Nowhere special

Some places get under your skin, exerting allure whatever their come-hither attractions, or spectacular lack of same.  Paris.  London.  New York.  Bombay.  Rome.  Destinations celebrated for revelry, eye candy, plunder and so much more. 

Swindon?  It's mention as must-see stop in southwest England begs the inevitable question: why?

Not so much off the beaten path as off the guidebook radar.  No quaint history, no monument of note, no picturesque setting to entice casual detours.  Whatever its other qualities, Swindon isn't one of those "finds" savvy travelers happen upon, never mind set out for.  

Unless, of course, you happen to be us.  Three sisters on a sentimental journey. 

In 2012, my two sisters and I—plus a friend I manage to drag along (the invisible shutterbug above)—set off for our father’s home in Swindon, England.  Lucky coincidence and generous happenstance conspire to create a memory-lane itinerary—highlighting Swindon and Cardiff—of our father's design.  Growing up in Trinidad, at the southern end of the archipelago known in the day as the Lesser Antilles, England was be-all, end-all mother country and cultural beacon still to colonials like us.  Years after the Queen's arrival to proclaim independence, my younger sister and I still sat common entrance exams and shared the fever dream of studying in Britain via scholarships.  America and Canada might be bright up and coming stars, but England was the sun. 

In 1973 I graduated from high school in Florida where my family had decamped after leaving Trinidad four years earlier. (See October 1970 backstory.)  That summer my parents decided to take me and my younger sister still living at home on something of a “grand tour.”  England, including our dad's old stomping grounds of London and Swindon, formed the heart of our travels. 

A lifetime later, my older sister— the one "born there"—returns to a place she's connected with incidentally, not from memory.  It’s an unremarkable place to include on any visit of the sceptred isle.  On arrival at our destination,  I find the hedges and lushness of distant memory literally paved over.  The small front lawns—so typically "English" in the early 70's, as in my father’s day—now parking stalls.  The elderly couple next door who came out with their middle-aged son to greet my father—their neighbour from so long ago—are themselves long gone.

What's missing in tourist pamphlets and billboard advertisements is the house's situation as my older sister’s birthplace.  That she has spent her life away from this isolated event, having been removed as a young child under the worst of circumstances, her mother’s painful demise.  My sister’s mother—our father’s first wife—had left Guyana—then British Guiana—for England shortly after the War ended.  She would have met and courted her fiancé largely through photographs, family, and letters.  For all intents and purposes a latter-day picture bride, she would have found life in Swindon, then a sleepy semi-industrial town, entirely foreign.  Like the man she married, she was well past youth.  How she got along in her marriage, whether she was content, how she coped with what we now conveniently ascribe to culture shock—none of us can guess.  Not long into her marriage, however, and shortly after my sister’s birth, she developed uterine cancer.  Her husband, who had spent years carefully building up an accounting practice as a precursor to family life with a new bride, must have been devastated.   Whenever he spoke of those times to us as children, it was always with a sense of fatalism, as if no other course was possible or even thinkable.  As if the only path for him was to sell everything and take his little girl and dying wife home to her birthplace, where she could at least be in familiar surroundings, with her own family for comfort.

I can’t imagine the shock and distress he must have suffered.  Or the upheaval and disorientation my sister must have gone through.  One of the family stories regularly told was my sister’s first encounter with black people in Guyana.   Almost on cue, she asked why they didn't (just) wash.  We jeered at her ignorance then; her only contact—aside from her parents and maybe rare Chinese acquaintances—would have been with white people in England.

We arrive at 30 Langford Grove on a Friday morning to find the fondly recalled cul-de-sac of family lore mostly empty of cars and hum.  On first impression the street looks drab, less English quaint, less cared for than a lifetime ago.  This time, however, there is no garden enclosure, no barrier to the front door.  Against both my sisters’ better judgment, I knock on the door.  We have come so far, I silently insist, we will not go away quietly.  After a pause, a man appears.  He’s a scuffy, middle-aged bloke with glasses and a close-cropped head, probably stunned to be facing down no less than four Asian women on his doorstep. 

I relate who we are and why we’re here.  Assessing our threat, he essays us in.  We crowd into the large, newly renovated kitchen at the rear and listen to John recount how he came into the house from his grandfather.  The same man who built the homes of Langford Grove that sold to our dad.  John relates how his grandfather divulged details of what, apart from its coveted location at the "end" of the cul-de-sac, set this particular house apart from the others he built along the street.  A sensible, modest project for its time.  An appealing home in which to settle and raise a family.  As the compact scale of the original house reminds us, these were modest dwellings built right after the War, the likes of which are probably widespread throughout Britain.  Our dad, a Chinese bachelor, took a chance on Swindon, a quiet unassuming town near Wales, to settle into.

