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rushthatspeaksI can't remember how I heard about this movie. When I looked at the October schedule for the Harvard Film Archive, what I thought to myself was, oh, wow, they're showing that legendary nine-hour documentary about Mongolian yak herders! I have to go see that! I do not know how the legend of it seeped into my mind in the first place. As to why I wanted to go see it, well, it seems self-evident to me, but B., among other people, has been teasing me about it for a month now. He insisted that I was going to be the only person in the theatre.
There were about thirty people in the theatre, and all of them stayed. Ha.
It was an additional treat for me to discover that this film, Taiga (1992), was directed and photographed by the German feminist director Ulrike Ottinger, who based on Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (see my immediately previous entry) is made entirely of pure weapons-grade awesome. Ottinger started as a painter, switched to film in the early seventies, and has made two kinds of films ever since: complex fantastical and sometimes allegorical pieces, with a subversive feminist slant and an impressive range of literary reference (her Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press, which I have not yet seen, appears from the blurbs to be a slash epic about genderswitched versions of Dorian Gray and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse in 1980s Berlin, and she is currently making a vampire movie with Tilda Swinton); and long, very unstaged documentaries, including so far one on China, one on Korea, and this one, on Mongolia. (One of the things I love about Johanna d'Arc is that she combined both types into one movie.) As far as I can tell, her team (herself, a backup camera person, a sound guy) were the first foreign documentarians allowed into Mongolia.
The extraordinary length is of course the first thing one notices. Nine hours is a very long time. My back still hurts from sitting in the theatre seat, even though the HFA has very comfortable seats. There was a half-hour intermission, an hour-long meal break, and two minute-long breaks for reel changes. I left the house at noon and got home at eleven-thirty p.m., exhausted. I am still exhausted. Why the length?
Total immersion. Ottinger is not interested in standard documentary styles, in standard film structure. She does not want to show you things. She wants you to see things, as you might if you were standing there. She wants you to be standing there, as she was standing there, the camera on her shoulder. Only, because she is a brilliant filmmaker, and because making a movie is an art, she has condensed down the slow process of learning about people by watching them as much as she can possibly condense it; she has edited it and refined it and made it, I am convinced, as short as it can be made. Which is nine hours. I do not think this movie could or should be a minute shorter, because watching it, having seen it, does not feel like having seen a movie. It feels like having gone somewhere. It feels much more real and present than any other documentary I can think of. Which is only assisted by the fact that, unlike most documentarians, Ottinger does not edit out the reactions of the people to her camera and crew. Children are fascinated. Adults are shy, or sometimes disapproving. Everyone speaks to her directly-- none of the 'pretend I'm not here'. She is served tea and food like everybody else. What we don't get, what she did edit out, is what she says back. And the effect of that is to put you, the viewer, right there yourself, figuring out what you'd try to say. Wishing you knew how to be polite.
Of course, I have no idea what I'd want to say except in the most general terms, because I don't speak a word of the language. Listening to a language you don't speak for nine hours, in a context in which there is no way to pick up even a word of it, is a fascinating experience. What I found is that I kept trying to fit it into patterns I knew. I would 'hear' something as having been a collection of random English words, although I knew rationally it was nothing of the kind, and so I would have to remind myself, no, that was not what you thought it said, you're making things up. Over and over again. And there are very few subtitles, and those only in the most general terms, so I could not try to relate the words I heard to the sense they made. Half the subtitles are descriptive subtitles, things put in by Ottinger as basic cultural vocabulary. A typical one would be something like "At the far back right of the yurt is the zel altar." Which tells you nothing, except that the thing at the far back right is important (which I had not twigged to, visually, it looked like a table with a lot of strips of cloth tied to it) and that it's important religiously; not how it's important, or what you could expect a person to do with it, or why; those things are to be picked up from watching people interacting with it, or not at all.
