Tell me Lies About Vietnam (1989)

Inter-Arts 9 (1989)

Tell me Lies About Vietnam: Cultural Battles for the Meaning of the War, edited by Alf Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh. For the F.V.A.C. Research Group, Open University Press (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia) 1988. xiv + 217pp., £27.50 hardback, £9.95 paperback.

Tell me Lies About Vietnam (1988)

As against specialist analyses ... we wished to explore a range of discourses, some of which have so far received scant attention (hence our concern for visual and aural as well as exclusively verbal modes – for cartoons, comics, songs and films as well as poetry and the novel). This range inevitably means that the collection offers sample studies, test cases and work-in-progress rather than the definitive scholarly last word. [‘Preface’, p.xii.]

This passage from the editors’ preface to the latest collection of ‘revisionist’ essays about Vietnam encapsulates both the virtues and vices of their book. On the one hand, many of the contributions are excellent and intriguing (notably the essays by the editors themselves –their joint introduction, Alf Louvre’s ‘The Reluctant Historians: Mailer and Sontag as Culture Critics’, and Jeffrey Walsh’s ‘First Blood to Rambo: A Textual Analysis’). On the other hand, there is a basic unclearness about the aims of the project, imperfectly masked by critical rhetoric (‘visual and aural as well as exclusively verbal modes’), which has resulted in the inclusion of many flawed and tendentious pieces – above all, Antony Easthope’s ‘Realism and Its Subversion: Hollywood and Vietnam’, which succeeds in turning a potentially fascinating subject into a babel of conflicting jargons. Easthope’s description of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now is perhaps the clearest example of this: “From its start in the hotel room where Willard, punching his image in a mirror, tries to break out of a close dyadic world of self on self, the man is always in search of a symbolic position outside himself with whom he can identify” (p.41).

The trouble with this sort of statement is that, leaving aside its potential status as self-parody, it actually serves to obscure Easthope’s argument rather than advancing it. One ends up knowing less about the film than when one started, with the dubious privilege of assenting to such judgements as “Every film of the [Vietnam] period, then, contains an implicit, sub-textual reference to the war (how could it not?” (p.34). How, indeed? How, to take the argument a little further, could it not contain a reference to the Second World War – or to Edison’s invention of the moving-picture camera? It is not that Easthope’s statements are in themselves foolish or wrong (indeed, his central point, that the successive waves of Vietnam films to date have played a more important role in echoing the various stages in the American public’s perception of the war, than in portraying its actual character, is a good one) – rather, it is that in overstating his points, and introducing random critical sophistications from other genres (such as Beckett’s definition of the ‘three laughs’, which reads even in context as a pointless distinction) he manages to discredit his own theoretical enterprise.

Even some of the best essays in the collection lapse occasionally into portentous assertions which serve to damage a carefully presented case (James Aulich’s ‘Cartoon Representatives of the Vietnam War in the British Press’ is a case in point). The book’s undoubted successes, by contrast, lie in encouraging a closer scrutiny of the ‘range of discourses’ which have so far lain outside the field of Academic criticism. David Huxley’s entertaining account of the response of American war comics to Vietnam is perhaps the best of these, but W.D. Ehrhart on the poetry of the war, Jeffrey Fenn on the dramatic response, and Robert Hamilton on British photojournalism also deserve mention.

The question of the scope of their book is, of course, addressed by the editors in the statement I have quoted above (‘sample studies, test cases and work-in-progress’) – but unfortunately the ideological presuppositions about Vietnam’s importance, which they share with the majority of their contributors, mean that this ‘tentativeness’ is often a mask for a deeper consensus on the ways in which the war has been falsified in most of our channels of communication. (A consensus, what is more, which they have explicitly absolved themselves from justifying, since they are not providing the ‘definitive scholarly last word’.) This does not seem to me a fatal objection to the work (by and large, I must admit, I am in accord with their ideological bias) – but it certainly illuminates the dangers of assuming that your case has been proved when in fact you have done nothing but present a set of materials that might, some day, contribute to such a solution.