Swindon didn't disappoint him.  That he was accepted—even sought after in one account, by a particular divorcée—was no small feat.  Not only was he able to establish himself as an accountant —albeit under an English pseudonym—he became secure enough to acquire and operate a second business, a beauty salon.  His social stature in town was a source of fond pride; he enjoyed participating in Swindon life as a business owner, even joining the local association of beauty salons.  I picture him on his rounds at the beauty parlour—inspecting the equipment, interacting with staff, making small talk with customers. 

In all he spent more than 20 years becoming English. His wife’s untimely death forced him to a second crisis—the first left him bald not long after arrival—that saw him sell off and abandon a life he had taken great care to build.  He returned to the country he had left as a hopeful young man.  It was like stepping back in time; very little progress had occurred, nothing like the sweeping changes he had seen in England.  Here he found himself odd man out, almost a foreigner in his own country.  Gradually over time, Swindon receded into a trove of amusing vignettes of bachelor life highlighted by very occasional glimpses of withering isolation.  

John hesitantly offers tea, which we politely decline; intruders, after all, hardly guests. We are fortunate catching him, a car mechanic, home on one of his off shifts.  The room we're in, he relates, is an expansion of the small functional kitchen of the original house.  He has lived here probably longer than our dad ever did, long enough to convert the modest backyard of previous owners—where our dad grew brussell sprouts and hoped for frost to sweeten them—into a Japanese-style garden with pond and bridge.

For an unremarkable place—its depressed core showing signs of the global recession—Swindon is ordinary even shabby, a kind of nowhere young people escape from.   And perhaps more than occasionally—as with John—come back to.  Unexciting, perhaps, but more importantly, affordable.  Swindon's selling point—its safe dependability—sustains lives like John's. After the Blitz in London, and working on agricultural teams early in the war, it might have seemed a relative haven of potential to David Bennett.  Somewhere you could keep your head down and get on with the business of ordinary life.  Here he could imagine settling down, putting out a shingle, finding a wife and raising a family.   Not to pin his hopes too high, but there could be a future.  It was close to Wales, a beautiful place he was sure to visit—didn't they name a saint after him there?  With a bit of luck and hard work, he might even thrive. 

Body of Work

So simple and direct.  An artist agrees to sit still in a space, across from anyone who cares to sit in her presence, every day for going on 70 days.  An ordeal, a stunt, the distillation of a body of work to its most essential.  Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present charts the progress of artist Abramovic’s title piece for her monumental retrospective of performance art held at MOMA in New York in 2010.

Near the end of the film of the same title, the show’s curator Klaus Biesenbach describes the work as self-portraiture.  The art and artist are inseparable, both are present simultaneously.  Through her physical, live presence and mute stillness, Abramovic is both art object and art maker. The human aspect of her feat is never absent; she is adamant about the mental preparation necessary for the work of being present to thousands of visitors.  And watching her with a succession of sitters, the effect is unquestioningly moving.  Many sitters find tears welling up and trickling down their faces.  Is it the cumulative exhaustion of waiting for their time with the artist?  Or does the simple act of undiminished presence—minus distraction or digression—move people in unexpected ways?

When a young woman, inspired by Abramovic’s work and example, attempts an intervention of her own, she — like another would-be art upstager — is removed.  Where the male interventionist wants to confront Abramovic wearing a screened image over his face —providing another layer of comment or response to her work—the young would-be nudist seems less calculated, more naively in thrall to what she perceives as an opportunity to be spontaneous and “in the moment.”  There’s a part of me that questions why the security guards don’t permit her to remain.  Do they fear the work becoming some sort of sideshow, with sitters using their turn with Abramovic to perform bizarre stunts?   These two viewers want to turn the gallery into an ersatz theatre, adding themselves as performers to what is already a carefully calibrated performance.

Looking at art when the art can also look back, breathe, and emote.  That’s what “The Artist is Present” is all about.  In every way, this piece is a summation of Abramovic’s work, paring back her earlier provocative, often disturbing pieces, to their minimal essence: viewer and art.   No noise, distractions, props, and only minimal movement.  By taking Biesenbach’s cue in titling the retrospective The Artist is Present, Abramovic underlines the quintessential aspect of all art: its relationship to the viewer.  In this particular case, however, it also speaks to the endurance of the artist herself, whose performance exists only in time, not space.

The conundrum of how a performance artist survives within a commodified art market is touched on by Abramovic’s gallerist.  Through the sale of stills of her performance pieces, he created a mechanism to fund her work that has since increased in demand.  In her work and on camera, Abramovic is striking, a woman fully in control of her medium and confident of her impact.  Not that she’s immune to nerves; days leading up to the exhibition’s opening, she is seen vomiting and sick in bed from anxiety about the endurance test ahead.  One of the most moving encounters during The Artist is Present occurs near the beginning when Ulay, her former partner and collaborator of twelve years, sits across from her.  As she opens her eyes and recognizes him, tears well in her eyes as they do in his.  Breaking from her posture of stillness, she reaches across the table for his outstretched hands.  Applause breaks across the gallery.  