And this, the way that there was never quite enough context, the way I was always having my attention directed to things I hadn't thought were important, the way I was always having to reality-test the sound of the language against the tricks my brain kept playing on me-- this made me so much more aware of how people moved, what people did, the ways they interacted with each other. It was damn near hypervigilance. I could not forget, for one second, that I did not know what was going on, what the inner lives of these people were like, that I could not assume anything. This film made me study it, even the moments when, in conventional terms, nothing seemed to be going on. Especially those moments.
And then the sheer genius of the structure kicked in. At the beginning of the film, there's a sequence in a shaman's hut, there's a sequence at a wedding. I was working very hard during those sequences to try to make sense, to figure things out, what was general, what was specific, what was politeness, what was individual quirkiness. After several hours, I was still working very hard, but I'd got my feet under me, was starting to feel less completely confused by every single thing, and started vaguely regretting that these really cool sequences had happened before I could in some ways pay attention to them. And lo, there was another wedding sequence, and another bit in a shaman's hut, right when I wanted them to calibrate against. And this made me very happy.
So I will defend the length of this movie as a valid artistic decision, and I think it really should be watched in one sitting if at all possible. It might well survive as a mini-series, but that is not the intent and isn't how it's structured. This movie is meant to take you over and make you do a great deal of very hard work, and the length is one way of both doing that and warning you about that. I think in some ways this is a film that intentionally self-selects its audience, because I know that I am a minority in wanting to do some of the hardest intellectual work I have done in years by staring at Mongolian yak herders for nine hours.
But that is what I wanted, and it was in my opinion thoroughly and entirely worth it. I know enough to know that in most ways I still don't know a damn thing about Mongolia, but this movie gives some shape to what I don't know. And here are some things I saw in it:
-- men riding reindeer on the side of a mountain, going pretty much straight up, the smooth leaping movement of the reindeer from rock to tree root not hindered at all by having riders, a steeper angle than unmounted humans could walk, and then both men and deer swiveling suddenly to stare at a prop plane coming in below them to land next to the valley lake, surprise and delight on the faces of the men, the reindeer, the pilot
-- the way the hunter, making hunter's tea, knows so perfectly how large his kettle is that he builds his fire and mounds three stones around it without checking, setting the kettle down on the scorching stones where it fits without a millimeter's clearance
-- the way the shaman's head goes all the way inside her giant skin drum, so that she is beating the skin of it only two or three inches away from her nose; I can't imagine what that sounds like, whether there's some kind of damping effect from being in it at the center or whether it is louder than thunder
-- a sheep being killed in what they call the white death, because the blood doesn't go everywhere, and how the intestines get laced between someone's hands, a cat's cradle, and then one side pushed down and slit to drip, and all the blood ladled into the stomach for sausage, and tied off
-- a quiet man in the back at a wedding, gestured to by the bride's mother, who takes the ubiquitous dogend of a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, and straightens up, and produces the most extraordinary noise, with no warning or warm-up-- it is overtone singing, for these people, when they could range at their widest irrespective of national borders, once wandered through Tuvia in the summers
-- a baby, who, when her grandmother gestures irritably, consents to back up the three inches necessary to not be sliced in half by the scythe-sweeps of the winter haying, and her grandmother, who knows the three inches by eye and correctly, returning to her work
-- that same grandmother (who looks to be in her mid-forties, I think) taking a large stick and tapping along the hillside, and at a hollow sound turning the stick round and using its point to dig into a squirrel tunnel, and take the large store of nuts and cedar berries and a kind of root that looks like bracken, to dry on the roof of the yurt for later
-- milking, where the milk steams as it hits the bucket so freely that it looks like dry ice, and that's the only way you can tell that the grayness of the light is the grayness before dawn
