Cinema du Réel 2023: The Fuckee's Hymn (Travis Wilkerson) and Slaughterhouses of Modernity (Heinz Emigholz)
The 2024 edition of Cinema du Réel is happening now, and I should have some notes published soon both here and elsewhere. But this seems as good a time as any to post a couple of reviews I wrote for the 2023 edition and never published. These are unedited drafts, and a year old, but hopefully still interesting to someone?
The Fuckee’s Hymn (Travis Wilkerson)
Travis Wilkerson wants to tell us a story—about his father, about Vietnam—but he’s not sure if he should, or how he should. American culture is innoculated against the direct impact of images of Vietnam and its horrors; we associate them as much with our nostalgia for 70s Hollywood as with the true histories of colonialism and imperialist war. This is not just Wilkerson’s dilemma, but ultimately part of his point: The Fuckee’s Hymn is his latest effort to revive historical memory through film, but also a reflection on that project itself and the political functions of storytelling.
The film begins with a monologue along these lines. “Can a story kill you?” Wilkerson asks, and suggests that it’s through stories that ordinary people can be made into killers, and made to support killing. But he wants to reclaim stories from the grasp of hegemonic power, and does so in part by making them personal. We let our guard down and trust the personal stories of people we relate to. William Wilkerson—the director’s dad—was a relatable guy, an ambitious teenager who wanted to be a pilot and, because he was a working class kid, couldn’t find anywhere but the army that would teach him, so volunteered and ended up Vietnam, the youngest helicopter pilot to fly there. Several years of trauma and several brushes with death later, he comes home solidly anti-war and briefly joins up with campus activism before going to medical school and becoming a doctor.
Much of this narrative is repeated from Wilkerson’s earlier film, Distinguished Flying Cross (2011), where William recounts the stories himself to his grown sons at his kitchen table in a nonchalant and engaging manner. He is casually but deeply critical of the military and the war. “The bigger the fuck uo the bigger the medal,” he says of the incident that earned him the Flying Cross. William died of cancer in the time since that film, and this time his son Travis picks up the threads of the story, eventually focusing on a particular incident where William and other soldiers shared oranges taken from the body of a Vietnamese civilian—echoing the lethal Agent Orange which was probably responsible for his cancer. The narration repeatedly insists that it was this story which killed William, a tenuous stretching of a powerful symbol into a too literal claim which detracts from the film’s arguments about storytelling.
The Fuckee’s Hymn is weaker in its immediate narrative work than Distinguished Flying Cross, but more inventive formally. One of Wilkerson’s major strategies throughout his work is to introduce visual or linguistic elements whose meaning is initially unclear and return to them repeatedly in enunciative intervals until their meaning is revealed, building tension which is released with retroactive impact. Here, this strategy envelops the film’s entire visual language. While Wilkerson narrates in the audio, he shows us neutral black and white imagery of forests and his family home, an anodyne accompaniment that is occasionally interrupted by overlays of red. These interruptions become more and more prominent until they’re recognizable as images from Vietnam; the neutral domestic canvas has been hiding the trauma beneath, and eventually the narration informs us that these are clips from a Vietnamese film called The Abandoned Field, about a family pursued endlessly by American helicopters. In that film, an American helicopter pilot who finds out his wife has given birth to a son kills the Vietnamese father and is killed in turn by the mother. “I identify with them all,” Wilkerson says. The stories our governments tell about war give us an enemy who is a monster, but a true war story reveals that the true monster is the war itself, the true war criminals those whose power is preserved through millions of violent deaths.
Slaughterhouses of Modernity (Heinz Emigholz)
A change of gears is nothing new for Emigholz. His earliest works in the 1970s were flickering, roving spatial studies of landscapes and rooms, a Continental cousin to Gehr, Gottheim, and Snow. After briefly experimenting with narrative in the ‘80s and ‘90s with energetically modernist films such as The Meadow of Things (1988) and The Holy Bunch (1991), Emigholz found a new direction in the mid ‘90s when he began exclusively filming architecture. The resulting films, which now number several dozen, each take a particular architect or theme and wordlessly study the relevant works in chronological order from when they were built, using canted angles and quick cuts to build a dynamic sense of space and form. But this vein too ran dry, and the ensuing personal and creative crisis became the subject of Emigholz’s next and arguably greatest film, Streetscapes [Dialogue] (2017), which maintained the camera style of the architectural films but added a pair of actors engaged in constant dialogue, the text taken from Emigholz’s own discussions with his therapist and covering everything from the creative process to the use of space and time in film and the history of Europe in the twentieth century.
The Last City (2020) repeated this format, and seemed to mark a new period for Emigholz. Unfortunately, his latest, Slaughterhouses of Modernity, is a tepid step in yet another direction. It’s an attempt at an essay film, but a half-hearted attempt, unevenly incorporating fragments of a broad essay into a framework familiar from his previous work, which isn’t sufficiently adapted to the new form. The film opens with an offscreen narrator delivering a broad thesis statement about the schools of modernism and their attempt to create “a new man,” how their works quickly became detached from influence in public life and absorbed into market relations and political propaganda, and how this reduced capitalist thinking resulted in concentration camps. The narration stops with this provocation and Emigholz settles into the familiar form of his architecture films, this time following the bizarrely modernist slaughterhouses built in Argentina by Francisco Salamone. The rest of the film proceeds in this manner, periodic interjections from speakers (who are sometimes on screen and speaking to the camera) followed by long sequences of architectural photography. An important section in the middle describes an Argentine novel about a concentration camp official, and the film’s final segment features more sustained text contrasting the empty modernism of the demolished and reconstructed Berlin Palace with the postmodern, anti-Bauhaus work of Freddy Mamani Silvestre in El Alto, Bolivia.
The connections between these threads are easy enough to see. The empty, rusted slaughterhouses feel haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust even before the connotation is made explicit, and Emigholz’s disdain for the intellectually and morally bankrupt capitalist expropriation of buildings and architectural styles is clear, with Silvestre’s work forming a playful counterpoint. Slaughterhouses is bitterly angry and wrought with the horrors of the 20th century, but it’s also playful and openly humorous in a way Emigholz’s work hasn’t been since he abandoned narrative. But all of this is surprisingly loose, even hodgepodge, for an artist whose works have long been among the most methodical in the avant garde. The film is built on an historical argument tying modernism, Nazism, and Latin American fascism together, but the argument isn’t innovative enough to impress in broad strokes, and it’s only suggested in pieces and not clearly made–one can only imagine the force this argument might have had in the hands of a more gifted essayist like Harun Farocki. Emigholz’s own gifts lie elsewhere, and Slaughterhouses is at its best when it lets the photography and editing speak for themselves, but they’re not fully allowed to do that, resulting in a film that can’t excel either as a sophisticated essay or as a suggestively mysterious portrait of art in historical context.