As John Storey entertainingly puts it in his essay ‘Rockin’ Hegemony’, about the response of rock music to the war; ‘What I mean is this: the fact that Country Joe and the Fish sang songs against the war was enough to make all their songs seem implicitly against the war” (p. l88). What I mean is this – the fact that one has compiled and classified a series of responses to Vietnam in different media does not add up to a consistent view from which one can generalize. The war was ‘appropriated’ by various Interest groups – and (as is common in such cases) it is now impossible to disentangle what was appropriation and what was reality, but the infinite suffering and death that was inflicted on Indo-China by the Americans and their allies seems to me to be a fact which somewhat outweighs the importance, in the final analysis, of yet another spate of Narcissistic films and books about ‘the end of American innocence’. The virtues of this book lie in its particularity – its emphasis on individual artists (Ralph Steadman, Tim Page, Susan Sontag) and popular media (cartoons, comic books, rock music). Its errors reside in the assumption that some over-view of the falsification of the war can be deduced from all this – an attitude which is, in itself, as dangerous a ‘lie’ about Vietnam as any of those which the contributors expose.

(8/89)

Inter-Arts: A Quarterly Journal of Cultural Connections 9 (1989): 31.

[1000 wds]


Inter-Arts 9 (1989)


•

Mythologies on Stage (1988)

Inter-Arts 7 (1988)

Mythologies on Stage

The Mahabharata, written by Jean-Claude Carrière, translated and directed by Peter Brook, designed by Chloe Obolensky, performed by the Centre Internationale de Créations Théâtrales (Glasgow, 13 April-17 May, 1988)

[Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1988)]

‘All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Tolstoy). If for families one reads ‘reviews’ and for happy one reads ‘favourable’, a little of the dilemma of reviewing the Mahabharata after the shower of praise that has been heaped upon it becomes apparent. Essentially I must count myself in agreement with the statements about its being ‘one of the theatrical events of this century’ and an extraordinary act of cultural embassy’ – but, having said that, I cannot help feeling that there are still some qualifications to be made, Just how does it achieve this effect, for example? In what sense is it ‘epic’? – Through its portentousness, or through its fidelity to Brechtian notions of theatre? One would have to be a very trusting person to accept the plaudits at face value without actually seeing the show.

Perhaps the easiest way of delineating what it is that makes this play (or, rather, series of plays) unique is to compare it with earlier attempts to encompass an entire mythology on the stage – and since a comparison with Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen was inevitable sooner or later, we might best begin our analysis there.

It has been stated (I do not know with how much authority) that Wagner’s great operas virtually always come off when they are performed at Bayreuth, and virtually never when they are performed elsewhere. I never saw the quarry at Avignon where the Mahabharara began its life, but I can state that the Old Glasgow Transport Museum won half the battle for the English version before the play had even begun. It was not just that the setting was so fruitfully bizarre – though the vast zeppelin hangar of a building, with its tiny wicket-gate of an entrance, immediately started one thinking in terms of the ‘elect’ who had been let in, and the rest of the people (symbolised by the traffic held back by the omnipresent police cones and barriers) who had not booked in time, and must therefore be excluded. We all know the story that hearing the original epic read right through guarantees one salvation, and there was a certain sense that watching the play right through might go some way towards accomplishing the same objective. Inside the building, too, the atmosphere was relaxed but somehow reverent – one could see members of the cast determinedly ‘mingling’ with the audience, and I for one saluted the gesture, but I didn’t dare to approach them myself. Somehow, the fact that almost all of them were simultaneously memorialised in a little gallery of carefully posed black-and-white photographs made one regard them as, in a sense, living works of art – and all good Westerners know that such things are to be treated with respect, not familiarity.