-- making dumplings, which is at least a twenty-person activity, because as the subtitles say dumplings are the second-highest meal of honor, after fatback of mutton, and flour is quite rare; the assembly-line motions of it mean that they can whip out a couple of hundred dumplings in about half an hour, and all the while everyone is switching places and checking the baby and going out for a smoke and getting that goat out of here and slicing bits off the teabrick and putting the wood on the fire and commenting on the chess game that's going on in the corner and looking for the salt and foaming the yak milk and slicing bits off the saltbrick and sewing up a hole in somebody's boots and keeping the toddler out of the stove and taking some milk out to pour in various directions, as everyone does anytime anyone ever eats anything, as an offering, because that is what you do
-- putting up a yurt, and I think that I could put up a yurt now myself, unless there's a trick to it, and I know I could make the dumplings (and I intend to try it), and I think I now know also how to make about sixteen separate kinds of milk tea
-- the wrestler who came with the cousins from out of camp (if they are cousins, but they probably are) having trouble getting his wrestling trunks on, as he seems to be an inch or so thicker than last year, but then politely and unhurriedly knocking over three different challengers and whirling round his second, who is holding his hat, afterward, arms in the air, a sudden swooping grace and the call of a falcon (his crest, the subtitles say, his symbol, or maybe his clan's)
-- the way everyone has a hat, everyone, at all times, and it is as much a means of personal expression as one's facial movements and I cannot imagine anyone appearing in public without one-- though if the women have cut their hair short, in the modern style, they sometimes do not wear scarves, but usually they do; and the approximately three-quarters finished cigarette is just as much a fixture
-- the way no one ever appears to be in a hurry, as I would interpret being in a hurry; by my lights they are a calm, shy, extraordinarily polite, unruffled, stoic people, who sing at full volume indoors, giggle behind their hands while playing dominos, ride before they can run, and have all memorized a stanza or so of epic for state occasions; but I know I do not know how they behave when there are not guests, or what their body language means, or what they do when they die, or, in fact, where they go to the bathroom
-- and that is a very little of what I saw. You would have seen something entirely different, or some things that maybe overlapped, but that we each thought meant something different. Which she knows, the one who made this movie, and I can't help thinking that she did see everything I saw, and maybe everything you'd see, although not everything that's there to be seen, because I don't think anyone could do that. But she predicted very well what I would look at, and what I would make of it, and therefore would probably have done the same for you.
It did of course change me, watching this movie. And it tired me out, and I don't think I'm going to be able or want to watch any movies for probably quite a while, no matter how well I know them. I don't know if I can honestly recommend seeing this, because it was so much work it was literally painful, and I am not saying that bits of it weren't boring, the kind of boring you get when your brain shuts down from overload and will not do any more work for a while and puts up basically a 404 error.
But I saw a nine-hour documentary on Mongolian yak herders, and I enjoyed it, and it was a masterpiece.
There were about thirty people in the theatre, and all of them stayed. Ha.
It was an additional treat for me to discover that this film, Taiga (1992), was directed and photographed by the German feminist director Ulrike Ottinger, who based on Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (see my immediately previous entry) is made entirely of pure weapons-grade awesome. Ottinger started as a painter, switched to film in the early seventies, and has made two kinds of films ever since: complex fantastical and sometimes allegorical pieces, with a subversive feminist slant and an impressive range of literary reference (her Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press, which I have not yet seen, appears from the blurbs to be a slash epic about genderswitched versions of Dorian Gray and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse in 1980s Berlin, and she is currently making a vampire movie with Tilda Swinton); and long, very unstaged documentaries, including so far one on China, one on Korea, and this one, on Mongolia. (One of the things I love about Johanna d'Arc is that she combined both types into one movie.) As far as I can tell, her team (herself, a backup camera person, a sound guy) were the first foreign documentarians allowed into Mongolia.
The extraordinary length is of course the first thing one notices. Nine hours is a very long time. My back still hurts from sitting in the theatre seat, even though the HFA has very comfortable seats. There was a half-hour intermission, an hour-long meal break, and two minute-long breaks for reel changes. I left the house at noon and got home at eleven-thirty p.m., exhausted. I am still exhausted. Why the length?
