| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Independent |
RETRAINING PART 1 of 3
On Waise Azimi’s STANDING UP
By Jan Philippe V. Carpio
“I feel that people are ultimately individuals and it's only when they are trained to fit into a sociological pattern that is convenient to someone that they begin to blame their conditions [on things outside themselves]. All my pictures are … about individuals. That's the only thing I believe in … Groups can go fuck themselves. All of them. You know, a Black to me is a Black. And when he's a person, he's a person. And when a Puerto Rican is a "Puerto Rican" or a "Hispanic" – I don't care what title [they put] on – to me there's a name for each person. I think it's marvelous to have a name. And a woman is not a "woman." It's either Gena or my mother or some person.” (Carney, 301).
- John Cassavetes, filmmaker
“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” – George W. Bush, President of the U.S.A.
Getting to Know Each Other
In the first few minutes of Waise Azimi’s debut full length documentary, it is made very clear as to who we are dealing with. One after another he shows several new recruits of the 55th Battalion’s First Company of the National Afghan Army introducing them selves on camera. We meet people like Gulam Askar, Baluch, Abdul Waseh, Kefiayet, young men all under the age of twenty five. These are some of the young men Azimi chose to document for four months in 2006 at the Kabul Military Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The significance of this cinematic prologue shows us in a subtle manner the importance Azimi bestows upon the individual humanity of his documentary subjects. This also helps distinguish the more complex relationship we the viewers need to have with them as people rather than the simplified association based on the formal documentary roles of “subject”, “documenter” and “audience”. Azimi also forgoes the use of voice over narration as the all seeing and all knowing or at times ironic tour guides of commercial documentary landscapes where nothing is left up to viewer interpretation except the conclusion that what they are seeing and hearing is supposedly objective truth. More than just giving the viewers necessary establishing information as commercial film forms do, this prologue establishes a particular emotional and stylistic tone that prevails throughout most of the film.
To Show What is Left Out
A single, unitary perspective is usually presented in most films, or in the case of most broadcast journalism, the journalist’s voice and personality oftentimes ironically overpowering and taking away focus from the very stories they are reporting. This sometimes reduces them to what writer and filmmaker Donal Foreman once called, “five second interview clips of the locals interspersed between clips of a celebrity journalist walking around the area.” Avoiding the limiting perspective of this approach, Azimi allows multiple perspectives with different personalities, overlapping, complimenting and conflicting with each other. He swings back and forth between being “the fly on the buffalo’s back” – with the camera buzzing nearly in the faces of the recruits as we listen to their interactions – and the recruits directly engaging us by suddenly turning to address the camera, at times even in mid-conversation. This is also mixed in with the usual question and answer sessions – or talking heads as they are sometimes called – found in most documentaries.
This self conscious shifting between so called “objective” and “subjective” stances is one example of what documentary filmmaker Errol Morris expounds on:
"When we talk about our intuitions of non-fiction and fiction, what we're really talking about is controlled and uncontrolled. Hence the 'auteur' theory is fiction, where we sort of imagine everything is controlled, script, lighting, acting, set, photography, you name it. It's sort of like the pure controlled fiction film--the pure 'auteur' film vs. the completely uncontrolled film. Kind of that dream of 'cinema verite' where everything just unfolds and the filmmaker and the camera does not interfere with what it's observing in any way. I think the real truth is that all kinds of filmmaking contains elements of both. It's what makes film interesting is that interplay of the controlled and uncontrolled in general. All documentary and all fiction have both of those elements. Maybe some in more significant quantity than the other, but it's always there."
This exposes a ground level fallacy of “pure objective truth”, cold hard facts purported by broadcast journalism, mainstream documentaries and films passing them selves off as documentaries like Michael Moore’s work as Foreman asserts:
“The documentary label gives Moore’s films a legitimacy that they don’t necessarily deserve. Films like Farenheit 9/11 (2004) could be called essay films at best, or propaganda at worst: they purport a particular opinion, and support that view with selective factual information that may or may not be misleading.” (4).