This false reverence soon wore off when one went inside the theatre, though – and this highlights one of its most significant divergences from Wagner and the nineteenth-century gigantesque. The stage set was, it is true, rather impressively strange: a mud floor with a small pond imbedded in it (I heard someone speculate that this was supposed to represent ‘all the oceans of the world’). The walls were the original brick of the museum, complete with grime and iron staples (used as rungs at various points in the action), and there was even a stream at the back. Rather than being used to overawe the spectators, however (as at Bayreuth), the good humour and low-key nature of the play were made obvious from the first – with the elephant-headed god Ganesha entering exactly on cue as Vyasa, the author of the poem, is announcing that he needs a scribe to write down his words (‘Rumour has it that you’re looking for a scribe for the Poetical History of Mankind’).

Admittedly, like the rest of the play-script (from which I am quoting) this fails a little flat without the accompanying gestures and tones of voice – but it was, somehow, exquisitely comic. Nor did this easy domination of the audience relax at all through A Game of Chess, the first three-hour play, devoted mainly to introducing the various groups of characters: Krishna, the Pandavas, their enemies Duryodhana and Duhsasana, and the two tutors Bhishma and Drona. Brook’s indebtedness to the Brechtian ‘epic theatre’ tradition was nowhere more apparent than in this section of the play: doubling of roles, assumption of masks, stylised settings (the mud floor had, at various times, to stand for a palace, a forest, a desert, the Himalayas, a battlefield, and even Heaven and Hell) – with, of course, a complex moral fable to be considered. To be sure, Brook follows Brecht’s practice more than his theory – as in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the effect is to encourage more complex identification with the protagonists rather than truly to ‘alienate’ us. And yet it was observable that as time went on even this initial distancing (conveyed in Brook’s terms by Brechtian irony rather than Wagnerian ‘sublimity’) began to relax into a more human appreciation. As the Pandavas, the half-divine cousins, became familiar, so did their emotions and moods become a subject for compassion rather than laughter. Indeed, it was this that astonished me most as I watched the play over three evenings – the first play seemed to set a tone familiar from modern theatre groups generally when they set out to dramatise history or legend; the second play (Exile in the Forest) was more static, with psychology beginning to penetrate the melodrama; the third play, however, (The War) built upon the familiar scaffolding of these first two to enter a new realm of representation: a sort of apocalyptic tragi-comedy (in the Shakespearean sense. As a devotee of the late Romances, I found myself reminded, as I watched, of the Winter’s Tale or Pericles – but in this ease it was a Pericles that worked: that fulfilled its promise as the most poetic of all Shakespeare’s plays.

To sum up, then – without wishing to type Peter Brook’s play as representative of any tradition except his own, I can best convey my impression of it by describing it in terms of other versions of myth in the theatre. From Wagner, Brook has taken a sense of deepening intensities: the successive musical and dramatic climaxes of each act building up to a single climactic moment of insight (the Good Friday music in Parsifal, Siegfried’s Funeral March in Götterdammerung). He has, however, rejected Wagner’s intimidation of the audience – his attempt to hypnotise them into participating in a wholly instinctive and emotional (and therefore politically suspect) ritual. From Brecht, he (like other modern directors) has taken over the spirit, rather than the letter, of ‘epic theatre’. As with Brecht’s Galileo or Azdak, he creates protagonists whom we identify with even as we question their actions – not so much alienation, as comprehension and empathy. Brecht, of course, is also significant for prompting a return to the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and it is here that Brook seems to have learnt most. The Mahabharata is not at all like his Lear or Midsummer Night’s Dream in its style of production – but it does have something of the mood and completeness, the prevailing tone of reconciliation through adversity, of Shakespeare’s extraordinary final plays.

Some have seen the play as an allegory of man in the twentieth century – complete with ‘sacred weapons’ that can destroy and scorch the earth – and certainly this interpretation is left open to us; but I prefer to see it in more humane, less doctrinaire terms, as:

Assuming man’s infirmities,
To glad your ear, and please your eyes

An epic fable brought down, like the god man Krishna, to the level of the human.