Total immersion. Ottinger is not interested in standard documentary styles, in standard film structure. She does not want to show you things. She wants you to see things, as you might if you were standing there. She wants you to be standing there, as she was standing there, the camera on her shoulder. Only, because she is a brilliant filmmaker, and because making a movie is an art, she has condensed down the slow process of learning about people by watching them as much as she can possibly condense it; she has edited it and refined it and made it, I am convinced, as short as it can be made. Which is nine hours. I do not think this movie could or should be a minute shorter, because watching it, having seen it, does not feel like having seen a movie. It feels like having gone somewhere. It feels much more real and present than any other documentary I can think of. Which is only assisted by the fact that, unlike most documentarians, Ottinger does not edit out the reactions of the people to her camera and crew. Children are fascinated. Adults are shy, or sometimes disapproving. Everyone speaks to her directly-- none of the 'pretend I'm not here'. She is served tea and food like everybody else. What we don't get, what she did edit out, is what she says back. And the effect of that is to put you, the viewer, right there yourself, figuring out what you'd try to say. Wishing you knew how to be polite.
Of course, I have no idea what I'd want to say except in the most general terms, because I don't speak a word of the language. Listening to a language you don't speak for nine hours, in a context in which there is no way to pick up even a word of it, is a fascinating experience. What I found is that I kept trying to fit it into patterns I knew. I would 'hear' something as having been a collection of random English words, although I knew rationally it was nothing of the kind, and so I would have to remind myself, no, that was not what you thought it said, you're making things up. Over and over again. And there are very few subtitles, and those only in the most general terms, so I could not try to relate the words I heard to the sense they made. Half the subtitles are descriptive subtitles, things put in by Ottinger as basic cultural vocabulary. A typical one would be something like "At the far back right of the yurt is the zel altar." Which tells you nothing, except that the thing at the far back right is important (which I had not twigged to, visually, it looked like a table with a lot of strips of cloth tied to it) and that it's important religiously; not how it's important, or what you could expect a person to do with it, or why; those things are to be picked up from watching people interacting with it, or not at all.
And this, the way that there was never quite enough context, the way I was always having my attention directed to things I hadn't thought were important, the way I was always having to reality-test the sound of the language against the tricks my brain kept playing on me-- this made me so much more aware of how people moved, what people did, the ways they interacted with each other. It was damn near hypervigilance. I could not forget, for one second, that I did not know what was going on, what the inner lives of these people were like, that I could not assume anything. This film made me study it, even the moments when, in conventional terms, nothing seemed to be going on. Especially those moments.
And then the sheer genius of the structure kicked in. At the beginning of the film, there's a sequence in a shaman's hut, there's a sequence at a wedding. I was working very hard during those sequences to try to make sense, to figure things out, what was general, what was specific, what was politeness, what was individual quirkiness. After several hours, I was still working very hard, but I'd got my feet under me, was starting to feel less completely confused by every single thing, and started vaguely regretting that these really cool sequences had happened before I could in some ways pay attention to them. And lo, there was another wedding sequence, and another bit in a shaman's hut, right when I wanted them to calibrate against. And this made me very happy.
So I will defend the length of this movie as a valid artistic decision, and I think it really should be watched in one sitting if at all possible. It might well survive as a mini-series, but that is not the intent and isn't how it's structured. This movie is meant to take you over and make you do a great deal of very hard work, and the length is one way of both doing that and warning you about that. I think in some ways this is a film that intentionally self-selects its audience, because I know that I am a minority in wanting to do some of the hardest intellectual work I have done in years by staring at Mongolian yak herders for nine hours.
