Sherpa (2016)

Phurba Tasha Sherpa has summited (i.e. climbed to the peak of) Mt Everest 22 times.  The Sherpas are a Nepali ethnic group who provide porters and guides for the Everest-climbing industry, a major branch of Nepali tourism.  Climbing Mt Everest was a man-on-the-moon achievement when Tenzing Sherpa and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first to reach the peak in 1953, but since then more than 4000 people have summited successfully and more than 250 people are known to have died in the attempt.

Jennifer Peedom, who had already made short documentaries about Everest, set out to make a film about Phurba’s record-breaking twenty-third climb, while showing the Sherpa’s economic dependency on this hazardous venture and their economic exploitation by the tour companies and the Nepali government.

Each adventure-tourist pays upward of $60,000 to climb the mountain, and the Sherpas are paid $5000 for the two-month climbing season.  In the 2013 season there was a violent clash between climbers and Sherpas triggered by a climber abusing a Sherpa, but clearly reflecting deeper tensions.  Peedom says her decision to make Sherpa was in response to this event.

The Sherpas carry massive loads each season to establish the Base Camp and then carry more loads up the Khumbu Icefall to set up Camp 1.  The Icefall is a steep slope of big ice chunks with large gaps that have to be crossed using aluminium ladders.

The Khumbu Icefall

It is difficult and dangerous; time-lapse photography reveals that the Icefall is in fact an ice river flowing slowly down the mountain.  The climb is gruelling, nerve-wracking and occasionally fatal.  In any climbing season Sherpas carry heavy loads and guide climbers up the Icefall as much as thirty times.

Peedom presents many viewpoints in the film – tour managers, climbers, and Sherpas – but we are clearly led to take the Sherpas’ viewpoint, and there is a fundamental disjunction between their view of the mountain and the climbers’. The Buddhist Sherpas call Everest “Chomolungma” (Mother of the World).  The same mountain they venerate is regarded by the climbers as a personal challenge, something to be “conquered”.  One climber making his second attempt to summit speaks of wanting to create a “legacy” for his grandchildren.

One shot of a long line of climbers shuffling up the mountain recalled to me a similar ant-like line of tourists climbing Uluru, “conquering” a rock that is sacred to the local indigenous people, an enterprise that is likewise not without its dangers.

Whether in search of a legacy, bragging rights or a dramatic selfie, modern climbers don’t have to endure the same privations experienced by Hillary and Tenzing.  The Sherpas lug a flat-screen TV up to Base Camp, and each morning wake the climbers in their tents with hot towels and tea.

Peedom set out to make a post-colonialist documentary, respectful to the Sherpas, with  mildly satirical attitude to the climbers and apparently, from the early shooting, not critical of the tour operators.  Everest itself was to be the true star, beautifully photographed by Renan Ozturk.  Then something happened that radically altered the film’s direction.

A massive block of ice broke off and fell on a party climbing the Icefall, killing sixteen Sherpas.  The bodies were brought down, some by helicopter, but in the aftermath the jolly little village that is the base camp falls apart.  The Sherpas hold a meeting; they want to abandon the season out of respect for the dead, and they also protest their working conditions.  The tour operators want the season to continue and claim that some Sherpas are forcing the others to refuse to climb with threats of breaking their legs.  This story gets traction with some climbers, who see it as a form of terrorism.  Phurba tells Peedom that he’s not aware of any such threat.  Tibetan government officials fly in to address the Sherpas, expressing their sympathy and urging the Sherpas to get back to work.  They carefully make no promises in what is plainly an attempt to protect the substantial government income threatened by the abandonment of the season.

One climber, indignant at losing his expensive chance to conquer something vey big, asks of the Sherpas, “Who owns them?”  A question worth reflecting upon.

Life, and Nothing More … (1992)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.

In 1987 Kiarostami made Where is my Friend’s Home?, a story about two young boys set in the remote Iranian village of Koker.  The cast, including the boys, were all local villagers.  In 1990 a massive earthquake in the same region killed 30,000 people, and Kiarostami set off to discover what had happened to the boys.  Life, and Nothing More … is the film he made about this journey, a road trip by the director of Where is my Friend’s Home? and his son  – and though these two are played by actors, the trip takes us through the actual disaster zone.  In effect, it is a docudrama in which the director creates himself as a character.