The glimpses of their work together—along with hints at their life as a couple—are tantalizing.  Abramovic was clearly the instigator of several of the pieces.  Her strength and stamina—a legacy of her war hero parents—are acknowledged by Ulay who found himself unable to withstand the physical toll of "Nightsea Crossing."  In that piece, Ulay and Abramovic silently fasted across from each other sitting at a table, in some durations, for several weeks at a time.  Later in the film, Ulay addresses the distance Abramovic has travelled in her career, her dedication to her art, the fact that she, unlike other contemporaries, is still making demanding performances.  If there’s a touch of envy of her fame and comfortable stature—we see her delight in designer couture—there is also respect and admiration.

If she were not so seductive—Biesenbach astutely describes his relationship with Abramovic as an affair—the artist would seem dauntingly formidable.  Moments of humour and candour go far in leavening the rigorous discipline and determination that feed her work.  It’s heartening to catch a glimpse of her at play with David Blaine, a magician, who wants to stage something “special” for the exhibition.  When her gallerist hears of Blaine’s proposal, he immediately shuts it down and Abramovic agrees.  With a history of work taking performance art’s examination of the body to dangerous extremes, Abramovic is alert to her gallerist’s distinction between her work’s reputation for absolute reality and magic’s true claim to illusion.

That art was once entirely illusionistic seems largely old hat.  Yet watching footage of Abramovic’s earlier work and recreations of her historic pieces where the performers are mostly nude, connections with the-Nude-in art are hard to miss.  If the radical performance artists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s sought to attack the nude as subject, the cumulative effect of Abramovic’s work seems to have revived what might otherwise have seemed academic.  Having to literally walk through the narrow space between a nude couple facing each other, museum visitors must come in physical contact with one or both nudes.

While the bane of performance art may always be the ease with which it can be dismissed as a stunt, The Artist is Present shows a range of viewer responses that the apparently average 30-second view of traditional paintings and sculpture does not enjoy.   Confronted by art, with the artist, present, so-called ordinary folk are moved by what is a unique and personal experience.

Pina

Spectrally thin, a woman shuffles blindly in a corner of a stage littered with black wooden cafe chairs.   More than 20 years ago Café Müller took the stage at Ryerson Theatre in Toronto.  I am with my husband in Vancouver watching a film called Pina begin on a stage in an empty theatre.  In Toronto I am the same and different, married to a different man. Diaphanous drapery parts to reveal archival and recent footage of Pina Bausch and her extraordinary company of dancers.  At intermission, loam is spread over the stage for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.  One by one dancers file past the camera, walking offstage onto a field of grass.

Le Sacre du Printemps and Café Müller—two touchstones of her remarkable repertoire—are intercut by Wim Wenders, the first of many such intrusions, by short "signature" pieces from individual dancers.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear (?) these dances—often following brief silent "interviews" dubbed with personal recollections of Bausch in voice over—are tributes to their late and much-loved mentor.

Near the end of Pina one of the dancers identifies yearning as a key emotion in Bausch's relentless search for expression.  That search yielded  breathtaking moments.  Seeing Pina tonight reminds me of what drew me to theatre.  

The way she continually pushed against what's safe and feasible.  Her refusal to acknowledge limits in her dancers, in space, in venues: Full Moon features a huge rock the dancers climb and leap from into a shallow pool of water that threatens to engulf the stage.  Elemental is how one of her dancers assesses her approach;  that's what I recall from Ryerson Theatre.

Seeing her work liberated from the confines of a black box theatre—danced literally and dangerously close to the edge of a dusty cliff, astride a natural stream, in traffic, aboard public transit—feels natural for someone who blurred the line between theatre and dance, whose interpolations of natural movement and non-dancers inhabited the dialogue between art and life.  The daring of her work springs from a personal, whole-hearted embrace of pain without glamour, her willingness to literally go up against a wall time and again.

To have seen two of her signature pieces live; what a gift.  Watching the film I look back at my younger self, for whom that performance meant so much.  And now, what's important has invariably changed as I have, unlike Pina who remains constant, forever now.   Watching Pina and her amazing dancers—each with their own tics and wholly individual cares and griefs—so many feelings arise.

 Melancholy, yes, recognition, unquestionably, and everywhere beauty.  And wonder.  Beauty born of grief, spun from exhilaration.  Beauty from ugliness, clumsiness, missteps, falling down hard and rising without counting the cost.  Her work is spare and elegant, even as she mucks about with dirt and has two male dancers spurt water from their mouths at each other.  There's nothing crude or lewd about the intense physicality of her choreography; what's evident time and again is her embrace of what can't be known: the missed moment, the forgotten love, the wrong partner relentlessly pursued, the inescapable eventuality of hurt, solitude, silence.  Yet her work is anything but dreary or ponderous; she constantly pushes against what cannot be, but must.  That's what makes her stagings so exciting: the rules are broken and the performers exult in abandon at the freedom to play.

Wenders wisely shoots the offstage dances in both contained and open spaces, reflecting Bausch's appreciation of stillness and formal geometry on the one hand, and her need to defy limits that saw her bring the natural world onstage.  So immersed in materiality, Bausch allows her dancers to soar, to kick up their heels in pools of water while sketching worlds of loss and longing brought into heartbreaking, thrilling focus.