But that is what I wanted, and it was in my opinion thoroughly and entirely worth it. I know enough to know that in most ways I still don't know a damn thing about Mongolia, but this movie gives some shape to what I don't know. And here are some things I saw in it:
-- men riding reindeer on the side of a mountain, going pretty much straight up, the smooth leaping movement of the reindeer from rock to tree root not hindered at all by having riders, a steeper angle than unmounted humans could walk, and then both men and deer swiveling suddenly to stare at a prop plane coming in below them to land next to the valley lake, surprise and delight on the faces of the men, the reindeer, the pilot
-- the way the hunter, making hunter's tea, knows so perfectly how large his kettle is that he builds his fire and mounds three stones around it without checking, setting the kettle down on the scorching stones where it fits without a millimeter's clearance
-- the way the shaman's head goes all the way inside her giant skin drum, so that she is beating the skin of it only two or three inches away from her nose; I can't imagine what that sounds like, whether there's some kind of damping effect from being in it at the center or whether it is louder than thunder
-- a sheep being killed in what they call the white death, because the blood doesn't go everywhere, and how the intestines get laced between someone's hands, a cat's cradle, and then one side pushed down and slit to drip, and all the blood ladled into the stomach for sausage, and tied off
-- a quiet man in the back at a wedding, gestured to by the bride's mother, who takes the ubiquitous dogend of a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, and straightens up, and produces the most extraordinary noise, with no warning or warm-up-- it is overtone singing, for these people, when they could range at their widest irrespective of national borders, once wandered through Tuvia in the summers
-- a baby, who, when her grandmother gestures irritably, consents to back up the three inches necessary to not be sliced in half by the scythe-sweeps of the winter haying, and her grandmother, who knows the three inches by eye and correctly, returning to her work
-- that same grandmother (who looks to be in her mid-forties, I think) taking a large stick and tapping along the hillside, and at a hollow sound turning the stick round and using its point to dig into a squirrel tunnel, and take the large store of nuts and cedar berries and a kind of root that looks like bracken, to dry on the roof of the yurt for later
-- milking, where the milk steams as it hits the bucket so freely that it looks like dry ice, and that's the only way you can tell that the grayness of the light is the grayness before dawn
-- making dumplings, which is at least a twenty-person activity, because as the subtitles say dumplings are the second-highest meal of honor, after fatback of mutton, and flour is quite rare; the assembly-line motions of it mean that they can whip out a couple of hundred dumplings in about half an hour, and all the while everyone is switching places and checking the baby and going out for a smoke and getting that goat out of here and slicing bits off the teabrick and putting the wood on the fire and commenting on the chess game that's going on in the corner and looking for the salt and foaming the yak milk and slicing bits off the saltbrick and sewing up a hole in somebody's boots and keeping the toddler out of the stove and taking some milk out to pour in various directions, as everyone does anytime anyone ever eats anything, as an offering, because that is what you do
-- putting up a yurt, and I think that I could put up a yurt now myself, unless there's a trick to it, and I know I could make the dumplings (and I intend to try it), and I think I now know also how to make about sixteen separate kinds of milk tea
-- the wrestler who came with the cousins from out of camp (if they are cousins, but they probably are) having trouble getting his wrestling trunks on, as he seems to be an inch or so thicker than last year, but then politely and unhurriedly knocking over three different challengers and whirling round his second, who is holding his hat, afterward, arms in the air, a sudden swooping grace and the call of a falcon (his crest, the subtitles say, his symbol, or maybe his clan's)
-- the way everyone has a hat, everyone, at all times, and it is as much a means of personal expression as one's facial movements and I cannot imagine anyone appearing in public without one-- though if the women have cut their hair short, in the modern style, they sometimes do not wear scarves, but usually they do; and the approximately three-quarters finished cigarette is just as much a fixture
-- the way no one ever appears to be in a hurry, as I would interpret being in a hurry; by my lights they are a calm, shy, extraordinarily polite, unruffled, stoic people, who sing at full volume indoors, giggle behind their hands while playing dominos, ride before they can run, and have all memorized a stanza or so of epic for state occasions; but I know I do not know how they behave when there are not guests, or what their body language means, or what they do when they die, or, in fact, where they go to the bathroom
-- and that is a very little of what I saw. You would have seen something entirely different, or some things that maybe overlapped, but that we each thought meant something different. Which she knows, the one who made this movie, and I can't help thinking that she did see everything I saw, and maybe everything you'd see, although not everything that's there to be seen, because I don't think anyone could do that. But she predicted very well what I would look at, and what I would make of it, and therefore would probably have done the same for you.
