Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty débuted at the IDFA last fall as the opening night film, and since then, has traveled a bit on the international circuit to various film festivals such as Thessaloniki in Greece in March (where I saw it for the first time), as well as at Hot Docs in Toronto last week (where I saw it a second time, met the director and listened to the post-screening Q&A).
The film, however, for the most part, has played as an art installation in galleries and museums; Dutch artist, Renzo Martens, the creator of the film, considers it a work of art with "connections to documentary film." For Martens, it is the relationship between the viewer and the image that he is most interested in exploring, and in his film, he plays the role of both the artist crafting and extrapolating upon that relationship, while also representing The Every (White) Man, exploiter and consumer of Africa's poverty trade. You can watch the trailer here.
The film embodies the best of pugilistic agitation, radicalizing a particular point of view through a somewhat caustic DIY sensibility. In speaking of the Situationists, Sadie Plant in The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992) says: "The situationists' desire to become psychogeographers, with an understanding of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not on the emotions and behavior of individuals, was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed or subverted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations to the post-spectacular world. . . . it is precisely this concern with the environment in which we live which is ignored."
Modern-day "psychogeographer" Martens has decidedly chosen not to ignore this particular construction, but to utilize it quite conscientiously in his film work and he states that he's doing this quite openly. In 2004, he created his Episode 1, a 45-minute film about his travels to Chechnya in the midst of a brutal war, the film centering on his investigation of what the Chechen and Russians thought of him, a comfortable, self-centered, handsome Northern European artist. In doing so, he stages a compelling and not-so-subtle articulation of why war zones and poverty-stricken places exist; it's precisely because of this self-referential imperative we use as a distancing effect so we can cope with living comfortably on the same planet alongside the people in dire circumstances who won't be comfortable a day in their miserable lives.
In their absurdity and disingenuous manner, these films use the conventions of nonfiction cinema to manipulate attitudes and ideas, as Martens presents himself as both perpetrator/exploiter and documentarian of that exploitation. In speaking of his filmic triptych in a January '09 interview with ArtSlant's Frances Guerin, Martens explains that Episode I and Episode 3 "are the side panels, representing earthly narratives. The centerpiece will focus on divine love . . . . represent[ing] a conversation between two people the topic of which will be love. As such it will offer a deeper solution to the consciousness of exploitation raised in Episode I and Episode 3, a consciousness I do not believe is limited to war and poverty, but is all around us."
I haven't seen Episode I, but I think Episode 3 is extremely sophisticated in its cinematic language and its use of hand-held self-shooting (there's nothing like it when it's done right). Attention was paid to the brutal beauty, the almost pornographic regard we have for images of poverty--starving children, hollowed-out human beings (both physically and emotionally), bloated dead bodies from which the sound of thousands of flies and maggots echo in the air, white photographers gazing through powerful camera lenses at the death and desperation around them, framing everything in a LIFE Magazine glow.
And then there's the sign: a big, fat neon sign that Martens has carried into the middle of the jungle in the Congo so he can piece it together, hang it high, and illuminate it with a gigantic generator. The extended scene (it goes on for several minutes) of the villagers dancing joyfully around the PLEASE ENJOY POVERTY sign, everything lit with a magical blue glow, is one of the most affecting scenes I've seen in a while. You want to laugh; you want to cry; you do neither--that kind of thing. A numbness that is all too familiar since there are organizations and entities that want to inundate us with those images until we really don't take them in anymore, for very specific reasons, foremost of which is making them even richer than they already are. Reaching into your pocket to "help the starving" is the most numbing action of all, I've found.
So I think this film is brilliant, one of the most intelligent ones I've seen. I'm sure Martens would be happy for me to reference alongside this comment that it is akin to Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary that scared me so badly just with its poster alone. Even the exceedingly well-constructed and gorgeously shot, Sergio, which elicited in me such a severe emotional response I was literally choking back my tears for the last 30 minutes of the film, did not haunt my thoughts like this film does. I think that it needs to get out of the rarefied air of the art galleries, Mr. Martens, and into the marrow of your average-Joe or Jane film goer.
The film has just had its national theatrical release in Belgium where Martens resides. I'm sure a few of us can work on a New York screening or two. New Yorkers robustly chew on films like this. And then spit them up at breakfast.
Next and last Hot Docs post: my review of Winnebago Man! From the sublime to the sublime. That's why I like film.
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