly original Black & White film proves you don’t need a big budget, great actors, or beautiful photography to produce a masterpiece, instead this film relies on precise and meticulous direction which relies on suspenseful storytelling which never lags, using real people and locations and what resembles a hand-held, cinema vérité camera style to lend an extraordinary authenticity to the people inhabiting the streets of the Arab Casbah region of Algiers.  Also noteworthy is the objective balance in getting both sides right, where neither side's conscience survives unscathed, from the exhilaration of the Arab resistance fighters, who rely on terrorist measures in their battle for liberation, including moments of horror when the bombers themselves realize that, by their actions, Arabs would be killed alongside the French, to the French, who express an admiration for the determination of the opposition, yet they rely on their much greater military firepower, turning the region into a police state, but are reduced to using methods of terrorism and torture themselves to counter a largely invisible enemy whose ability to stay united with what seemed like so little was shocking to an established European power that inhabited Algeria for 130 years.  This is Frantz Fanon style filmmaking, as never has there been a more Wretched of the Earth style exposé of the devastating effects of Colonialism, where the Motherland pretends to be paternalistically friendly and helpful while draining the nation’s wealth and resources, continually undermining the colonized citizens with humiliating and demeaning racist depictions, where the colonizer continues to exploit the colonized as second class citizens.  The similarities to Iraq and the Gaza Strip remain powerfully unsettling.  The film was banned in France at the time of its release while winning the Golden Lion as the Best Film of the Venice Film Festival in 1966. 

  

The film remains the seminal work on documenting revolutionary tactics, which includes targeted assassinations of police and bombings in heavily populated European areas, including a truck driver showing early signs of the inclination to become a suicide bomber, while also depicting the anti-terrorist police methods as well, which also include bombings, mass arrests, guarded security check points, and the routine use of torture in interrogation methods.  Wasting no time, the film gets into the heart of the action with an opening segment of torture that could just as easily be from Rossellini's OPEN CITY (1945), leading the French to the hiding place of the last head of the Algerian Resistance movement in 1957 before telling the rest of the story in flashback motif, going backwards in time and showing the earlier meetings of organizing the structure of various militant cells which were designed specifically so that information was spread to as few people as possible, limiting the knowledge that each individual may know while still allowing the entire organization to make strategic strikes.  My guess is that this technique is still used today, which shows how relevant the film really is, offering what amounts to a timeless perspective while actually documenting a specific historical event.  Structurally, the film plays out much like Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925), which shows the mutiny on a Russian battleship and the rallying of the sympathetic masses in 1905 only to lead to their crushing defeat, documenting the preliminary events that led to such outrage that it sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Similarly, Pontecorvo, an Italian Marxist director who commanded the anti-Fascist Milan Resistance in 1943, painstakingly reconstructs actual events that visualizes the birth of Algerian independence, which began as an idea, requiring education of the masses, mobilization of contacts, acts of resistance, and eventually a call to arms.  But the French response was swift and demonstrably harsh, turning Algiers into an occupied police state where citizens could be rousted out of their beds at any time and subject to brutal interrogations, with their leaders targeted for arrest, assassination, or extinction.  The irony, of course, is that some of the heavy handed French police were former Resistance fighters themselves against the Nazi occupation or survivors of the Holocaust.       

Much of the accuracy and rich detail comes from Saadi Yacef, playing Jaffar, who was the actual FLN military chief in 1956 and ‘57, the brains behind the resistance operation until he was captured and sentenced to death, writing his memoirs in prison, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger, published in 1962, the year Algeria obtained their independence, which were used in the making of this movie, where he is also one of the film’s producers.   Yacef was eventually pardoned when Charles De Gaulle returned to power and currently serves as a Senator in the Algerian National Assembly.  One can’t say enough about the sheer artistry in making this film, where the construction of the story and the use of editing is simply outstanding, while the cinematography by Marcello Gatti shooting without a tripod captures the seedy authenticity in a manner that is unrivalled, taking Italian realism to new heights, displaying the vibrancy of the impoverished Arab quarters like its rarely been seen, using all non-professional actors (except for the French Colonel played by Jean Martin, himself a fierce critic of the French occupation), who comprise a multitude of human faces, showing narrow streets that are always crowded and overpopulated, like a labyrinth where the density is unimaginable, with women dressed from head to toe in long, flowing robes, where the French police in their uniforms couldn’t appear more out of place.  Particularly compelling is the integration of sound and music, using the bold percussive sounds of Ennio Morricone to move the action along contrasted against the soft, spiritual sounds of a Bach Passion or an organ Prelude while prisoners are being tortured, also the opening movement of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, which was written to commemorate the eerie calm outside the Palace Square in 1905 before unarmed protestors were massacred by the Tsar, mournful music which is heard as the French are conducting raids to round up Resistance fighters who would later be tortured or killed.  The film retains an impassioned honesty and a no-nonsense sense of outrage using a staggering, newsreel-like authenticity, providing us with a time capsule view of history in the making.  Really, nothing this riveting has ever been made—either before or since.