There are those, even our enemies, we want to live; there are those, even our friends, we want to die. We imagine death may be the end of pain, but we may well will our pain. We honor those who die with dignity, but dignity is not something we ascribe to ourselves or can be our objective.
Alphonso Lingis
They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were beautiful shoes.
Imelda Marcos
The scenes (describing The Laughing Star) are shot with some tenderness, even those that show bloody rituals, like the flagellants during Holy Week. In between footage, a young boy is shown playing with matches. The view is from beneath a glass table, on which the boy breaks each stick & arranges the pieces to form a star. He drops water inside the formation, making the matches move so the outer tips touch to form a bigger star. The boy does this over & over until it looks as if the star is laughing: 'I tried to look openly at the hybrid identity of this country...The Laughing Star tries to look at the situation without lambasting the evil colonizers.'
I have wanted to write something about Der lachende Stern for a little while, this mainly for my own attempt at recollection. So the following, might be more or less poorly consolidated compendium of notes taken shortly after the screening & in the interceding weeks. I was prompted by shortly re-watching the ‘Final Edit’ of Apocalypse Now & dipping back into Conrad. For full measure, I rewatched Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse focused solely on the film’s mimetic realities (onscreen, narrative/plot, etc) with The Laughing Star being shot in 83’ at the tail-end of the dictatorship.
The film enters the Philippines officially, under the hospitality of the Manila International Film Festival, while simultaneously operating within that invitation inconspicuously, gathering another Philippines at the edge of the image regime. The Manila International Film Festival belonged to an attempt to manufacture an image of national modernity, poverty & political violence existed alongside an almost hallucinatory insistence upon glamour where the camera slips away from the guarded cultural venues.
The festival becomes more the accidental circumstance of Schroeter’s visit, wherein the Philippines becomes not merely a geographical territory governed by Marcos but a psychic landscape produced by crushed overlapping histories; Spanish Catholicism, American colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, Cold War anti-communism, consumer, indigenous & popular cultures compounded on-top of one another. Sometimes the banal mixes with the grotesque or beautiful. Imelda Marcos sang all these beautiful songs like ‘Strangers in the Night’.
The film nabs this strange position between essay-film or documentary-form, travelogue & politico-kino hallucination in a twilight haze of Marconian rule. Drawing on notes, I had a few loose essays by Alphonso Lingis in my bag; a man who has slowly become something of an opening to thinking the complex elision between bodies in Coppola & Schroeter.
Lingis is interested repeatedly in what occurs when bodies encounter systems much larger than themselves: state violence, international capitalism, tourism, military power, poverty, sexuality, illness & death. In Abuses, these encounters occur not as abstract problems of distributive justice but as physical confrontations as he through Manila, Latin America & other sites in which the circulation of capital & display of sovereign power are written directly on bodies.
Lingis in no way attempts to resolve these situations into an immaculate or moral positionality; here the ethical problem is therefore not simply was this exploitation? It becomes, what does it mean to stand before another body when the very conditions of the encounter have already been organised by radically unequal powers? It rides that sentiment often by the extreme.
This leads me into the crux of the notes, namely what arrangements of bodies were required before the film could say anything at all in Coppola & how does this re-enactment mean on the level of corpses & nationalism.
When a corpse plays another? Or when the Vietnamese refugee in Philippines does not simply signify Vietnamese suffering, he/she is hired.
A Philippine soldier does not signify military power, since his military institution rents its machinery & Ifugao tribes-people do not merely signify Kurtz’s archaic kingdom but their actual rituals become extracted from one cultural situation & installed into another, in a play of truth. The same body can become communist, prisoner, victim, civilian or corpse; where the dead body has no defence against its subsequent appropriations, similarly, the corpse in Lingis is not just a sign of mortality but the absolute exposure of the body to others, a body from which sovereignty has departed.
It had made me think of a passage in Carrion Body, Carrion Utterance, a chapter by Alphonso Lingis from The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common:
Every discourse among interlocutors is a struggle against outsiders, those who emit interference & equivocation, who have an interest in that the communication does not take place. But in the measure that communication does take place & that statements are established as true, it designates outsiders as not making sense, as mystified, mad, or brutish & it delivers them over to violence.
Lingis' subjectivity is never substantively self-contained, as the body is continuously invaded by what is foreign to it be that language, desire, bacteria, food, other bodies, social codes or morals, technologies or climates & political organisations as they come & go.
***
The following are largely from my notes that were attempts to pen what was the dialogue.
Scene begins. A man stands in a room, stiffly announces ‘an enemy is coming…strikers…strikers’ & ‘he is the enemy but we know he is a strong man & let him pass; we watch as he enters the temple’.
A man enters, is allowed to pass through men with was appear to be spikes encircling him, everything is performed precisely as if informed 5 minutes prior.
It is interspersed with Virginia R. Moreno, a poet & play-writer; she is figured here as a kind of high priestess, her spoken poetry becomes part of Schroeter’s filmic structure as she comes in & out often appearing as a total counter-weight to Imelda.
Schroeter undertook research & consultations with Moreno & filmmaker Ishmael Bernal. Moreno subsequently became close friend of his, founding the University of the Philippines Film Center in 1976 during the period in which Schroeter came to the Philippines.
Return to the room, wherein they the re-enactment has broken down & the disclosure of the economics of their involvement in the production is made clear:
'We are paid 1 dollar for the first month, by the second month we are paid 2 dollars...then little more, they give us 4 dollars.'
Schroeter later would come to describe Hollywood as the 'rear guard' of American military, a direct inference of Coppola's crew as an 'invaders' of the archipelago.
A further testimony; 'I enjoyed taking part in the filming of *Apocalypse*, because they taught me how to operate & fire M16 & an M14 gun' & another: 'I was very happy to take part in *Apocalypse because there was a lot to see, & the food was very good.'
The professional actors tell traditional myths while amateurs improvised scenes from their lives.
***
By 1976, the Philippines had been under martial law since September 1972 wherein nearly all political opposition was suppressed through arrests, detention, censorship & state violence. Marcos alongside the DND imposed no fee on the film production of Copolla’s & infamously the given use of any military equipment; including 20 Huey helicopters, military personnel. Requiring only that the helicopters be called back at any time, in the government’s fight against its own Communists & separatist. As American capital arrives in a former American colony governed by a US-aligned dictatorship, the production could only become ‘Vietnam’ by the transformation of another Southeast Asian country into the American imaginary of Vietnam. A film attempting to represent ‘the horror’ reaches a point at which simulated death is judged insufficient & actual dead bodies enter its material environment; the corpse ceases to function as the boundary beyond representation & production design.
At what point does a production like Apocalypse Now cease to function simply as a film, & begin to resemble a temporary nation-state or an enormous cultural-industrial apparatus? Testimony from Martin Sheen describes discovering that some of the corpses brought onto the compound were not props at all but actual human cadavers acquired for the production, the incident itself acquired a second cinematic existence because it was discussed during the making of Hearts of Darkness, according to co-director Fax Bahr, Coppola did not want the sequence included in the documentary. Contemporary reporting describes the production as having become, in the surrounding countryside, something resembling both an invading army & an inexhaustible source of American money & endangered visionary; at once obsessive & unstable whilst being financially imperilled but willing to descend into the material of the film for its own sake.
Here, any suffering of the auteur conceals an unequal distribution of actual danger, Coppola's mortgaged property, suicidal thoughts or artistic exhaustion become the dramaturgy of Apocalypse Now's production, the Last Pioneer of Hanoi.
TBC