No Exit, Deliverance

James Loney

What is captivity but a kind of living hell?  To live comfortably inside one's skin without imposed limits on spatial mobility forms the basis of individual autonomy, what we generally regard as freedom and liberty.  By contrast, the horror of entrapment coupled with physical and sexual abuse or torture forms a chilling dungeon to the larger cells of imprisonment and detention. 

To be held hostage — even intellectually to an idea — connotes a kind of injustice, being held against one’s will.   Yet self-willed captivity — seclusion, cloistering, solitude, isolation — exists as an option for religious, creative artists, hermits, misanthropes and contrarians of all stripes.  Writer and artist colonies proliferate in the belief and practice of creating conditions against habitual routine, inducing focus via isolation. 

No such illusions guide prisons, detention centres or any number of wretched locales where hostages are trapped and hidden.

Ingrid Betancourt held captive by FARC

To compare the terrifying circumstances of hostages —abductees whose lives are forcibly held — to the self-imposed isolation undertaken by creators or cloistered religious orders would be outrageous.   Yet sustained confinement— regardless of cultural/social/political context— has unmistakable, common effects.  Without the distractions of day-to-day routine, minds enclosed by physical constraints necessarily turn inward.  The dangers of enforced introspection — being trapped in one’s own consciousness from sensory or social deprivation — are frightening to contemplate.  That way madness surely lies.

In recent hostage narratives — three about several years of captivity in Colombia, one about being held in Iraq — the writers have to endure not only the constant threat represented by their captors, but also the uneasy company of fellow hostages.

My trek through these post-modern seasons in hell began with Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence Has an End and concluded with James Loney’s Captivity.  In between were parallel Columbian accounts: Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle and Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell.  (As a sidebar I watched Hunger, British artist Steve McQueen’s provocative immersion into Bobby Sands and the IRA’s “dirty protest” of the ‘70’s in Belfast’s infamous Maze prison.)

What’s fascinating about the experiences of the hostages in Colombia are the jungle-specific privations, as much as the particular insights and self-reflection offered by the different narrators.  As a genre, prison memoirs derive value from the quality, range and depth of concerns their writers tackle.  The sheer duration of the Colombian hostages’ experiences taxes comprehension.  Not weeks or even months but years were logged in the Colombian jungle.  (Some hostages, contemporary with Betancourt and the others, remain under FARC control.) By contrast, James Loney’s account of four spartan months holed up in suburban Baghdad seems mercifully brief.    Externally, the two sets of circumstance could not be further apart.  Yet all the hostage accounts touch on issues of faith and the “hell of other people” that is enforced captivity with strangers.

Ingrid Betancourt's incredible ordeal — six and a half years as hostage of the FARC revolutionary paramilitary in Colombia — is related in often excruciating detail in her gripping account, Even Silence Has an End.  Opening the book, she plunges the reader immediately into the gritty struggle of day-to-day existence: an early escape attempt with Clara (Rojas), assistant on Betancourt's presidential campaign, captured at the same time in February 2002 opens the book.  The two women's shifting, wary regard of each other informs each of their books.   Given the extreme circumstances that tested their particular friendship, it’s not surprising each woman would seek to justify her conduct under duress, after the fact.

Intensely personal and necessarily introspective, Even Silence has an End finds Betancourt burrowing into experiences she would have shrunk from imagining in her previous existence as a member of Colombia's educated elite.  The degradations of near constant moves in the hostile jungle — swarming with voracious insects in all-too-real horror-movie 3-D — are chronicled from a distinctly female perspective.  Betancourt's subjective record of her captivity — the shifting society of fellow captives, FARC guards, commanders, and rangueras (guerrilla girlfriends) — provides compelling episodes easily imagined in cinematic images.

FARC rangueras

There are daring escape attempts: two (at least) with Clara as unwilling or obtuse participant that land both in a cage from which the book begins.  Much later comes an extended attempt with Lucho, a fellow politician whose friendship became a lifeline.   Their capture — after surviving hours adrift in treacherous Amazonian waters, against hunger and the danger of Lucho's lapse into diabetic shock — is heart-rending if somewhat inevitable.  Not so Pinchao, a policeman whom Bagaietancourt befriends and urges to escape, successfully.  These episodes are recounted with Mission Impossible-style details remarkable for their vivid recall.