One can never factor out the personal in creation, no matter how much the creator attempts to disappear into the objective background. The essences of subjectivity remain in the examples of what subject matter the artist chose to film, how it was filmed, what editing choices were made and what the final form of the film turns out to be.
By maintaining the “pure objective truth” stance as the foundation for presentation and conclusion, one ironically contradicts one of the fundamental functions of truth: to help set one’s soul free. The problem of course is not that objectivity and subjectivity are wrong per se. Problems can arise when too much emphasis on either of them leave viewers little or no room to make their own conclusions or interpretations. (Moore’s work is actually one example of an overemphasis on subjectivity rather than objectivity.) This replaces ignorance of the issue with another kind of mental enslavement: that of our thoughts and feelings being formed by someone other than ourselves.
Broadcast journalism and commercial documentary may argue that they also use a multi-perspective approach by “presenting all sides of the issue”. That is true for the most part, but ends when their formats tend to favor an adversarial and simplified presentation of these sides of the issue. This helps feed viewer tendency to place people under the restricting roles of “good guy” and “bad guy”. This form usually manifests itself during news reports on crime and politics, and overzealous documentary exposes of a particular scandal or wrongdoing.
Azimi could have gone the easy route by choosing this polarizing treatment. Considering the tough and at times “unlikable” personality of one of the commanding officers in the film, Sergeant Ali Khan, Azimi would have a lot of models to copy from. Based on the elements of his subject matter, even the possible the influence of the Hollywood fiction film form cannot be discounted. Films such as Private Benjamin, Biloxi Blues and Full Metal Jacket are all populated with drill sergeant characters cast in the roles of villains. Known for their brutal fascist tendencies, they are usually pitted against one or a group of rebellious new recruits. Most of these films usually end in said sergeant getting his/her comeuppance at the hands of their “victims”. Instead of reinforcing this over simplified vision of life, Azimi chooses a much more difficult and deeper exploration.
The general perception fostered by mainstream media networks like CNN and BBC is that Afghanistan is one of the most dangerous places on earth, and to set foot on its soil is to invite the Taliban, Al Quaeda or a suicide bomber to cut one’s visit short permanently. Not denying the reality of these dangers, the film shows us a completely different view of the country almost never shown through these media networks. Whereas they choose to focus on death, destruction and the supposedly “important” political, military and economic wheelers and dealers, Azimi chooses to focus on small, precious moments between the so-called “little” people who are forgotten and kept in the background or entirely off camera. At many points in the film he accomplishes what film critic Ray Carney referred to as a possible role for filmmakers like the Italian Neorealists:
“… the filmmaker could emulate the photojournalist with his Leica, leaving the studio behind and venturing out into the streets and apartments of life, to record what the … studios had left out of the picture.”
In this case, Azimi records and shows us what the television networks left out of their news reports and documentary specials. He shows us that to call these moments and people, “little” or “small” is to only display our own insensitivities. It is in these intimate exchanges of humor, kindness, cruelty, violence, gentleness that we find some of the deepest parts of human living. We find a very good example of this in the person of Drill Sergeant Ali Khan who is a brutally tough and harsh person, but Azimi allows us to see other emotional facets to him with his sardonic sense of humor and a rare moment of gentleness he shows one recruit.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Kiri Dalena, Emman De La Cruz, Tessa De Guzman, Sunshine Matutina and Yvette Pantilla.
STANDING UP premiered at the Kontra-Agos Resistance Film Festival last December 5-11, 2007 at Indiesine, Robinson’s Galleria. It screens at the 37th Rotterdam International Film Festival, January 23-February 3, 2008.
http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/eng/search/film.aspx?ID=e4af9279-ae57-457c-b63a-52192c269548
For more information on the film, please go to www.standingupthemovie.com.
For screening requests and other inquiries, e-mail B1ackspiral at yahoo.com