(8/88)

Inter-Arts: A Quarterly Journal of Cultural Connections 7 (1988): 27.

[1310 wds]


Inter-Arts 7 (1988)


•

South America in Recent British Cinema (1988)

[Inter-Arts 7 (1988)]

Views of South America
in Recent British Cinema

Moonraker, dir. Lewis Gilbert (UK, 1979) – starring Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale and Richard Kiel.

The Emerald Forest, dir. John Boorman (UK, 1985) – starring Charley Boorman, Powers Boothe and Meg Foster.

The Mission, dir. Roland Joffé (UK, 1986) – starring Jeremy Irons, Robert de Niro and Ray McAnally.

A Handful of Dust, dir. Charles Sturridge (UK, 1988) – starring James Wilby, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Rupert Graves and Alec Guinness.

[Charles Sturridge, dir.: A Handful of Dust (1988)]

The scene with which Charles Sturridge’s latest film A Handful of Dust begins is interesting for a number of reasons, two of which seem immediately germane to the subject of this article. The first is the fact that it does not occur at all in the novel by Evelyn Waugh on which the screenplay is based. (And, parenthetically, one may further remark that Sturridge himself has said that he put it in partly because he could not bear to open another 1930’s period film with yet another panoramic shot of a country house; and partly because it seemed the best way to introduce the theme of South American savagery asserted throughout by the use of pan-pipes in the music, and, towards the end, by artful intercutting between the ‘jungle’ of society and the rain-forests of Brazil).

The second reason is the content of the scene itself. It starts with a long panning shot of jungle. glimpsed through prevailing mist, and then focuses on a small pool shielded by rocks in front of a waterfall. The hero, Tony Last (James Wilby) is then seen diving – with considerable skill –into the midst of this pool. As he comes to the surface we see him register the presence, sitting on the rocks, of a young woman clad in white. ‘A hallucination’, we confidently deduce, bearing in mind the setting and the fact that all she is wearing is a frilly dressing-gown. Their subsequent conversation hears out this impression, conducted as it is on a level of considerable intimacy, yet with no reference to the context in which they find themselves. ‘Are you in love?’ he asks her. ‘I think so,’ she replies.

This scene might be seen as containing in embryo all the essential elements of British (as opposed to American, Latin American, or even European) cinematic views of South America. For a start, it is sensuously appealing to a very striking degree – it effectively screens out the oppressive heat and insects which accompany such scenes in reality (unlike, say, Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath of God) – and the vision of the young woman (subsequently to be revealed as Brenda, Tony Last’s estranged wife) introduces a mystical rather than a threatening mood. It also plays a structural role in the film which might be summed up as ‘the Old World tried against the standards of the New’ – and in this case the counterpointing is very exactly accomplished: Hetton, Tony’s country estate, is a compendium of natural beauty, complete with foxes and forelock-tugging peasantry, but all this serves as a screen rather than an expression of the real forces (lust, snobbery and avarice) that animate society. In South America, on the other hand, things appear as they are – nature is beautiful still, but dangerous rather than comforting (Tony’s companion is drowned by a waterfall like the one in the first scene); the foxes and other animals have become mechanical mice, designed to placate the natives, but succeeding only in scaring them away; while the peasantry have become the cowed peons (or ‘children’ – literally) of Mr Todd (Alec Guinness), the old Dickensian despot of the jungle.

In effect, then, the conventional props of ‘Latin America’ – jungle, floppy sombreros, downtrodden natives – are here used as an integral part of the theme, instead of being a mere backdrop as in so many Hollywood films (even the otherwise excellent Romancing the Stone (U.S.A., 1984)). The reality of South America may still remain beyond the film-maker’s grasp, but this relatively sensitive employment of the clichés associated with it reminds us that as a literary conceit, a collection of idees reçues, ‘South America’ has a long and illustrious history in European thought.