FARC hideout

Besides the grinding despair that captivity induces, Betancourt's chief bête noire, like Loney’s, is boredom.  To relieve the endless stretches of wasted time — as days become months become years — she devises strategies to cope with the hostility of fellow captives as much as the depredations or reprisals from guards.    She finds surprising allies in some FARC guerrillas — her appraisal of the women in particular is noteworthy for the unspoken solidarity gender alone can allow— and is conversely disillusioned or disappointed in others in whom she invested more.  Betancourt's treatment of Clara's pregnancy, the birth of her child and its care by the FARC provide opaque glimpses of circumstances fraught with uncomfortable questions.  Amongst the most moving passages in the book are Betancourt's regular invocations of family: her father, whose death she uncovers inadvertently early on in captivity; her mother whose faithful radio messages and tireless diplomatic efforts provide an emotional backbone; and her own children, Melanie and Lorenzo, whose teenage milestones she is cruelly aware of missing.  Given Betancourt's heightened awareness of her own pivotal role as mother and daughter, her discomfort with Clara's desperation to have a child and her subsequent pregnancy under duress, reads as unsympathetic, yet credible.  The strains of being the only women prisoners — to say nothing of their unwilling co-habitation in the early years — etch the divides of habit, class, and personality between Betancourt and Rojas that would otherwise be overlooked in civil society.  Under the constraints and caprices of enforced captivity, their quotidian interactions degenerate into petty squabbles.  The tendency to assert dominance and control in the absence of any real self-determination becomes the source of the hostages' bitter descent into feuds and friction. 

Ecuadorean soldiers uncover abankdoned FARC camp (Rodrigo Buendia, AFP, Getty Images)

Betancourt, assuming leadership tactics time and again, becomes a target of resentment and hostility amongst the other captives.  Her refusal to capitulate to the FARC's agenda of defeat fuels her quest to improve her own condition as much as those of the other prisoners.   Aware her identity and sense of self are giving way under captivity's boot, Betancourt adopts whatever tools she can muster against derangement.  Books — a dictionary and Bible as well as Harry Potter — become touchstones and beacons to the world outside.  The radio — with its regular broadcast to the hostages of messages from families — becomes a cherished, if contentious, lifeline.  Even her status as a dual citizen of France and Colombia, itself a source of derision and division within the camps, eventually works to her advantage as she uses her fluency to teach guerilleras and prisoners alike.

What ultimately sustains Betancourt throughout her extended ordeal in the jungle is faith.  She writes of her relationship to God and the Virgin Mary as a given: faith as consolation, as constant even in anger, hard-won and tested by seemingly endless physical hardships yet never abandoned.  Betancourt's journey of faith — her practice of prayer, her insistence on the Bible as a source of spiritual as much as cultural survival — and her own privations and sufferings do not, despite their moving account, endow her conduct with irreproachable virtue.  The complexities of the story she relates — the enforced society of strangers united only by captivity, the manipulations of the guerrilla leaders in managing the hostages' profiles to the world at large, the daunting logistics of survival within and escape from the camps and relentless jungle marches — mitigate against easy binary appraisals. [Fellow captives Clara Rojas and the trio of American hostages with whom she shared prison time in the jungle —one of whom she became close to — have each published disparate, often pointedly critical accounts.  Rojas' Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle preceded Betancourt's publication by more than six months.  Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle by Marc Goncalves, Keith Stansell and Tom Howes (with Gary Brozek) was published about a year ahead of Even Silence has an End.]

What emerges over the course of hundreds of page-turning action and reflection is the scope of wretchedness that was Betancourt's season in hell.  That it was relieved by snatches of friendship, glimmers of decency against all odds and calculation, displays of humanity as humbling as the all-pervasive filth and deprivation are testament to Betancourt's ability to sound the beat of this particular heart of darkness.  Not surprisingly her life post-captivity — the book ends with the triumphant release of a select group of hostages in a dramatic rescue operation — has been fraught with controversy.  Lionized on the Oprah show following the book's launch, Betancourt latest struggle has been a suit from her former husband claiming proceeds from the book's sales.

By contrast, Clara Rojas’ Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle—was written less than a year after freedom.  At a third the length of Betancourt's memoir and Out of Captivity by the trio of American hostages, Rojas' account often reads as opaque, less a thoughtful record of experience than a justification — to herself as much as her son — of lost years of wretched captivity.  

In many moments of Captive, she addresses Emmanuel directly seeking to explain and justify the brutality she experienced.  However, one key part of the puzzle is purposely left out.  Comfortable enough recounting the woefully inadequate FARC responses to the practical demands of pregnancy and birth on the move in the jungle, Rojas sidesteps curiosity about the baby's father with a vow of privacy, undertaken for her son's protection.   It's understandable she would resist disclosure as a violation of privacy, needing to exercise this most fundamental right to protect herself and Emmanuel.  The bitter truth of captivity shared by the three linked hostage narratives from Columbia — Even Silence Has an End, Captive, and Out of Captivity — is the destruction of any sense of personal destiny.  Trapped in mind-numbing routines of haphazard marches and encampment dictated by the FARC, the hostages wage an uphill battle to maintain a sense of self against grinding, relentless odds.  Tormented by doubts surrounding her decision to accompany Betancourt, Rojas’ refusal to disclose the identity of Emmanuel's father on the grounds of personal privacy is hardly surprising.  Unfortunately, the resort to secrecy leaves a gaping hole in her narrative.  While it’s still absorbing to discover the details of the FARC’s fumbling attempts to cope with an unscripted event like pregnancy and childbirth, Rojas provides little insight into her state of mind then and after, regardless of naming names.  How much more moving and inspiring her story might have been if she had been able to find a way other than omission to probe her own feelings of motherhood in extremis.

