Power
to
the People
by Howard Schumann
For almost fifty years, from 1948 to 1994, black citizens
in South Africa were stripped of every basic human right while governments
of the world pretended not to see. Systematically uprooted from their
homes and moved into "townships," they were made to carry passbooks,
arrested without provocation, tortured and randomly murdered. But while
successive governments took away their freedom, they couldn't take away
their songs or their desire for freedom. Today, while there are still
problems, blacks and whites live together in a free South Africa.
Amandla!
A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, a documentary by Lee Hirsch,
pays tribute to the role played by protest songs in the non-violent
revolution that brought an end to apartheid nine years ago. Amandla
means power, and it’s the power of the songs that helped to free the
people. Hirsch, a young filmmaker from New York, spent nine years in
South Africa gathering newsreel footage, video clips, old photos, and
interviews with musicians and political activists to show how protest
songs expressed the fight against oppression. Winner of the Audience
Award and the Freedom of Expression Award at the 2002 Sundance Film
Festival, Amandla shows fifty years of South African history
beginning with Prime Minister Verwoerd's announcing his racial segregation
policy in 1948 describing it as "a policy of good-neighborliness." The
film also shows footage of the Sharpeville massacre and the Soweto uprising,
and the triumphant election of Nelson Mandela to the Presidency in 1994.
Amandla
begins with the exhumation from a pauper's grave of composer Vuyisile
Mini, whose protest anthems led to his hanging in 1964, and ends with
his proper reburial. The film depicts how the songs communicated to
the people in a way that political speeches could not, showing how different
phases of the struggle brought forth different types of songs. For decades,
songs such as Mini's "Beware Verwoerd," Vilakazi's "Meadowlands," the
"Toyi-Toyi" chant, and the uplifting "Mandela" by Hugh Masekela expressed
the energy and purpose of the South African people and rallied followers
to their cause. In addition to the music, there are interviews with
those that describe their experience of being imprisoned or forced into
exile. There are even interviews with white riot policeman and executioners,
but the power of the film belongs to the music, and "powerful"
is an understatement.
It
is truly moving to watch 20,000 people sing in unison a song that asks
over and over, "What have we done?" It is worth the price of admission
just to hear Sophie Mgcina singing "Madam Please," a song
written for black domestic workers that includes the lines "Madam, please,
before you ask me if your children are fine/ Ask me when I lost all
mine." Amandla builds to a joyous climax with President Nelson
Mandela singing Masekela's "Bring Him Back Home" before thousands of
cheering admirers.
It
has been only nine years since freedom came to South Africa but many
have only a distant memory of the years of oppression and conflict.
In a similar way as movies about the Holocaust, Amandla underscores
the power of films to help us remember. At the end, you may be short
of Kleenex, but filled with renewed hope for the human race.
It
is closing time in a bar somewhere in Eastern Europe. Someone says,
"Show us, Janos." A blank faced young man, Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph),
begins to organize a ballet of inebriated patrons playing the Sun and
the Moon turning in their orbits. Valuska pleads, "All I ask is that
you step with me into the bottomlessness." As the dance continues, the
men are spun. They stop suddenly as the orchestrater tells us that "in
this awful, incomprehensible dusk, everything that lives is still…"
Then, with a push, the dancers carry on until the Earth emerges from
the Moon's shadow. The eternal conflict between darkness and light begins
again. Thus begins Werckmeister Harmonies, a film by Hungarian
director Béla Tarr.
As
Janos leaves the bar and walks through the cold and half-deserted streets,
an enormous van drives up the main street and comes to rest in a great
empty square in the town center. A circus is in town. The exhibit contains
the world's largest whale, dead and stuffed with tiny staring eyes,
and The Prince, a shadowy figure that we never see. The town is full
of rumors of impending violence. Janos sees the whale and watches a
growing group of seemingly unemployed middle aged men gather silently
around fires in the square. He seems to know everyone in the town. 
To
further her political agenda of "town cleansing" (read ethnic cleansing),
Eszter's estranged wife, Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), sends the compliant
Janos on errands. He is told to put the children of the police chief
to bed but, as if presaging the coming violence, they stomp on their
beds to a cacophony of noise while one shouts at Janos over and over
again. "It will be hard for you." When the signal is given, the men
in the square come together and march towards us with growing anger
in a hypnotic parade lasting five terrifying minutes. They go on a rampage,
setting fires and ransacking a hospital, beating the sick in an unbroken
orgy of violence.
Containing
shots that last up to fifteen minutes at a time, Werckmeister Harmonies
is a nightmarish vision of a society duped by political demagogues and
distracted by circuses, being led into a cycle of violence and despair.
Based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, it is a powerful and disturbing
film that, in its surreal depiction of growing madness in an unnamed
town, is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's Songs From the Second Floor.
The film takes its name from the theories of Janos' "uncle" Gyorgy Eszter
(Peter Fitz), a musicologist who tells him of his obsession with the
legacy of Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century German musician who created
the twelve-tone scale. Eszter believes that perfect order does injustice
to the holiness of music, and says that the heavens move to their own
music. As above, so below. The ideology of order results in the disaster
of social collapse. Werckmeister Harmonies mourns the deadly
past, and offers a bleak warning to the future.
On
Election Day on a remote island in the Persian Gulf, an airplane drops
a parachute containing a ballot box filled with registration materials
and ballots. A soldier (Cyrus Abidi) retrieves the material, but is
astonished when he discovers that the official who arrives to run the
election is a young woman (Nassim Abdi). The official (unnamed) is an
outspoken idealist who believes that voting can give citizens the opportunity
to make a difference, while the soldier does not see any value in it.
Secret
Ballot, written and directed by by Babak Payami, is a lightweight
but charming Iranian film about the frustrations an election official
encounters while attempting to collect votes in a place where there
is no tradition of democracy. In this case, the official's problems
are compounded by the fact that she is a woman in a male-dominated society
and must combat ideas about what is proper for women to be doing.
As
the soldier drives her around the island in his jeep, the quest for
votes leads to one absurd situation after another. The unlikely pair
meets a man running across the desert - the soldier suspects him of
being a smuggler and has to persuade him to vote by pointing his gun
at him. They must also contend with a truckload of women and a single
man who insists on casting all of their votes for them. In other situations,
women in a nomadic camp refuse to vote without permission of the men
who are out fishing, and a Muslim at a solar energy site will vote for
only one candidate - GOD - who isn't even on the ballot. In one of the
more surreal episodes, the soldier refuses to drive past a red traffic
light standing in the middle of the desert even though he knows it is
broken and will never turn green.
Simplistic
ideas about the value of democracy are tested against the reality that
the islanders must face. One potential voter asks the official, "What
do you know about us and our problems? We have to hide our feelings
here." In another case, women cannot vote because they are forbidden
to look at the photographs of the male candidates. Another time, the
official cannot register the votes of men at a cemetery because women
are forbidden to enter the sacred ground. It is not clear if the film
was made to promote democracy or to show it as being ludicrous. Apparently
the Iranian officials took it seriously, because the film was banned
in Iran. What is clear is that unless an electorate is informed and
feels a stake in the outcome, the process of voting is a sham and, as
the protagonists in Secret Ballot find out, cannot be imposed
with high minded speeches or a gun pointed at the voter's head.
©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene
