On a Certain Really Bad Film

[bcholmes]

So I've been getting occasional anonymous comments on my journal entry about a film I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. Among the comments made are:

1. Sistagod is a mystically brilliant film
2. The film is way beyond its time and space
3. It's full of codes[1]
4. It will turn off white audiences because the antagonist is white

([1] It's like a Dan Brown book! Except the director doesn't decrypt anything for you!)

Now, admittedly, because these commenters are anonymous, it's hard not to imagine that they're sock puppets.

But I'm trying to be open-minded about my impression of this film (and, to be clear, I really dislike this film); maybe there's something I'm just not getting about it. So I've tried to do a bit of web searching for some commentary. About the only review I found was this one from Showcase. Here is an interesting passage:

At TIFF, filmmakers can present their work to people from all walks of life and the people either get it or they don't -- it’s as simple as that.

[...]

With very little dialogue, Ramesar uses the vibrant lush greens of waterfall banks, bright blues of painted thatch roof houses and the variant colours of skin to weave his concepts of race, religion, sin and redemption. In this landscape, he employs several archetypes to further the story, from Sistagod's mixed, light-skinned half-siblings whose mother she compares to "Ms. Universe," to the quietly forceful Nen, Sistagod's surrogate grandmother who discreetly wears mysterious "branding" tattoos on her forearms. Ramesar never fills in the blanks; never deliberately explains the back-story or underlining meaning of his message. Unfortunately for an audience not well-versed enough in his framework, this amounts to be led astray. While full of vibrant imagery and riveting performances, his film is almost too experimental and inaccessible to have the impact it should. And, then before the audience's eyes he sets an explosion ablaze.

In what seems like a never-ending scene, Ramesar presents a massive carnival or "mass" stretching into the night and that lasts far too long and at this point several audience members begin to leave the theatre. Loud screeching cries of the carnival whistles, the twisted and macabre-inspired costumes, the bodies painted in blue gyrating upon one another, illuminated by the terrifying and dazzling glow of the fire blowers in the distance. The line between the euphoric, throbbing, expression of elation is effectively blurred between the unsettling world of Trinidad and Tobago’s mysticism. It all comes together in this long overdrawn moment, which proves to be too loud, too intense, too confusing and too tedious for some. And, many of the people choose not to get it -- as simple as that.

So. Um. My recollection was that audience members were leaving the theatre in droves well before this climactic scene. But that's neither here nor there.

The thought I want to explore is the idea that as an audience member I "[chose] not to get it". Between the review, above, and the anonymous commenters, there seems to be this implication that a white, middle-class audience member like me isn't going to be able to stretch her movie-going expectations sufficiently to enjoy the film for what it is. And maybe that's true. Maybe I'm just not able to situate the film in a context of Trinidad and Tobago filmmaking history.

I think I have some experience with watching film that's created outside of the Hollywood form. For example, a few years ago I was taking a course on Post-Colonial Cinema at York University. There's a classic Senegalese film called Borom Sarret by Ousmane Sembene. Borom Sarret is a film about a cart driver. It's important as one of the first (if not the first) films by an indigenous sub-saharan director. Sembene would later film La Noire De... (a.k.a. Black Girl), which is generally considered to be the first such feature film.

Borom Sarret is a difficult film for North American audiences. Part of Sembene's motivation for making the film is to promote social change, and in his mind, that meant he needed to use a form that the poor could have access to (in a way they wouldn't have access to writing). That's his motivation for using film. Further he needed to ground his storytelling technique in a structure that people would recognize.

In North America, our film industry mostly derives from the intersection of two other art forms: the theatre and (to a lesser extent) photography. What we, as North American audiences, expect from our films is a story with clear, real-seeming characters. A somewhat believable plot. A build-up toward a climax. Resolution. Classic Western story-telling form. Initially these things were all lifted from the theatre, and various filmic conventions developed over time.

Sembene chose to ignore that Western format. What he believed his audiences could relate to is the story-telling tradition of the griot. As a result, Sembene has structured his film much like a parable or story that a griot would tell. (He'd also, later, start making films in Wolof, rather than French, to make them even more accessible). For me, it was hard to get into Borom Sarret, because I wanted to see a narrative character, in the Western filmmaking tradition, and Sembene gave me a parable character. I wanted the main character to have history, and personality quirks, and heroic flaws. In Sembene's film, the main character doesn't even have a name: he's just known as "Borom Sarret" -- cart driver.

And, in some ways, it's tempting to look at Sembene's film and read it as "undeveloped", or "inexperienced". I think that'd be a mistaken pronouncement. And having the cultural context, I think, helps to defer those judgements.

But here's the thing: I watch Sistagod and, I confess, I think it's amateurish. It strikes me, not as a film that's based on a different filmic lexicon, but rather as a film made by a director who hasn't gotten all the 101 mistakes out of his system.

To use a simple example (I might have the details a bit off, as I was leaving the theatre as this was happening): as the film ends, there's a final title card that reads: "The End". After a moment, this fades into a card that reads: "The End?" and then finally to "The End of the Beginning". And I shook my head. I saw this, and I thought, "here's a tired device, that directors try out in first year film school, then abandon because they realize that it's just not terribly original, and not very effective." But Sistagod ended on that note. What can you do but roll your eyes?

Certainly, there are elements of the story that seem foreign to me as a Canadian: for example, when Sistagod becomes pregnant (without being married), I don't expect that the she should naturally feel shame. And it's not intuitive to me that wearing a carnivale costume to hide her shame is a reasonable reaction to the situation. But the film presents these as comme il faut, and I shrug and conclude that this is just cultural disconnect.

What I don't accept easily is the plodding, lugubrious treatment of each beat in the story. Really, there are only a few story points:

1. We are told the histories of Sistagod's father (a white American soldier wounded in the first Gulf War) and (to a lesser extent) her mother.
2. Sistagod is born, and because she's very black, her father believes that she's not his
3. Her mother goes crazy and is put in an institution
4. Her father remarries
5. The local priest thinks that Sistagod is possessed and tries to exorcise her
6. The priest also insists that Sistagod's house is dismantled
7. Sistagod's surrogate grandmother dies (because she's distraught by having to move)
8. The priest gives her an iguana, but her father runs it over in his car
9. Sistagod becomes pregnant -- a virgin pregnancy, it seems
10. Her mother sews a carnivale costume for her to hide her shame
11. Her mother dies (she drowns at the base of a waterfall)
12. The carnivale happens
13. Then all the people disappear from the planet, leaving only the pregnant Sistagod
14. Sistagod's water breaks

That's not really the simplified version of the story. That's the whole story. Each one of those story beats is primarily narrated by Sistagod (no more than a few sentences for each point), followed by minutes (minutes!) of slow-motion or unsteady camera work. Look, the priest has an iguana. Close up of the iguana. Next shot, Sistagod is holding the iguana. Lengthy shot. Sistagod isn't really moving. The iguana isn't really moving. The cameraman is the only one that's moving. And this whole shot is in slow motion. Now Sistagod is in the road. In narration, she tells us that, out of the blue, she saw her father that day. Slow motion shot of car coming down the road. We see her father in the car. Driving by sloooooooowly. Although the car is moving, father is essentially motionless, looking at Sistagod. Sistagod is motionless. The iguana is motionless. Now the car is gone. Next shot. We're looking at the street. There's a squashed iguana on it.

Fuck. As they say: "Skip a bit, brother!" And the whole film is like that. Toooo slooooow.

There's more I could talk about. The whole "Show, don't tell" rule, for example, doesn't appear to have been introduced to the director. It's too slow, it's too dull, and with apologies to the Showcase reviewer, there aren't any performances. There's just Sistagod's narration and a bunch of mostly-still poses filmed with pretentious camerawork.

I make no apologies for thinking that it's dreadful, and I wish the anonymous sock puppets who are defending the piece would provide some insightful analysis of the film rather than just go on about how ahead of its time it is.

Comments

Filmmakers...

[perette.livejournal.com]

I'm so reminded of an experimental film premier I saw the the Dryden Theatre at Eastman House in Rochester a few years ago. It was touted as being about the life of Oscar Wilde, especially commenting on homosexuality; in actuality it amounted to 50 minutes of what looked like multi-coloured oscilloscope traces run through a spyrograph, while listening to what I can only imagine was someone being trained in audio engineering by sampling well-known Wilde quotes on a Casio keyboard and running the output through a reverb effects box while tinkering with the settings.

IMHO, it sucked.

Nevertheless, as it wrapped and the filmmaker came up front for Q/A period, the assorted aspiring filmmakers (we have a lot here in Rochester, as we have the RIT Film/Video department) all took their opportunity to comment on the wonderful use of sound/color/processing/whatever. Whatever it was that this cinematic wreckage held was completely inaccessible to me as a lay-person.

On the other hand, I could probably show them pieces of code that make my nipples tingle but would be equally inaccessible to them.

[futabachan.livejournal.com]

So, clearly, we need to do a double feature of Sistagod and The Brown Bunny at some point, just for snark value....

Sistagod

[(Anonymous)]

So I just saw the movie and read your review and I thoroughly agree.

I am from the Caribbean and have a decent understanding of Trinidadian culture and I don't think the problems with the film lie with any ignorance of Trinidadian culture.

I do think some of the visuals are interesting but the film's pacing is exceptionally slow and could easily have been chopped by 40 minutes [that Carnival alone I'm sure took up most of that time]or more. The result is that the flaws in its storyline and message are even more obvious.

It is supposed to be the first of a trilogy but my recommendation is that, if the remaining installments are anything like the first, that they should each be substantially edited and merged into one film that will hopefully have greater impact.