Where Betancourt’s and Rojas’ are distinctly female voices, Out of Captivity: Surviving 1947 days in the Colombian Jungle offers the overlapping accounts of three male hostages: Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell, Americans hired by a privately contracted company as part of the official US war on drugs.  A year after Betancourt and Rojas are captured, Gonsalves, Stansell and Howes literally crash into FARC-occupied jungle on February 23, 2003.  On a regular surveillance mission to monitor drug-related operations in the Colombian jungle, their plane’s engine fails and they are forced to crash land.  Emerging from the wreckage, they and two other survivors are quickly surrounded by FARC guerrillas whose leader, Sonia, separates them into two groups.  Wounded, wearing street clothes only, the authors embark on what turns out to be a grueling 22-day trek through mountainous jungle made extra challenging by Colombia’s high altitude.   The punishing marches undertaken by the FARC — necessary to avoid detection by the Colombian army — are encountered in all three books.   Pain, exhaustion, mud, and the relentless pace set by the guerillas over endless days (and often nights) of marching are constants.  What’s reported in the Americans’ account — missing from the two native Columbians’ — is the factor of altitude.  This explains the cold nights related in passing by Betancourt in a supposedly tropical country around the equator.

Out of Captivity benefits from its three narrators each taking turns providing individual eyewitness-type accounts.  They corroborate each others’ testimony, often arriving at shadings of meaning by an accrual of details.   Their responses to Betancourt and the contingent of political hostages around her are revealing.  Stansell dismisses Betancourt as high-handed, essentially a snob, and untrustworthy.   His overall appraisal, though not entirely unsympathetic at specific incidents, remains remarkably consistent.  Gonsalves’ relationship to Betancourt undergoes a more dramatic arc: from wary indifference to intense friendship and guarded intimacy, even jealousy.  In Betancourt’s account, desire is endorsed in the FARC’s jungle operations, with couplings and rivalries amongst the captors regularly noted.  Its more renegade counterpart, love, however, is pretty near impossible.  The would-be lovers’ efforts are doomed by the circumstances of captivity, large and small.  Ingenious contrivances adopted against their captors’ vigilance unravel under prolonged separation, as suspicion and resentment replace romantic longing.

If Even Silence Has an End succeeds as a kind of gritty, real-life romantic thriller—Captive and Out of Captivity serve largely as apologias, largely aimed at “setting the record straight.” James Loney’s angle on Captivity is an extended argument for pacifism against his experience as a hostage in Iraq.   Faith is what propels Loney to Iraq in 2005.  An activist Catholic raised in Sault Ste. Marie, later based in Toronto, Loney joins Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization dedicated to non-violent witness as peaceful intervention in violent conflicts.  Taking their cue from the Apostles, CPT members consciously choose to mingle with groups and individuals working for peace against the overwhelming presence of armed conflict.  In November 2005, the CPT Iraqi group comprising Loney, Harmeet Sooden, Tom Fox, and Norman Kember are abducted en route to a meeting with an Islamic group, the Muslim Scholars.   They are held in two houses for 118 days.  During that time, the carrot of freedom is repeatedly dangled before them; its opposite outcome is visited upon Tom Fox, whose military background — despite having served strictly as a musician without combat experience — likely contributes to his murder. 

Whereas Betancourt suffered distinct periods of being chained in solitary punishment for her escape attempts, Loney and the others are regularly chained together as a condition of confinement.  As with the Colombian hostages, survival issues of food and hygiene become paramount, with personal humiliation recounted as testament to the debasing conditions of captivity.    Living intensely with a succession of individuals they nickname “Junior,” “Uncle,” “Medicine Man,” each of the four hostages adopts strategies to cope with the endless boredom.  Marveling at Sooden’s general composure, irritated by Fox’s insistence on “being in the now”—an odd echo of the American hostages’ mantra of choosing the “hard right thing”  in the face of the FARC’s revolutionary caprices—Loney exposes his own turmoil and impatience with his fellow hostages as much as his captors.    More so than their US counterparts in Colombia, the Iraqi hostages are united by a common mission as peacemakers; that unity, however, is challenged at one point as the avowedly Christian aspect of Christian Peacemaker Teams is called into question by Sooden, a Sikh.  

Harmeet Sooden, CPT member

Unlike Betancourt, Loney does not attempt escape.  Not that he doesn’t consider or fantasize about it.  In both instances, however, the tight circumstances of the group—their weakened physical condition to say nothing of their lack of Arabic in immediately hostile surroundings—check impulses toward freedom.  As troubling as Loney finds this acceptance of their fate, he becomes aware of his captors’ parallel experience.  As they wait for Medicine Man to once again deliver the latest news of Godot-like negotiations for their release, the hostages observe their captors’ liberty as constrained by much the same factors as theirs.  That jailers necessarily partake of imprisonment is not revelatory.  As a peace activist, however, Loney fingers the cult of violence and conflict that leads to situations that enslave captor and captive alike.  Later, following liberation by a British-led international rescue team, Loney is cautioned against Stockholm syndrome coloring his concern for the fate of his captors. 