The first half of the film depicts the slow, difficult trip along a highway choked with cars, lorries, moving equipment and rescue vehicles, through one devastated village after another.  We see the driver and his son in closeup, from inside the car or through the windshield.  We see crumbled buildings and people searching for victims and clearing up the debris, mostly filmed from inside the car.  The audience is anchored in the car, hearing the conversation between the man and his son and his questioning of villagers and officials about the state of the roads ahead.  Perhaps this is not the route to Koker, perhaps it is the route but impassable – but the driver persists.  The filming of this section is strongly reminiscent of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954) with its semi-documentary scenes of actors driving through real streets, alternating between shots of the actors in the car and ordinary street scenes shot from the car.

The driver asks people by the road if they know anything of the boys he is seeking.  He shows them a photo on a movie poster; he’s from Tehran, the poster is in French, and he’s searching for two boys in a district where many thousands of dead are still being dug out of the rubble.

Finally, they leave the highway and attempt to reach the village by rough backroads, mostly deserted apart from occasional pedestrians carrying various bundles and items salvaged from the ruins of their homes.  No longer hemmed in by other vehicles, the camera gives us the driver’s view through the windscreen and we see the bare, rocky landscape of northern Iran.  The people they meet are courteous and helpful, yet is is obvious that the driver and his son are from a different world – the urban middle-class in the midst of the rural poor.  Eventually, they reach a village in which part of the first film was shot, not far from Koker.  The villagers are trying to carry on in the ruins, rescuing utensils, clothes and furnishings from what remains of their homes.

They meet an old man who played a character in Where is my Friend’s Home?, and he shows them a house – “that was my house in the movie” –  and observes that his own house is in ruins.  It’s better not to contemplate the intertextuality here – a real person who acted a character in another film is talking to an actor playing the part of the actual director of both films, and they are playing this scene amongst real devastation.

The son, who knows nothing of village life, clambers amongst the ruins: “Dad, what is this?” “A hearth.”  “And this?” “An oven”.  For the son, it’s all an adventure, the human significance of what has happened is simply beyond his comprehension.  The father is determined to press on with his search, but he also tries to comprehend the effect the quake has had on the villagers.

He meets Hosein, a young man who has just been married, a few days after the quake.  Hosein says that he had sixty-five relatives die under the rubble, but he and his fiancée decided to cut short the traditional mourning and marry.  They slept three nights under plastic sheeting and have now moved into a partially ruined house.  They want to go ahead and have children – who knows if they will survive the next quake?  Better to get on with it.

The driver and his son continue, hoping to reach Koker.  Unexpectedly, they encounter one of the boys they are seeking, walking along the road.  He had been watching a World Cup match on television when the quake hit, and most of his family had escaped.  They give him a lift to a temporary camp where survivors are staying.  Men are putting up a TV aerial so that the survivors can watch the World Cup.  The boy gets out and the driver’s son asks to stay to watch the match; since they are only a few kilometres from Koker, the driverr agrees and drives on alone.

Kiarostami is a poet of roads. The director/driver is already travelling the road when the film starts, and is still travelling at the end.  The origin and the goal are purely notional, ideas that provide a frame for the film – but the road is the film.

“The road is the illustration of the soul that has no peace.” (Kiarostami).

Finally, the director is driving alone the last few kilometres to Koker.  We have seen him drive on the choked highway, filmed claustrophobically in his battered yellow car, then on increasingly rough backroads, no longer threatened by traffic but battling the rough roads themselves.  Now in the final, almost wordless sequence, he is struggling up a steep mountain road, trying to maintain traction.  In extreme long-shot the car enters frame from the right on a level stretch, then turns to climb a steep grade.  Near the top it loses traction and slips back a few metres.  Again it climbs almost to the top, then slips and slowly rolls back to the bottom of the slope and stalls.  A man carrying a bundle enters the frame and offers to help push the car, which starts and leaves the frame the way it entered.  The camera follows the man with the bundle as he steadily climbs the hill to the top and turns onto a flatter stretch leading out of frame to the left.  The camera pulls back to extreme long-shot and the car re-enters the frame, this time climbing all the way to the top and turning left along the road to Koker.  It passes the pedestrian, then stops and picks him up and proceeds towards Koker as the film ends.  This almost Sisyphean sequence elegantly encapsulates the spirit of the movie.

The Act of Killing (2013)

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer.

