|
“The little girl sitting near the fire Throws ashes at her
mother's ass Throws ashes at her mother's ass.”
Chanted by
Sarah, the defiant year-old protagonist of Raoul
Peck's new film, Man by the Shore (1996), these
lines from a vodou society prayer underscore the (dis)order imposed on Haiti
during the reign of "Papa Doc" Duvalier
and the tontons macoutes
in the 1960s. Sarah is struggling to make sense of events that have
disoriented her life, events that have scared her and torn her family apart.
Her father, a discredited army officer, and her mother have fled their rural
hometown, entrusting Sarah and her two sisters to their grandmother.
As she narrates
the story 30 years later, Sarah shares with us her memories of birthday
parties and bicycle rides on one hand and police beatings and invasions of
privacy on the other. Several times in the film, the young girl exhibits her
frustration with events by refusing to remain boxed into the image of the
child as pure and never rude. "Throws ashes at her mother's ass,"
she says again, this time in her grandmother's presence.
"Man by the Shore
is about violence; it's about humanness, how we treat each other and how we
resist cruelty," says Peck, the film's writer director, who now doubles
as Haiti's
new Minister of Culture. "Using `classical,' credible and real
characters as a starting point, I employed stylistic elements in the film to
introduce a level of interpretation which is slightly `out of sync' or even
abstract. It's this dismantling of reality which allows us to identify
ourselves via the figure of Sarah."
In this, his
third feature-length film, Peck tackles a history that has been told and
retold in so many different dimensions and from so many perspectives that it
has tended to disappear somewhere in the exposition. Haiti--the
"Black France," the "African Antilles," a country of
politics and vodou--lends itself to such confusion.
But in Man by the Shore, Peck doesn't so much pick
apart the distorted images of his country; he offers his own vision by
piecing together arresting fragments of life.
"Man by the Shore
came from friends who told me stories, things that I've read in the papers
and my own experience in Haiti.
At some point, I started writing this one story of a young guy, and that
story evolved into the story of Sarah because one of the people close to me
told me her own story. So I can say that almost everything in this film is
real somehow.
"When this
film was to be shot, after the election of President Aristide, it was really
a time of great hope in Haiti.
It was a time when we thought: `Well, it's over. We will never have that kind
of dictatorship anymore.' We were wrong. And the film that was supposed to be
a historical piece about a dark period in our society became actuality
again."
Even though
oppression is a part of Haiti's
everyday reality, Peck knows full well that it is a universal phenomenon.
"`Macoutism' isn't any different from any
other form of dictatorship or apartheid," he says. "Because you
have done two or three or four films coming from the same territory, you tend
to get a stamp on your forehead saying `Haitian filmmaker.' But if you really
know my work, you can see very quickly that it's not just about Haiti.
It's wider than that. It's also about you--no matter where you are. The
character of Sarah becomes very close to you, whoever you are."
Peck's nonnaturalist approach--his assemblage of poetry, legend
and narrative as well as varying moods and techniques to tell a
story--underscores his commitment to what he calls "the poetic aspect of
reality." It also allows him to universalize his themes. Peck himself is
something of a universal man. Born in Port-au-Prince
in 1953, he left for Zaire
with his family at age 8 because his father, who had been arrested twice, had
a contract to teach there. Peck finished high school in France,
studied industrial engineering in Germany
and visited the United States.
He then returned to Germany
for film school. This was the start of a career that has won him wide
recognition--particularly for Haitian Corner (1988) and Lumumba:
Death of a Prophet (1991)--and acceptance in the competition at the Cannes
International Film Festival in 1993.
Despite his new
bureaucratic duties, Peck's concerns continue to be driven by the art of
film. "For me, the greatest challenge as an artist and a filmmaker is to
get the emotions of people, and not emotion in a
typical Hollywood way of making you cry or making you
laugh. No. What I mean is making you laugh and think and making you cry and
think, which is a very difficult challenge
nowadays."
by Joanne Hams,
American Visions, June/July 1996,
|