Confining ourselves to the portion of the tradi¬tion relevant to film, it might be as well at this stage to attempt to distinguish between the various strands of cinema mentioned above –British, American, European, and Latin-American. Latin-American cinema can be seen to be both independent from, and a deliberate rejection of what might be lumped together as ‘Western’ images of South America. The independence is shown by the strongly regional concerns voiced by each national film-industry – the corruption and despair of modern urban life in Brazilian productions like Pixote (1981) and Hour of the Star (1985); the radical preoccupations of Cuban-funded films such as Alsino and the Condor (Nicaragua, 1982) or Tupac Amaru (Peru, 1985); even the attempts at interface with the ‘Boom’ in Spanish-American fiction: Eréndira (Mexico, 1983), Time to Die (Colombia, 1985), and Kiss of the Spider Woman (Brazil/U.S.A., 1985), based, respectively, on works by Gabriel García Márquez and Manuel Puig. The rejection lies principally in a refusal to echo European film¬makers’ desire to see South America as a sort of exemplary landscape – a country of the soul, in which each landscape feature becomes significant. In this respect, one is perhaps correct in adopting the reversed paternalistic (or ‘infantilistic’) attitude that European views of a culture are invariably imperialist distortion, while indigenous attitudes embody a deeper and richer response.

Having said this, though, there is undoubtedly much interest in seeing precisely now the west does view (and distort) South America in its film-making, especially if some consistency and continuity can be teased out of it. And, for better or worse, that is the subject of this article. Politically suspect many of these films may be, but the naiveté of some of their social attitudes is not matched by the subtlety of their inner myths. The exemplary modern film in this respect is Werner Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath of God (West Germany, 1972). Ostensibly the story of a group of Conquistadors who go astray while looking for ‘El Dorado’, and instead succeed in conquering an endless expanse of swamp and hostile jungle, it is in fact a prolonged meditation on the futility of human existence – complete with examples of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ at its most absurd (a group of starving men drifting on a raft are content to watch their loutish Emperor claim the land that looms up on either side: ‘Every day we drift my realm becomes larger. Already it is bigger than France and Spain together’). This film has been very influential in inspiring directors to attempt similar ‘mythologising’ of South America – but the comparative lack of success of its successor Fitzcarraldo (West Germany, 1982), as well as the immense logistic difficulties associated with its production, imply that this fatalistic, almost saga-like reading of South America may be too much of a purgatory for film-makers, let alone their imaginary protagonists. The ‘Continental’ school continues to use Latin America as a setting however: Herzog returned there briefly for Cobra Verde (West Germany, 1987) recently – and we have also had the spectacle of Francesco Rosi’s big-budget adaptation of García Márquez’s laconic Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Italy/France/Colombia, 1987).

Differentiating this class of film from the efforts of British film-makers is more for convenience than real taxonomic need (though there are, to be sure, distinctions to be drawn – the British films seem more concerned with the aesthetic frisson to be derived from landscape than with existential imperatives), but this is not the case with American films about the region. If we take out those specifically concerned with Mexico (extensions of the Western), we are left with a few clear categories which hardly match at all the post-Aguirre perceptions of European directors. There are, for example:

1. Political Films – these tend, of course, to be about the United States involvement in Central America, and consist of a series of variations on the ‘ugly American’ theme. Examples include: Missing (1982), Costa-Gavras’ film about right-wing oppression in Chile; Under Fire (1983), a rather naive film about the Nicaraguan revolution; El Norte (1983), a rather more ‘human’ view of the region; and, the exemplary film in this grouping, Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986), a really horrifying picture of the ambiguities of war-journalism in an unreported war.


2. Exploitative Comedies – drawing on the Hollywood ‘Latin-American craze’ of the 1940’s (which spawned such works as Flying Down to Rio (1933), Gilda (1946), Road to Rio (1947), and the films of Carmen Miranda and Yma Sumac), one might mention: Bananas (1971), an example of the sort of film that Woody Allen thankfully no longer makes; Blame it on Rio (1984), where Michael Caine is seduced by the attractions of Carnival; and Romancing the Stone (1984), where the clichés of romantic comedy are subjected to as amusing an analysis as is possible without transgressing the rules of the genre (this last film is also remarkable for its recognition of the formulaic nature of most cinematic references to Latin-American manners and mores – as is instanced by the scene in which Kathleen Turner wakes up on a bus surrounded by fat peasant women nursing pigs in their arms.)