It did of course change me, watching this movie. And it tired me out, and I don't think I'm going to be able or want to watch any movies for probably quite a while, no matter how well I know them. I don't know if I can honestly recommend seeing this, because it was so much work it was literally painful, and I am not saying that bits of it weren't boring, the kind of boring you get when your brain shuts down from overload and will not do any more work for a while and puts up basically a 404 error.
But I saw a nine-hour documentary on Mongolian yak herders, and I enjoyed it, and it was a masterpiece.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:50 am (UTC)Nine
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 08:39 am (UTC)A bit of off topic, but when you wrote - "I would 'hear' something as having been a collection of random English words, although I knew rationally it was nothing of the kind, and so I would have to remind myself, no, that was not what you thought it said, you're making things up. Over and over again." - this reminded me listening to crows some time ago and being amused how I was hearning what I expected to hear - when I listened for the Estonian KRAAK, then that was what I head the crows saying and when I listened for CAWW, that was what I ended up hearing!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 01:20 pm (UTC)The Harvard Film Archive is one of the few things I miss about Boston.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 01:47 pm (UTC)a steeper angle than unmounted humans could walk, and then both men and deer swiveling suddenly to stare at a prop plane coming in below them to land next to the valley lake, surprise and delight on the faces of the men, the reindeer, the pilot
This is magic.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 12:48 am (UTC)In some ways closer. :-)
That is: I visited Mongolia for three weeks, but I spent two of that in Ulaanbaatar, which was a sprawling grid of crumbling grey apartment buildings, with internet cafes on every block and people playing pool on the sidewalks and pickpockets who know their business and students hawking paintings of the steppes and temples that were like and unlike Korean temples and...
And I went to the Naadam festival for the three days it was on. And I went to Kharkhorin, which was a ride in a minivan for ten hours on unpaved roads each way, and a night in a ger camp in miserable weather, and a day wandering around local ruins in mud and rain with mosquitoes biting me through my *hair*, and walking to... a suburb? of the town. I never actually figured it out, after wandering around lost-like I just went to a cantine where I chose a random soup from the menu and found it came with a slice of potato, which in great delight I saved until last, only to discover it wasn't potato, it was fat/gristle. And on the way back to the ger camp I met the driver of the minivan and negotiated for when he would come and pick me up to go back to Ulaanbaatar.
In Mongolian, of course, because if Mongolian failed they'd try Russian, which was never going to work; so then I spent hours the next morning wondering if I'd understood correctly, until he showed up - of course he was only late because the minivans wait until they've got enough passengers before they make the trip.
I've left out the friend I made when someone pickpocketed me on my first day, who met me every day for a week to take me to some museum or temple or other, or once to her family's ger. The language lessons were worth the money I lost.
But my point was -- even being in the country I never met any yak herders, and this film sounds fascinating, so I'm going to have to watch this the first opportunity I ever get.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 05:16 am (UTC)...Possibly the kind of full that Taiga was? It was hard work -- very rewarding, but definitely hard work. All the bad stuff that happened (including the pickpocketing) didn't matter, because the good stuff more than made up for it; but the everyday nuisances wore on me. Leaving after three weeks was good timing, because that was just when the culture shock of all that hard work was starting to kick in but hadn't quite. If I'd stayed just the wrong length of time I'd probably have ended up hating the place, but leaving after just the right length of time has kept the good and bad nicely balanced in my memory.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 03:00 pm (UTC)Did the film itself use "yurt"? I could have sworn that the Mongolian term is "ger" (and that "yurt" is actually Turkish), but I should recheck that.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 05:49 pm (UTC)