In his introduction and post-liberation, Loney ponders the paradox of his release effected not through negotiation but by force, the very action he had gone to Iraq to oppose.  He notes how every army or violent force throughout history has operated under the conviction that they were right, that they were “the good guys.”  He observes how this same principle animates the “bad guys” who abducted the CPT team, even as they cheer and identify with the “good guys” in the Hollywood action movies they watch to kill time.   For them as for the soldiers who liberate the hostages, there is no irony.   For Loney, every side in the struggle sees themselves as the good guys, even in situations of occupation like Iraq.

For all these hostages, the hell of slow erasure—acclimation to everyday privations, piecemeal bargains with self and others over petty advantages, accommodation to filth and constant fear, chronic lack of privacy—is over.  What’s invaluable in the best of these narratives is the quality of witness: the courage to relive wretchedness all over again, not for cringe-inducing reality-TV notoriety, but as a necessary journey toward true catharsis.  In our media-saturated, irony-laden culture of overdrive, It’s rare to find—never mind seek out—gritty, old-fashioned forms of release based not on (self) indulgence but its opposite.  Without so much as a whiff of the other much more taboo “s” word, Silence and Captivity resonate as chronicles of enforced self-reflection, the void of captivity—its grinding sense of time irretrievably lost—offered up as hapless sacrifice at the altar of freedom inseparable from existence.

I confess [the app]

Ah the confessional app,  push-button answer to feel-bad guilt, the download generation's escape valve for nagging conscience on a data plan.  
Bless me facebook for I have sinned... it has been a million seconds since my last status update ... I accuse myself of following these tweets ...

Hunger | Artist

Everything about British artist Steve McQueen's extraordinary film Hunger holds surprises.  For one there's the filmmaker himself and his famous doppelganger; it's hard not to banish the popular movie icon of The Getaway or any number of other action flicks.  And after watching Hunger, it's tempting to assume or at least wonder if its author might be Irish.

But Hunger is no easy work of art. (And whatever his name's origins, McQueen's visage immediately places him within the Grenadian and Trinidadian continuum that is his heritage.)
Whatever drove McQueen to focus on IRA prison protestor Bobby Sands and his infamous hunger strike at the Maze prison in 1981 remains mysterious. 
 Yet the film — as much as the history that inspired it — is compelling, and horrific; distasteful to watch — depictions of the "dirty" protest prison cells smeared with excrement start early in the film — yet riveting and unforgettable.  The uncompromising, deliberate attention to details reveals its strategy in one brief scene where prison guards in riot gear are brought in by the regular guards who spit on a mirror and polish it.  McQueen seems to be doing much the same throughout the film: despoiling a looking glass and holding it up for both self-reflection and see-through perception.  He invites the audience to look at the often gut-wrenching images he stages, at the actors in them, and at the responses the actors and images give rise to.  The images of the prisoners — extremely thin, often naked, beaten — contrasts with the neatness of the prison guards. 

McQueen's guards are not strutting sadists;  they are grimly methodical.  McQueen's empathy for the guards — his complicity with them — is revealed during a particularly harrowing sequence of beatings when one of the guards in riot gear is shown out of his helmet, tears streaming down his face.  (In a 2009 interview in W magazine, McQueen revealed that he found himself in tears during this scene, experiencing the very real impact of the brutality enacted for the sake of verisimilitude.)  In a rare sequence outside the prison, the guard who opens the film visits his mother in a nursing home.  As he tries in vain to make contact with the person imprisoned within her immobile physical form, a man with a gun enters and without ceremony shoots and kills him.  Nothing wakes the mother, nor does anyone interfere with the murderer.  In another sequence, a guard wearing a dust mask dumps liquid on a floor oozing urine dumped out of their cells by the prisoners. As the guard systematically pushes the liquid along the hallway floor — sometimes choosing to shove it back under a cell door or two — the brutal conditions of the prison and its impact on guards and prisoners both are inescapable.

As for Bobby Sands, he is played by Michael Fassbender in a performance that makes Mickey Rourke's comeback in The Wrestler appear breezy by comparison.  Fassbender's gaunt skeletal physique recalls images of Holocaust survivors.  In a bath after starting the hunger strike that ends his life, he summons up David's famous depiction of Jean-Paul Marat.  As A.O. Scott has noted in his New York Times review, Hunger calls up images from Renaissance artists.  Yet it comes by its artistic and filmic references honestly.  (Unlike the New Yorker's David Denby, I found neither creepiness nor preening aestheticization in Hunger's relentless gaze.) The squalor of the "dirty" protest — its dehumanizing effects — are depicted vividly enough to incite real outrage and discomfort.