3. Literary Adaptations – these, depending on how faithful they are to the book in question, also constitute a sort of tradition: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Under the Volcano (1984) are both exclusively concerned with Mexico, and therefore outside our scope – but The Honorary Consul (1984) is set in Argentina, while The Mosquito Coast (1986) attempts to do a sort of Aguirre for Honduras (but succeeds only in turning into a black comic Swiss Family Robinson.)

Aside from accidental ‘sports’ such as Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) (an attempt to impose drug-culture aesthetics on Peru) or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Rambo-like Predator, these three categories comprise most of the recent American films about South America, and confirm what one originally suspected – that ‘South America’ has a more particular significance for inhabitants of the Old World than the United States.

[Lewis Gilbert, dir.: Moonraker (1979)]

To return, then, to our ‘British’ tradition of films about South America – the first, Moonraker, can be used almost as a ground-zero level against which to measure thematic subtleties. The James Bond films have always been noted for their more-or-less amiable exploitation of women and natives (often simultaneously), and the scenes from Rio’s Carnival in this film are no exception. What is notable is how tired and uninventive they are. One has only to compare the efforts of the Moonraker team with the fresh and vivid view of Copacabana beach in Hector Babenco’s Pixote to realise that the former is the sort of film that requires falsity in order to function. The basic postulates of the plot (an evil genius who intends to breed a new, genetically perfect race in Outer Space – while destroying the rest of mankind) are so absurd that they cannot afford to compete even with the modest attractions of well-filmed jungle or seaside. Just a few moments of honest or insightful camera-work or acting, and the whole edifice would collapse in ruins. Luckily Broccoli and his production crew are equal to the challenge – managing to concoct such memorable absurdities as a set of Guatemalan temples in the middle of the Amazon rain-forest, and even a complete ‘secret headquarters’ in the Andes (how these got to the coast of Brazil it is hard to know) staffed by men in ponchos and karate-chopping monks. The temples prove to be the evil Hugo Drax’s hideout – but the sole justification for seeing this film as being in any sort of tradition is the fact that Bond is lured inside them by a mysterious Rima-like female, who immediately abandons him to be eaten by a giant snake.

‘Mysterious women’ are, to be sure, perhaps the most prevalent of all Romantic archetypes –from Rider Haggard’s She to the Sphinx of Gustave Moreau – but anyone who is at all familiar with the iconography of South America in English literature will realise that bird-women and snake-women are, to say the least, recurrent features. Rima, in W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, is the most obvious example, seconded by the saintly women of Conrad and Masefield – and (on the snake side) the witches in Hudson’s ‘Pelino Viera’s Confession’ and The Purple Land. Brenda Last, then, can be seen to be in a long line of heroines – as can Cherie Lunghi as the fatal, divisive woman in The Mission, or even the Indian girl Kachiri in The Emerald Forest.

[John Boorman, dir.: The Emerald Forest (1985)]

