Acceso a los vehículos

Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or symptomatic revenant. (LaCapra, 2001: 49)

A journey into the past

In an interview given at the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland), where his film From What Is Before/Mula sa kung ano ang noon (2014) won the Pardo D’Oro for the Best Feature Film, filmmaker Lav Diaz said: “The people who come [to see my films] are the followers and the curious … The curious will be converted or they will hate you more, depending on how they will see the work, depending on the condition they are in when they enter the film” (Diaz, 2014a). When the bi-annual AV Festival with its tagline “As Slow As Possible” took place in March 2012, I was far from a follower of Diaz’s work. Despite my growing interest in so-called ‘slow films’ from all over the world, I had not heard his name before. Nor had I even the smallest notion of Philippine cinema more generally. In his equation I was one of the curious, who could not quite believe that an eight-hour film with the title Melancholia (2008), which promised post-film viewing depression, could be

“worth my time”, could be - to be more exact - interesting enough to keep me awake. I did not take it seriously - until the film started, that is.

In the film’s opening scene, a young woman tends to her clothes in a claustrophobic room (Fig. 1). The frame is tight, and the room’s walls are overbearing. The camera is static, and while we see the woman at times from the side or from behind, an unidentifiable hammering in the background disturbs the soundscape. It reminded me of a similarly continuous and suspenseful ticking in Béla Tarr’s The Man from London/A londoni férfi (2007). I am not even sure

whether or not I know to this date where the ticking came from. Perhaps it originated from a large clock on a wall, but I cannot be certain. This is precisely what directors such as Tarr and Diaz give rise to in their films; by exposing the viewer to sounds from unknown sources they generate uncertainty, complementing the films’ often non-linear narratives and transmitting to the viewer the characters’ feelings of anxiety in the face of oppression by an external, often unseen force.

After having watched the woman folding her clothes for three minutes, a cut brings us onto a long narrow balcony. The camera is not positioned directly on the balcony, though. Instead it is in another room, and framed itself by a door frame. After staring for a little while into the nothingness of the empty balcony, a woman (the same woman as before?) appears on the balcony. She wears high heels, a tight leather mini skirt and an even tighter leather top. Is she a sex worker perhaps? From the long distance to the camera it is not entirely clear. The camera is not close enough to make out details. She smokes, repeatedly dials a number on her phone, and then disappears indoors again. The camera remains on the balcony, focused on nothing in particular. By remaining with a frame void of action or even characters, Diaz creates one of those now famous temps morts, or dead time, Michelangelo Antonioni had already used and infuriated his audience with in the 1960s, causing “boredom, frustration, and irritation” (Mroz, 2012: 49). Halting narrative progression, Antonioni’s temps morts slowed down temporality and stood in contrast to contemporary film at the time, when the prime aim in film was narrative progression and character development. As we will see, Diaz pursues a similar aim, but he takes the duration of dead time to the extreme with the purpose of supporting his films’ narratives of terror and post-trauma.

Figure 1 A woman tends to her clothes.

Melancholia - Lav Diaz (2008)

For some reason, I was hooked by this succession of two scenes. Nothing that would be deemed striking or particularly memorable took place on screen. While I was familiar with the ‘nothingness’ Tarr portrayed in his films, Diaz’s films seemed to be an entirely different form of slow film that I had come across until then. His films place emphasis on the mundanity of life in the Philippines; waiting, walking, drinking coffee, more waiting. I had been familiar too with Tsai Ming-liang’s focus on the most banal events of everyday life, a common trope being his long-takes of characters peeing, but Diaz showed a different way of life; a life of struggle in the aftermath of traumatic events. Diaz’s films thus stress not only the mundanity of rural life, they connect this mundanity to the wider subject of Philippine history.

In the subsequent eight hours of Melancholia, I found myself being shifted between everyday life and highly traumatic situations, between the normal and the abnormal, between a sense of calm and severe pain and anguish. Going from one extreme to another, those eight hours’ running time took me to the dark side of the Philippines; disappearances, extra-judicial killings, and endless slow suffering. I felt empty after the film, but I also felt as though the director had taken me on a unique journey through his country and its history. The next day, I briefly met Diaz and told him how overwhelmed I had been by his work. That brief chat, and another screening of his films at the AV Festival – Century of Birthing/Siglo ng pagluluwal (2011) – caught my interest in Diaz’s filmmaking and his country’s history to such an extent that I would not let it go anymore for a long time to come.