Anwar Congo, the executioner, is a tall, almost elegant man who talks cheerfully about his technique for killing communists.  Clubbing them to death spilled too much blood and the smell became unbearable, so he developed a method of garrotting with piano wire that created far less mess and increased productivity.

He is one of a group of men who took part in the killing of about 40,000 people in Northern Sumatra in 1965-66, most of the victims either Chinese or members of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party), part of a nation-wide bloodbath in which between 500,000 and on million people were murdered.  When Joshua Oppenheimer approached them to record their stories, they agreed to make a film recreating their actions, with Oppenheimer’s help.

Which sounds a little strange, but not as strange as it becomes.  Anwar and a colleague, the enormously fat Herman Kato, gangster and paramilitary, take a gaggle of paramilitarys to recruit extras for a scene about the destruction of a village:

As lovers of Hollywood movies and the Indonesian equivalent of Bollywood, their movie incorporates elements of westerns, film noir and utterly bizarre musical numbers.  Herman likes to dress up in Carmen Miranda drag, weird enough in musical numbers but positively Père Ubu when he wears the same costume while reenacting a garrotting, with Anwar playing the victim.

In one “re-creation” Anwar, Herman and Adi – another gangster-killer – cast the son of one of their original victims as the victim.  He tries to play the part, as these are still powerful, dangerous men, but he becomes distressed as the scene unfolds.

As the film unfolds, Anwar comes to express doubt about the part he played, a doubt not shared by Adi:

Given that Anwar is an inveterate play-actor and narcissist, it’s hard to say whether he has any real misgivings about his murders or is simply acting the guilty man to comply with his understanding of Oppenheimer’s documentary intentions.

As members of criminal gangs, closely associated with paramilitary organisations, politicians, the military and the police, these are men of substance, and their gory past is treated as a regrettably necessary elimination of a political opposition.  In their own eyes they are heroes;  Anwar is John Wayne, using techniques derived from gangster movies.  Men who fantasised themselves as movie heroes while committing real murders now make the movie they previously imagined.  And seeing this, it’s impossible not to feel an attraction to these monsters.  In making us see theses men as attractive, vital human beings while also feeling  repugnance at their actions, Oppenheimer has created a genuinely absurdist documentary.

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

Directed by Malik Bendjelloul.

“Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story” – Forster.

In apartheid-era South Africa, the songs of an obscure American singer-songwriter became popular with young whites opposed to apartheid.  Albums cut in the early seventies by Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit musician, began to circulate to an ever-widening audience.  In 1991 his music was issued on CD; by this time he was a cult figure in South Africa, although virtually nothing was known about him.  He was believed to be dead, possibly having committed suicide at a performance by shooting himself or setting himself on fire.

In 1998 one of Rodriguez’ daughters came across a South African tribute website and contacted the site authors to tell them that her father was alive and earning a living in Detroit as a construction worker.  Searching for Sugar Man tells this story, and shows his subsequent triumphant tour of South Africa.

The film begins with interview footage of South Africans speaking about the impact Rodriguez’s music had when it was first available there, intercut with footage of anti-apartheid demonstrations.  Albums by Rodriguez appeared and spoke to a young generation of South AFrican whites much as Dylan did to the sixties generation.  At the same time the rumours of his death spread, and the film retails them without comment.  How did the living man not know of his fame?  An interview with a belligerently defensive American record company executive doesn’t say, but clearly implies, that South African royalties were simply not passed on.

A South African learns fortuitously that the singer is still alive, and the film details Rodriguez’s life in obscurity, a construction worker and working class activist, liked and admired by colleagues who knew nothing of his music. Interview footage from SA and America is interspersed with long tracking shots of Rodriguez walking through the streets of Detroit, a hyperreal landscape of a decaying city.

The latter part of the film consists mainly of interviews with Rodriguez, his daughters and his fans, intercut with footage of his triumphant 1998 South African tour.

Malik Bendjelloul says of the film:  “It’s a fairy tale, it’s a man who didn’t know he was famous, a man who was living for forty years and then like Cinderella one day … the life that you live was not the truth… but in South Africa, you were a king.”

Of course Bendjelloul plays up the Cinderella storyline, holding back the revelation that Rodriguez is not dead until well into the film.  But he also embellishes the “Detroit Cinderella” line by omitting the fact that Rodriguez was also popular in Australia and New Zealand, and had successful tours in Australia in 1979 and 1981.  His obscurity is exaggerated for the purpose of strengthening the storyline.

One can’t object.  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend