48 (93', Portugal 2009) by Susana de Sousa Dias
This film was awarded the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel. Although such seal of approval is no guarantee of the quality of a work of art... this was one of the most moving, well-composed films I saw in the festival.
A 1950s' police photo of a young woman appears on the screen. Black and white print faded into shades of brown and yellow. A solemn face looks straight ahead: not at the audience, but into the light of the projector shining like an interrogation lamp. A "mug shot" of a victim of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal. Soon, a voice begins to speak, recounting details of her imprisonment as they come to her mind, called forth by the photograph. The voice is calm; at times falters. Breathing can be heard, sometimes the sound of swallowed tears. The face on the screen gradually fades until the entire screen is flooded by grey luminosity. Silence. Breathing. Silence and darkness: de Sousa Dias is not afraid to explore those moments of waiting, risking the discomfort of the audience who, as if suddenly conscious of the two senses of captivity, begins to leave*.
Waiting, expectation. The voice may speak again: the story has not been exhausted. Speaking does not bring relief to the survivor; there is no catharsis in truth-telling. Retold, the torment is relived, and telling it now, like withstanding it then in silence, is a duty. There is no completing of the tale.
Out of the darkness of the mute screen, in the exact same place where the other has disappeared, another face emerges. . . .
Hesitant, as if not knowing where to begin, another voice speaks. By careful superposition of tphotographs, the profile of the speaker transforms into an en face shot; the older snapshot is replaced by a more recent one; an older face, ravaged by sleep deprivation, yet gazing with the same impenetrable eyes, grows distinct as the younger face vanishes. Then the face of yet another prisoner appears. The sequence of photographs, far from giving the impression of monotony, unfolds according to a varied rhythm which undoes sequential story-telling. Arranged following the chronological order of arrests, the prisoners’ stories intersect, pick up at arbitrary points, and break off.
Their story has no beginning as it has no end. Like the photographs, the stories are fragments. They say little. Of the lives of the people who tell them, they say nothing. They reveal neither their names nor their origins. They offer snapshots of the victims' captivity and torture. By excluding 'life' - that life which, in tragedy or joy, unfolds outside prison walls; which obeys the laws of desire and chance, or fate; and which is customarily the subject of story-telling, - these narratives offer glimpses into an existence that is the suspension of life, the torment of awaiting, or a “slow death,” as one of the survivors called it. By offering nothing else, they accomplish two things: they uphold the prisoners’ anonymity as one of the tools of resistance against the persecutory machine, itself anonymous, which preyed on any knowledge of a prisoner’s private life; and, by opposing the singularity of the visible face to the namelessness of the terror – doubly invisible because undocumented and perpetuated behind prison walls by faceless agents – the narratives present an essential humanity which goes beyond the act of naming and any so-called facts of life.
De Sousa Dias’s use of archival photographs to construct a film out of still frames, thereby subverting the expectations we have of motion pictures and, at least at first glance, the creative nature of a work, provides a critical commentary on the role of photographic document in our culture. From images from Iraq and Afghanistan to documents of other past and present conflicts, through staged scenes of bloodshed and torture in popular TV series, our daily experience is saturated with representations of violence. De Sousa Dias in effect escapes the cinematic, and shifts the emphasis onto the word. The spoken account seems more effective in breaking down the audience’s capacity for blocking out and isolating themselves from the experience of violence. The living voices of the survivors make the absent images more vividly present than a video stream from a torture chamber. At the same time, the faces frozen in the photographs, by reproducing the prisoners’ refusal to speak and to express suffering in front of their torturers, place the audience in an ambivalent, and hence uncomfortable position: at once that of a witness and that of an interrogator. The viewer has a clear sense of being watched in turn.
What is asked of us is perhaps memory. We wish to know each face and each word by heart – and fails. Each story recounts similar events, and each prisoner is posed in the exactly same manner, staring straight ahead, with his or her head stabilized by a metal brace. The photographs, as well as the stories, are as much testimonies as they are documents of forgetting. The face is a mask: one of the survivor repeats emphatically that “even if they took all their clothes off, they would still be in disguise”. The present-day speakers do not recognize themselves in the photographs; many of them cannot recall the occasion on which these “identification photos” were taken. The mutual exclusion of ‘life’ and ‘prison existence’ is acutely felt. The two are in a reciprocal relation of remembering and forgetting. The unseen survivor speaks in the place of the prisoner who remains silent.
One of the prisoners recounts a curious incident. For a number of years, he received visits from his family and watched his little daughter grow up from behind bars. In the last years of the regime, the prison rules had relaxed slightly, and for the first time the prisoners were allowed to be in the same room with their family. The little girl burst into tears at the sight of her father: having always seen only his torso (i.e. as much as is shown in a police photograph), she had assumed he had no legs.
The police photographs were developed in pairs: en face and profile on the same print. As a result, the two shots are often separated by a dark vertical bar, and, as one photograph is shown centered on the screen, a part of the adjacent shot is also visible. In a series of cuts and frames, the photographs become metaphors for prison cells and for mutilation, literal and symbolic, suffered by the prisoners.
There is one photograph among the sequence of faces that gaze sternly at the flash: an eighteen-year-old girl, photographed in the same position as everyone else, is smiling. Wearing a simple knit sweater, her face framed by her curly straw-colored hair, she just smiles. The voice of the woman she had now become disavows that smile, is ashamed of it, of its naiveté in the face of horror. She explains that she was proud to be arrested since, until then, she had been the only one in her family without a police dossier. The photograph has a life of its own, independent of the interpretation. The smile, foolish as it may be, is an incongruous burst of beauty, an involuntary expression of freedom.
Notes______________
* I insist on noting the behavior of the audience, not because I wish to question or analyze the value judgment implicit in their exodus, but because I see their reaction as an extension of the film.
RELATED LINKS:
Personal website of Antonio & Susana de Sousa Dias
A page from the Cinéma du réel blog with a clip from the movie
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