I was converted, and left the circle of the curious. I am now one of Diaz’s followers but a curious follower nonetheless.

Both Melancholia and Century of Birthing struck a chord with me. Diaz seemed to stress feelings of absence and loss in his films. His approach to the representation of post-trauma without showing violence or atrocity on screen created an uncanny feeling in me throughout the viewing process. His focus on history and the portrayal of oppressed and suffering characters in relation to an overwhelming external, yet unseen power, reminded me of an experience I had when I was a teenager.

When I was around 14 or 15 years of age, my school organised a day trip to a local concentration camp. It was a compulsory trip as part of our learning about World War II, and, on top of that, it was an expected duty for us Germans. We went to Oranienburg, a city approximately forty minutes away from my hometown. It is a city which has still not reached peace since the end of the war, with unexploded

bombs and rockets still being found and in need of diffusal on an almost weekly basis. The concentration camp Sachsenhausen is situated in the immediate surroundings of Oranienburg. It was one of the smaller camps, and in contrast to Treblinka, for instance, it was not a designated extermination camp. In other words, it was not purposely built for the Final Solution that had been pursued by the Nazis since 1942. Instead of becoming victims of systematic genocide, prisoners in Sachsenhausen were likely to die of inhumane treatment over long periods of time (Stiftung Brandenburg, no date).

We were given a guided tour through the camp, which has been rebuilt into a museum and which now seeks to tell the stories of the deceased. That day left a lasting impression on me. It generated an uncanny feeling, but it was not only because of my presence at a place where atrocities had been committed on a daily basis. What struck me most was what was not there. The museum as it is today is a skeleton of the former camp. While some buildings and sites of death have been preserved, Sachsenhausen is, compared to other museums, not as direct in its representation of atrocities. It was certainly a landscape of death, though not of death seen. Instead, it was a landscape of death sensed. Of the over 200,000 prisoners, of which most died of starvation, forced labour or disease, only their ghosts remained.

With the liberation of the concentration camps, especially Auschwitz, the world witnessed horrific footage of the conditions in the camps. The photographs and short videos showed images of starved men, women and children - walking skeletons, degraded and seemingly reduced to mere animal status. While these images were important at the time, they could merely present an outsider’s view of what life in the camps must have been like. I only understood much later that

the absence of shocking footage and the presence of myself in Sachsenhausen, a place haunted by history, conveyed not only an image but a sensation of trauma.

Seven years after that class trip, a chain of traumatic events triggered an abnormal stress reaction inside my brain and I was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in summer 2010. The conception of the term PTSD came as a result of the Vietnam War, and its veterans rallying for the public recognition of their shell shock symptoms. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) defined PTSD as a clinical symptom in response to the veterans’

rally and it has henceforth been in persistent use, especially as a legacy of America’s War on Terror after 9/11 (Elm, Köhne and Kabalek, 2014: 7). Similar to the representation of life in concentration camps through graphic images, writing on PTSD has so far tended to focus on what is visible to an outsider; a high degree of anxiety in the victim-survivor, aggression, social withdrawal, and other debilitating factors (Yehuda, 2002). Once I was able to live with PTSD, I began to see a widely understudied, yet striking point of post-trauma which resonated with my experience during my viewing of Diaz’s films and, curiously, my visit of Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Post-trauma is preceded by loss. Carol A Kidron names “physical and cultural genocide, slavery, forced migration, urban and domestic violence, natural disasters and terror attacks” as potential triggers for post-traumatic stress disorder (Kidron, 2003: 514). Loss – of life, of agency, of safety – is inherent in all of these triggers and leaves the victim-survivors with a sensation of absence.

Dominick La Capra (2001) sees clear differences between loss and absence, and insists that the two cannot be used interchangeably. While I partly agree with LaCapra’s argument, my personal experience showed that post-trauma is

preceded by loss, and is from then on governed by absence. Dirk de Bruyn (2014) correctly argues that “trauma is largely defined by what is not known or what is not said” (De Bruyn, 2014: 160-161, emphasis added). Absence and loss, therefore, are unmistakably linked to one another and together they create the complex condition that is called post-trauma.¹ An example is necessary at this point.

Imagined situations, which cause a high degree of uncertainty, accompany survivors and victims of PTSD through their daily life (National Institute of Mental Health, no date). One case in point is an excessive fear of death. Especially in the initial period after the traumatic event, survivors often expect a lethal blow from nothingness, as any situation, but especially those which resemble the initial traumatic event, is considered to be life threatening. Rachel Yehuda points out that

“experiencing … a traumatic event challenges a person’s sense of safety”, which leads to hypervigilance in the survivor (Yehuda, 2002: 110). Thus, post-trauma indoctrinates a degree of paranoia in survivors and victims, therefore forcing them to live with a persistent sensation of death, often without immediate or overt death threats being present. In this way, post-trauma is governed by a perceived danger, or sensed threats, even though the original traumatic event has long been in the past (National Institute of Mental Health, no date). Anne Rutherford describes it aptly: “Like the insect attuned to a differently-marked perceptual world, the trauma survivor picks up resonances imperceptible to the unaffected, their residue reverberating through the fractures in the psychic shield”

1 Throughout this thesis, I consider trauma as an event and post-trauma as a condition that may or may not follow a traumatic event, depending on the individual. An event becomes only traumatic

(Rutherford, 2013: 89). The relation between post-trauma, absence, power and time would shape up for me when I began to study Diaz’s films, first as part of a wider interest in Slow Cinema, then as a more specific case study of the representation of post-trauma in film. Diaz’s films represent post-trauma as what Ulrich Baer, studying the representation of ‘trauma’ in photography, describes as

“a disorder of memory and time” (Baer, 2002: 9), and this thesis seeks to illuminate this disorder throughout the following chapters.

The films under investigation in this thesis stand out in the way they reject images of the traumatic event, and focus instead on the event’s effects on human psychology. They explore the condition that is called post-traumatic stress disorder. This absence of imagery is the result of what Gil Z. Hochberg (2015) calls

“failed witnessing”: “The stimulus is too overwhelming to experience in real time, and the witnessed traumatic event leads to a momentary shutdown of all sensory organs, most notably the eyes” (Hochberg, 2015: 140). Thus, the individual suffers from virtual blindness with regards to the traumatic event. This blindness – the absence of imagery of traumatic events – is a defining characteristic of Diaz’s films, and I will return to the subject of absence time and again in the following pages.

As will become apparent throughout the discussion that follows, Diaz focuses on individual points of crises in the aftermath of traumatic events, while at the same time telling the story of his country. In her study of time in Chinese independent cinema, Jean Ma identifies a characteristic that can be detected in Diaz’s films alike, namely a strong “fixation on absence, evanescence, and the ghost of history” (Ma, 2010: 12). His films, especially those in focus in this thesis, are what Annette Kuhn calls “memory texts”, in which “time rarely comes across as continuous or sequential” (Kuhn, 2010: 299). Rather, the films contain fragmented

episodes that develop in a non-linear, disorderly fashion and therefore use the representation of time as a reinforcement of the nature of memory.

Lav Diaz’s rubber hour(s)

Before I go into more details about Diaz’s representation of post-trauma, however, I would like to use this introductory chapter in part to explore Diaz’s background, which will supply the reader with sufficient information for a thorough comprehension of his approach to filmmaking.

Diaz was born on 30 December 1958 in what is today Datu Paglas on the island of Mindanao, Philippines. The region has had a long history of violent clashes between Christians and Muslims; an aspect that has been taken up by Filipina filmmaker Adjani Arumpac in her personal documentary War is a Tender Thing (2012), which explores these clashes metaphorically through a study of her parents’ divorce; her father a Muslim, her mother a Christian.

With their children still young, Diaz’s parents had moved from the urban centre of Manila to Mindanao in order to teach the poor. They came into direct contact with the aforementioned clashes. Despite the risks the move posed, his parents’ decision to leave the capital is still having a profound influence on Diaz’s filmmaking, which is in some ways an extension of his parents’ approach to teaching and living (Diaz, 2014a). For him, film is a means to “investigate, examine, confront and challenge the Pinoy [Filipino] psyche” (Guarneri, 2010). Diaz went regularly to the movies with his father in town. It is of little surprise, then, that Diaz dedicated his Locarno Film Festival award to his father: “He brought me cinema, he’s a cinema addict, and he started this passion in me” (Blaney, 2014).

Ultimately, however, it was the experience of seeing Lino Brocka’s Manila, in the

claws of the light/Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975) which triggered his

desire to become a filmmaker (Vienna International Film Festival, 2009).

Diaz worked for a few years for the Filipino film studio Regal, under whose umbrella he produced films such as Serafin Gironimo (1998) and Hesus, The Revolutionary/Hesus Rebolusyonaryo (2002). This period of Diaz’s (commercial) filmmaking is distinctly different from his later arthouse films. This new period appeared to have started with the production of West Side Avenue/Batang West Side in 2001. Since he left the studio system with its clear hierarchical structure behind in the early 2000s, Diaz has worked closely with his cast and crew in making his films. Rather than being the sole author of his films, the director’s work is the product of extensive conversations and discussions on set with his long-standing collaborators. While he writes scene after scene on his own, usually the night before the shoot takes place, his script is open to the interpretation of his actors and actresses who bring in their own ideas and experiences once the camera is running, which have an effect on the continuation of the script. In addition, already filmed scenes are then discussed collectively. Diaz considers

“everyone” an author of his films, thereby pointing to the complex issue of authorship in the context of his filmmaking (Diaz, 2015b). This approach is linked to the detachment of the author of the script from the centre of a cinematic work, which started in 1960s structuralism and was reinforced even further in 1970s with post-structualism taking into account ideologies, contexts, and even the spectator in the creation of meaning (Hayward, 2000: 23-26).²

2 Despite Diaz’s collective approach to filmmaking, I consider him an auteur in my work, that means as the person who is the sole creator of meaning. The reason for this is the sheer complexity a non-auteurist approach would have involved, given the prescribed maximum word count of this study. Even though I am aware that I marginalise the very essence of his filmmaking, namely its collaborative nature, I chose to narrow down the focus to only one agent in the filmmaking process,

Today, Diaz is primarily known for his films’ extensive lengths, their distinct visual aesthetics and the two-fold film themes, which employ depictions of a suffering individual as a metaphor for wider social ills, both in the Philippines and in the world. Bernhard Hetzenauer (2013) makes a valid point about the aesthetics of Hungarian director Miklos Jancsó, who influenced the work of Béla Tarr, but whose aesthetics can also be detected in Diaz’s work. Especially in relation to Diaz’s representation of post-trauma and terror, these aesthetics are decisive. Quoting a German anthology of Hungarian film, Hetzenauer notes that in Jancsó’s famous long-take films, “scene after scene, a network is created around places and people, which [is] so impenetrable and suffocating like the terroristic violence depicted in his films” (Hetzenauer, 2013: 8).³ Duration is key in Jancsó’s films and is a signifier of the suffocating violence the characters are confronted with. We can infer a parallel here between Jancsó and Diaz, though it is vital to note that both directors also differ in their approaches to the representation of terroristic violence throughout their countries’ history. Jancsó’s The Red and The White/Csillagosok, katonák (1967), for instance, stands in stark contrast to the depiction of violence in Diaz’s films, emphasising on-screen violence on top of long duration in single takes throughout the film’s ninety minutes running time. The

Today, Diaz is primarily known for his films’ extensive lengths, their distinct visual aesthetics and the two-fold film themes, which employ depictions of a suffering individual as a metaphor for wider social ills, both in the Philippines and in the world. Bernhard Hetzenauer (2013) makes a valid point about the aesthetics of Hungarian director Miklos Jancsó, who influenced the work of Béla Tarr, but whose aesthetics can also be detected in Diaz’s work. Especially in relation to Diaz’s representation of post-trauma and terror, these aesthetics are decisive. Quoting a German anthology of Hungarian film, Hetzenauer notes that in Jancsó’s famous long-take films, “scene after scene, a network is created around places and people, which [is] so impenetrable and suffocating like the terroristic violence depicted in his films” (Hetzenauer, 2013: 8).³ Duration is key in Jancsó’s films and is a signifier of the suffocating violence the characters are confronted with. We can infer a parallel here between Jancsó and Diaz, though it is vital to note that both directors also differ in their approaches to the representation of terroristic violence throughout their countries’ history. Jancsó’s The Red and The White/Csillagosok, katonák (1967), for instance, stands in stark contrast to the depiction of violence in Diaz’s films, emphasising on-screen violence on top of long duration in single takes throughout the film’s ninety minutes running time. The