The film's centrepiece is a remarkable 17-minute scene between Sands and Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), a priest and sympathizer.  Here the film's contribution by co-writer playwright Enda Walsh comes into focus.  The taut dialogue is a kind of debate between adversarial friends.   That the camera does not move, that there are neither cuts to close-ups or cutaways of any kind, underscores the chilling scrutiny applied to the men's arguments.  It is McQueen's most naked moment and a singular demonstration of the film's technique;  watch this, he urges us, and listen too.  Up to this point, the film's text has been minimal and largely in obvious service to the workaday realities of the hellish Maze depicted.  In 20 minutes — including the close-up monologue by Sands and short coda from Moran — the film bursts full of rapid-fire exchanges, a veritable feast of unfettered talk in a film famished of local speech so far.  This entire sequence would be remarkable even if what the characters said to each other were less than compelling or sounded less true.  In its austere technique — combined with the dialogue's feisty honesty inhabited by actors too true to their roles to be less than authentic —  this scene reveals what Hunger is all about.  Protest is an action, it has a face, it can be extreme, the film insists.  Moderation also has a face; it can be haggard, immutable. (In a striking scene, a prison worker wearing what appears to be a decontamination- type suit takes a power washer to the endless concentric circles of excrement created on a prison wall.  The jet of liquid slowly reveals white beneath curds of brown its force pushes aside and liquefies.)  In the end, art is also extreme; it can adopt an extreme choice, pushing the bounds of acceptability to remove comfortable ideas and attitudes about squalor, about beauty, about heroism, about inhumanity.  Thankfully, McQueen stops short of calling up the divine.

As Time Goes By: Terence Davies' Own Private Liverpool

Terence Davies' idiosyncratic ode to his hometown of Liverpool, has the kind of barbed relation to mass box office appeal that its titular soundalike Sex and the City has to art cinema.  Released in 2009, Of Time and the City employs Davies' trademark meditative touchstones in a manner closer to the work of Steve Reich than say Madonna.

So how does a working class misfit like Davies develop a peculiarly inward iconography against, say, the more polemical approach of contemporaries like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach?  Two words: sex and movies.  Fondly recalling his teenage seduction by the silver screen, Davies pays homage to glories past in an opening montage set within a long-gone movie palace proscenium, archival footage giving way to brightly sunlit shots of neoclassical architecture (Kenneth Clark Civilization-style).  Davies proceeds to serve up a lyrical interior travelogue of Liverpool the dowdy, a parochial hotbed, its sonorous tour guide snidely dismissive of mass culture.  Landmark events such as Queen Elizabeth's coronation are scoffed at as "the Betty Windsor show", the city's favourite sons the Beatles and their rise to fame brushed aside with undisguised disdain or grudging acknowledgment, at best.

It's tempting to regard Davies' rueful jibes — of slags and the city —  as a defiant gesture at his producers' perverse hire of a downbeat auteur for a commercial take on civic shine.  But Davies is no slumming esthete or class-conscious contrarian.  Where his better known contemporaries Ken Loach and Mike Leigh attack working class experience with overtly political agendas, Davies adopts an approach closer to chamber music: setting the fleeting yet telling images of working class existence to period notes that paradoxically transcend time.

It's not surprising to learn — given his talent for transcendence — of Davies' Catholic background.  Offering up cherished relics of a Catholic, working class childhood, Davies rejects doctrinaire reverence for a healthy embrace of his new-found homosexuality. This crisis of faith leads Davies to embrace a new altar in the movies' large-than-life stars and escapist fantasies.  Rather than casting Liverpool as a town on the verge of becoming hip post-Beatles' explosion, Davies celebrates Liverpool's down market character, without romanticizing its hardships.  Small shared pleasures — gathering to listen to favourite announcers on the beeb, ferrying across the Mersey en masse to the lilt of “Dirty Old Town” —  shape the post-war Liverpool of Davies’ recall.  At the centre of the film, Peggy Lee sings "The Family that Lived on the Hill" to archival footage of housing projects under demolition.   This sequence was the catalyst for Davies to launch his meditative anti-travelogue.  

In revealing the shadows and light of his own private Liverpool, Davies returns to the strategy of his earliest narratives, Distant Voices/Still Lives and its follow-up The Long Day Closes.  Music propels Davies' storytelling, regardless of textual narrative.  Of Time and the City layers poetic text —his own and others’— to the score of largely period music that provides the narrative arc.  In features like The Neon Bible or The House of Mirth, his signature visual style — luminous, painterly colour, unhurried pacing — is allied to his selective sampling of popular song.  The catch is that Davies’ taste in music, as with most choices, follows a backward trajectory: to classics and period jazz, skipping past the vibrant immediacy of the Beatles and anyone after for the pop music of his parents' bygone era.  Here as elsewhere, Davies reveals himself as a filmmaker whose subject may appear musty — à la Proust — whose persona may be stubbornly unfashionable, whose audience may never grow past the boundaries of the sartorially challenged.  Yet whose command of time lost and found resonates long after even the most cursory viewing.