After Moonraker had set the precedent, the next British film to go on location in Brazil was John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest. Since Boorman has published his own diary of the shooting, we can note the immense amounts of preparation and care that went into this attempt at a ‘moving human story’. Not only did Boorman visit a tribal Shaman and spend days being initiated into the mysteries, but he also devoted an unprecedentedly long time to rehearsing and co-ordinating his native extras. Unfortunately, the fact that he had been let into the country so easily mainly because of the huge local success of Excalibur, his retelling of the Arthurian legend, proved prophetic of the whole enterprise. Just as Excalibur travestied the works of Malory and Chrestien, so did The Emerald Forest fail to portray South America convincingly. The black make-up for the ‘evil’ tribe. and white make-up for the ‘Invisible People’, his principal protagonists, looked as arbitrary as it in fact was. The attempts at tribal dancing looked as if they had strayed out of a John Ford Western, and the hackneyed nature of the plot (a child, stolen from his parents in infancy, returns to them only to discover that his world is no longer theirs) was not redeemed by any finesse in the handling. Nor was the (immensely difficult) loca¬tion shooting particularly impressive. Nothing in the film reached the supreme depths of Boorman’s earlier film The Heretic, culminating with the scene in which Richard Burton wanders around an African town, uttering the word ‘Bazuzu’ to everyone he meets – but Tomme’s trance-state, in which he flies above the forest as an eagle, runs it close.

Technically, The Emerald Forest was an immense improvement on its predecessor – admittedly, one could probably say the same of Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros (USA, 1945)) - but it fell sadly short of German films like Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. The same could hardly be said of the next film in our series, however. Roland Joffé’s The Mission was both visually superb and thematically astute (a return to the days of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago for Robert Bolt – out of the doldrums of Ryan’s Daughter and Lady Caroline Lamb). The first shot, of a crucified Jesuit falling over the Iguaçu falls, rivals even the opening of Aguirre, the endless caravan winding down the Andes) as a visual icon. The plot is, it is true, somewhat simplistic – as are the binary oppositions between the path of peace and that of vio¬lence, as exemplified by the saintly Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) and the reformed slave-trader Mendoza (Robert de Niro) – but this very simplicity achieves some remarkable effects; things which ought to jar and yet somehow do not. The scene where Mendoza, who has dragged his armour and weapons in a bundle to the top of the falls in penance for killing his brother, has the burden cut from him by the Indians he formerly enslaved is, one must admit, somewhat of a production number – but when de Niro starts to weep, and the music swells, even the most jaded member of the audience is tempted to follow suit. Similarly with the portrayals of Arcadian innocence in the Jesuit Missions. No doubt this is really a myth, but it is not one which was invented for this film – being, rather, the accepted picture of ‘paradise in Paraguay’ handed down from the eighteenth century. A more jaundiced or realistic view (including the scenes of drunkenness and debauchery among the Indians originally included by Bolt) might have salved a few consciences, but it would not, it seems to me, have resulted in a better film.

The Mission depends for its success on absolutes – on one-sided sponsorship of nature and natives against ‘civilisation’ – and on the vision of love, and music, and water as three clarities opposed by the hatred, war and bloodshed of the settlers. As Jeremy Irons comments of an Indian myth describing blackness as the result of laziness when called on to act by God: ‘I wonder which Spaniard told them that’.

And so we come full circle back to A Handful of Dust. Like Moonraker, and unlike the other two films, it is only partially set in South America –though the momentousness of that portion of the film is perhaps more striking than the corresponding section of the book, thanks in part to the opening scene. Comparing the two films, however, makes it clear that progress has been made. The Mission established a soft-focus photography which seems best to suit the ‘British’ view of South America as a stage where moral problems are reduced to their raw elements. The Emerald Forest made it clear that, contrary to popular belief, beautiful landscapes cannot make your film for you. The farrago of second-hand images which characterised Moonraker, then, seems to be a thing of the past – and we can look forward to more films which use South America as a symbol meaningful in itself; a place of rivers, mountains and trees. (One possible example already is the ending of Bellman and True (UK, 1987), which presents the hero and his son’s Ronnie Biggs-style escape to Rio as a continuous moving frieze, full of rioting dolphins and whales, culminating in a Brazilian black Madonna, with the voice of the boy saying ‘Great here, i’n’t it?’).

[Richard Loncraine, dir.: Bellman and True (1987)]

[10/88]

Inter-Arts: A Quarterly Journal of Cultural Connections 7 (1988): 14-16.
[Available at: Versions of South America (16/4/09)].

[2970 wds]


[Inter-Arts 7 (1988)]


•