Vague film about Afghanistan trauma
Alex van Veen
9 June 2007 - “Show me dead, show me
the death man!” In a gloomy way, the seriously troubled man
wanders through the Jodenbreestraat in the city centre of Amsterdam
in the middle of the night. Cyclists skirt around him to avoid having
to face misery. Away, away, away from here!
No one takes notice of the man. And who could blame them, for are
we not daily confronted by people who have lost their way in both
senses of the word? We are becoming immune to human suffering.
The fearful scene was observed by Cyrus Frisch, who shot it from
his balcony using a cell phone. His latest film, with the intriguing
but somewhat misleading title Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld
dat het zo erg zou worden in Afghanistan? (Why did nobody tell
me Afghanistan would become that bad?), contains a series of images
of youth hanging around and making a nuisance of themselves, pushy
drug dealers, homeless people, drunks and cautioning policemen,
shot from the front and back sides of his apartment at the Zuiderkerkhof.
The scenes at his doorstep are mixed with footage of subjects apparently
chosen at random, such as a visit to the supermarket, where an aggressively
swearing young man is detained by staff members. We also see images
of a helicopter circling above the city centre, of shots fired in
a faraway war, of police cars and an ambulance (apparently) responding
to an accident on an Amsterdam street, of Palestinian (?) youth
throwing stones, and of intense smoke hanging above the Central
Station, the final shot of the movie.
All these images are equally vague, due to the lousy resolution
of the cell phone. Seen on a movie screen, it is really dramatic.
The abominable sound quality does not help either: because of the
wind, the viewer constantly has the impression that the film maker
is taking a shower. Repeatedly we see and here people on the streets
swearing and shouting; police car sirens are a recurrent theme.
After seventy minutes, it fortunately ends at the Rialto movie house.
I wanted to hear NRC Handelsblad journalist interview the film maker
afterwards, otherwise I would have called it a day after ten minutes.
This was a mistake, for what Frisch had to say was almost as vague
as the film itself. For example, he told us that he had chosen the
title because he “sort of liked” it. The synopsis states
that the film should be seen through the eyes of a traumatised Afghanistan
veteran. “This makes the film easier to grasp, I think”,
Frisch told the audience, which seemed to consist mainly of his
former neighbours. Former, for the film maker has left the Nieuwmarkt.
“His trauma makes it plausible that the main character experiences
the incidents on his street as very threatening”, Frisch continued
his ramshackle argument. Despite concluding that the atmosphere
in the city has “hardened considerably”, Frisch finds
that the nuisance created by ethnic youth at the Zuiderkerkhof is
non-existent. “They demand respect from the white residents,
who in turn expect these young people to earn their respect first.
This results in frictions, which is unnecessary”.
Frisch said he made a conscious decision to use his cell phone
because of its low resolution, which gives an “added tension”
to the images. With a regular camera, he would not have succeeded.
Although he considers his latest film a “small personal contribution
to tolerance”, the average viewer will see it as an attempt
to make a statement, painfully showing the deterioration of our
materialistic welfare state.
Journalist Van den Boogaard was very enthusiastic about the film.
“In a few years, we may well reach the conclusion that the
Dutch military effort in Afghanistan has made an impact on our national
cultural pattern - on how the Dutch feel about the use of violence,
the acceptability of victims, the place of the Netherlands in the
world, in short, on this country. Frisch deserves credit for being
the first to raise these issues”. But the Afghanistan war
is exactly what the film is not about...
The generally laudatory reviews of Waarom heeft niemand mij
verteld dat het zo erg zou worden in Afghanistan? are based
mainly on the film maker’s artistic qualities. This is incomprehensible,
for compared to the experimental art movie of the 1960s this is
the work of an amateur. Apparently, film critics have become so
fed up with high tech gadgets in the form of computer simulations
and expensive monster productions, that making a vague film using
a cell phone sitting comfortably in one’s chair is considered
innovative and uplifting. I cannot say that I understand it.
Rialto
This article appeared originally at Ravage
Digitaal
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