by Devin Leong
In his infamous manifesto, French critic Michel Mourlet pinpointed an essential property of cinema’s beauty: “a hypnotic state sustained by an incantation of gestures, gazes, minute movements of the face and the body, vocal inflections in which we lose ourselves before regaining possession of ourselves, expanded, lucid, and soothed.”1 Michael Roemer’s cinema is founded in this awareness. In his essay The Surfaces of Reality he wrote at length about cinema’s ability to capture minute gestures, motions that would remain lost on the stage or be impossible to translate to text: “Film thrives on this kind of intimate detail, […] The camera makes it possible to use the stuff of life itself.”’2 But Roemer isn’t concerned with making things beautiful, he knows the ontological matter that makes up his cinema: the faces, the friends and the spaces he films, expressing themselves naturally, are already beautiful. Though all his films betray a documentary impulse, Roemer’s only documentary feature, Dying (1976) displays this same profound humanism in how he films people. He works in the lineage of realism that passed through the Lumières, Hawks, Rossellini, Straub-Huillet, Warhol, Costa… the list goes on.
When asked by PBS to make four short documentaries on the topics of death and art, Roemer initially refused. In an interview, he recalled his response to his producers, which led to the inception of the film: “I said, the only people who are going to have any say in this matter are people close to death. There’s no point in talking to people who haven’t died and I don’t know anyone who has.”3 Making Dying, Roemer spent two years with forty terminal patients in Boston during their last days; his approach was not one of distance, he befriended the people he filmed. He still kept in contact with Harriet—the widow to-be of the film’s second chapter—up until his tragic passing this year. It’s an ethical approach similar to that of Antonio Reis: “I can tell you that we never shot with a peasant, a child or an old person, without having first become his pal or his friend.”4
And through his humanism, Roemer never loses sight of the world that surrounds his subjects. This is true even in a literal sense, a shot in the film’s first chapter begins with a close-up of Sally staring off-camera. The camera zooms out to reveal the hospital window, the cameraman moves to look outside at the trees and cars with her. Later, when Sally is at home being taken care of by her mother, the film cuts to a shot of the flowers outside her window, looking in. Roemer’s perspective is never singular, as is made even clearer in the second chapter, Harriet and Bill. Roemer films Harriet speaking to Bill’s doctor, breaking down as she wishes her husband would die earlier; the uncertainty of when he will die is a bigger fear than the certainty of death itself. It’s perhaps the ‘hardest’ part of the film to watch; words allude to possible futures, but also distant pasts. When Sally reminisces about being a “big healthy redhead climbing mountains all over” the apparatus of cinema is only able to neutrally affirm the present: Roemer cuts to her climbing up stairs with the help of an orderly.
Every chapter of the film ends with a title stating the date of our protagonists’ deaths. Roemer never films these people in their true final moments. In his fiction films he never filmed, or staged, death either, “We are pitting our own sense of reality against the movie-maker’s; needless to say, we come out on top and the scene is destroyed,”5 citing Dreyer’s never-made Christ film where the nails wouldn’t be filmed going through Christ’s hands, but rather through the back of the cross. When death occurs in Nothing but a Man (1964) and Pilgrim Farewell (1982), Roemer films life before and the earth after. He knew how sacred such a thing was, for him it couldn’t be staged, but the reality of it also shouldn’t be filmed. In the spirit of Bazin: “death must be experienced and cannot be represented without violating its nature,”6 and for Roemer, nature is all there is.
The film’s third and final chapter, filming the last days of Reverend Bryant, a preacher and pillar of his community, occupies half of the film’s runtime. Here, Roemer’s materialism fully reveals itself, the effect of death on a family expands to an entire community. This is why he breaks the pre-established structure in the film’s epilogue, after the final title card of Bryant’s death on January 23, 1975 (chronologically the earliest of the film) Roemer films his funeral, an event that unites an entire neighborhood in mourning.
Roemer’s camera explores the spaces that these people occupy, (to recall Costa, one might call it In Sally’s Room, In Harriet’s Room…) both in the presence and absence of them. Bill and Harriet’s children run around their kitchen, the lingering knowledge that they will lose a father far more overbearing than the noises of rowdy young boys making a mess. As Bryant is taken care of at home, Roemer shoots him through the gaps in the bodies of his family; windows are made through people, just as the windows in Sally’s hospital room and bedroom breathe life into these interiors, the care of people do as well.
Sally was in a coma, I remember going in and holding her hand—for my sake, not for hers. Suddenly Sally, who had not spoken a word, said “why?” We went to see her mother and she said, “I know why she said ‘why?’: she said ‘why didn’t you bring the camera?’”
The close-ups, or more precisely, the faces in Dying are the film’s foundational unit. Roemer’s editing constantly places these faces against the world. Bryant watches a young gospel choir rehearsing, the scene cuts between his face smiling at a hopeful future and that possible future in front of him, and us. Compare this to a scene of Bill at the lakeside with his children: the close-up on his face overlaid by the sound of his children playing, or back to the close-up of Harriet in tears with the doctor worrying for her future as a widowed mother. Again, Roemer does not need to imply anything; possible futures are present not only in words but in the eyes, smiles, and tears of the people he films. It would be crude to call this a standard ‘talking head’ documentary—it is hope, fear, the essence of life itself contained in close-ups. Dying isn’t a film about death but the final moments of living: it’s a film about life.
Devin Leong is a student and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They are currently studying History, Literature, and French. [Letterboxd] [Twitter]
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- Michel Mourlet, ‘Sur un art ignoré’, Cahiers du cinéma 98, 1959 ↩︎
- Michael Roemer, ‘The Surfaces of Reality’, Film Quarterly, Autumn, 1964 ↩︎
- Michael Roemer, ‘The Nonconformist: A Conversation with Michael Roemer’, Notebook, 2023 ↩︎
- Antonio Reis, Interview with António Reis, Cahiers du Cinéma 276, 1977 ↩︎
- ‘The Surfaces of Reality’ ↩︎
- Andrè Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’ ↩︎