by Ruairí McCann
This essay was published as part of our new, free digital zine, Intervals of Light & Darkness: A Collection of New & Selected Texts on the Cinema of Larry Gottheim. Download this publication here.
“On the final rainy evening in Santo Domingo, I returned to the hill opposite La Cementera. Life was stirring across there, between us there were intervals of darkness and silence. Voices blended into hum. It began speaking to me. I saw. I listened.”
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“We were travelling towards the Haitian frontier to […] where Oriol had relatives. It was hot, peaceful and still, but I felt I was approaching a frontier as profound as those that divide the heart and mind.”
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In Scott MacDonald’s Binghamtom Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967-1977, former student, the programmer Steve Anker recalls an inspiring moment and lesson from one of Larry Gottheim’s classes.
“Looking back, I realize that Larry had a profound impact on me during my first years at Binghamton. He caused us to think about perception, to take note of smallest details during a moment in a landscape, of things we’d otherwise barely be aware of. One large three-hour lecture class was conducted totally in the dark, and over time Larry pointed out objects in the room and qualities of light that few of us had ever noticed or thought about. That was also how he approached cinema, that it was both totally simple, yet wonderfully complex, a miracle medium that we could discover for ourselves.”
For Gottheim, film, this remarkable arbiter of light, is not only able to hone our vision and makes us see anew in a literal sense, but on a deeper, intellectual or even spiritual level. It can expose and help us understand the boundary lines of perception and representation, their socially informed nature and where the limits can be bent or broken.
This tendency to trace and lope what we can see and what eludes our sight, the fact that a myriad of cultural and social factors inform images, as much as the physical process of light beaming into our eyes, is the engine behind the recently restored Machete Gillette…Mama (1989). This film could be slotted in the old and often fusty, twinned genres of the ethnographic film and the travelogue, but its lack of either clear paths, surface-level generalities or easy assumptions sets it apart. Instead, it materialises as an insistent, productive haze, striated with doubt and blurred lines of connection.
Shot over a period of a year when Gottheim, along with his friends and guides, Isidro, Oriel and Victor, and a 16mm camera, travelled across the Dominican Republic. Although his travels include in and around the capital Santo Domingo, he mainly moves between the communities and sugar cane fields that dot the border with Haiti, a splintered region haunted by past and ongoing eruptions of mass violence and discrimination, such as the 1937 Parsley Massacre where the Dominican army and militias, under the command of dictator Rafael Trujillo, murdered and expelled tens of thousands of Haitians. In this contested zone, Gottheim spends most of his time in the ‘bateys’, government-designated, but woefully neglected, settlements to which Haitian seasonal sugar workers are tied in a form of indentured servitude.
True to Gottheim’s position as a free-floating, privileged stranger among people whose lives are unmoored and limited by toil and the loose, unspoken and rigidly enforced demarcations of a divided land, there are no contiguous sounds or surfaces, no big picture. We are given instead a pointillist rendering of a series of impressions, which moves swiftly and sporadically, in a spray of images, ranging from a few seconds long to considerably less. There are hardly any establishing shots, and the screen is regularly engulfed in bodies caught up in a variety of activities, laborious, tender, jovial, desultory, communal and mysterious. The people that Gottheim films often notice the camera and seem to treat it varyingly with curiosity, bemusement, boredom and annoyance. In short, these are not people corralled and coerced into some pageantry for the sake of the camera, nor is there any pretence that the camera is some invisible, value-free observer. The acts and experience of watching and being watched are pushed to the forefront and perform a complex interplay.
In some ways, the narration is the film’s anchor through this dizzying and distancing mosaic. Composed of Gottheim’s log of his travels, it gives us an oral map and some idea of his motivations, and yet it also metastasises the film’s complex web of associations and dissociations. It is, for the most part, a narration written by the filmmaker from his perspective. Its point of view is clearly of someone unfamiliar with DR, speaking with a speculative and formalist quality that is very much in the style of Gottheim’s other writings. For example, the frequent mention of ‘intervals’. And yet the voice we hear is not Gottheim’s, but a Dominican man called Bernardo Román, speaking in English.
On top of these two interlaid identities, there are other distortions and fissures. Moments where other perspectives feed into Gottheim’s account, such as when the narrator suddenly says:
“As I returned to my hometown, Moca, I saw the line of people waiting to visit prisoners in the fort. Haunted by ghosts and memories of the Trujillo dictatorship, I visited the cemetery where my family lies.”
Perhaps this is Bernardo not merely reciting but weaving in his own story, or else a description of Isidro whose own sorrowful homecoming is one of the film’s major threads. It could very well be an imagined figure; the proposed musings of one of the many caught glancingly by Gottheim’s lens asserting their presence, or else it is a ghost, stuck earthbound but invisible and forgotten, until the film apparatus came along to give voice to their lonesome state. Or maybe all are the case, or none. At one point Gottheim states that he is collecting images to articulate ‘Haitian and Dominican realities’. This overlapping multiplicity of voices posits that the sprouting and congealing of many different possible interpretations is a way of avoiding misrepresenting these manifold realities through a form and language that is sealed-off, reductive and dehumanising.
This welter of richly disarraying of images, voices and ideas ends not with a tidy conclusion. Instead the ‘thread is broken’, severed by a calamity and a serious encounter with state power. We are told that Isidro has been arrested following a hit and run incident which occurred while he was driving without a license in a car rented under Gottheim’s name. In an attempt to get his friend released, Gottheim asks the police to list himself as the driver, which leads to him spending a day and a half in jail. While up to this point, the film has hurtled outdoors or, if indoors, in domestic and recreational spaces, suddenly we are thrust into the sterile and hostile bureaucratic zones of a police station and then the courts.
Gottheim himself finally appears on screen, as a roving, tense figure mired in this Kafkaesque situation. Until he is spat out of this nexus of power and left to wander in a state of disarray through the centre of Santo Domingo, which is undergoing extensive demolition. It is a fitting end for a work of decisive indecision. Governed by the tumultuous vicissitudes of being a personal and a collective expression of an outsider, attempting to encompass an immense, unfolding landscape of many possible perspectives which stretch from the fraught but vivid hinterland of Hispaniola to the playful shadow boxing of two lovers.
Ruairí McCann is an Irish writer, curator, illustrator and musician. He has contributed to various publications, such as photogénie, aemi online, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook, Documentary Magazine, Film Hub NI and Sight & Sound.
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