 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
FilmeFobia
|
 |
|
Dedicated to the memory of Jean-Claude Bernardet (1936-2025) An extraordinary movie counted for me as the outstanding discovery of the Las Palmas film festival in 2009: Kiko Goifman’s resolutely divisive FilmeFobia – rendered in English as FilmPhobia, although surely CinePhobia (the opposite of CinePhilia!) would have been a more apposite title, given that it begins with the tale of how even the canonical cult-object Rome, Open City (1945), as viewed by a little child on a cruise ship, can register as a horrifying film of fear! The guy telling that story is the legendary critic-teacher-filmmaker of Jairo Ferreira’s generation, Jean-Claude Bernardet, and one of the delights is the scene where Coffin Joe (José Mojica Marins) himself pops up in the editing room to evaluate the footage Bernardet is surveying of FilmeFobia’s willing participants facing their greatest fears: “I think I see a semi-erection there”, Marins notes. Promotional material claiming that this was an exaggeration, parody or critique of Reality TV, or Saw/Hostel torture-porn fantasies, turned out to be highly misleading, and probably an obstacle for some viewers – although one can’t help but note the affinity (entirely unintended by the filmmaker, as it turns out) of what we see with TV programs like Fear Factor or especially I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!. In fact, what we are seeing is far closer to ritual performance art, some very modern outgrowth or descendant of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty … at least, until the strong, lurking dose of the Absurd in all this (thousands of buttons being hurled at a button-phobic, toy cars buzzing around with condomed phallic ornaments underneath a suspended woman, a Lynchian dwarf scurrying up a beach to menace Goifman himself in the very first shot … ) dawns in the viewer’s consciousness. But does it dawn for everyone? From the many post-film discussions (arguments, actually) I experienced, it seems not. “It’s just the same, or worse, as what it pretends to address!” – meaning Reality TV and horror movies – was a refrain I heard a lot, signalling a blanket refusal to engage with it further, or see what it really is, and is doing. What is so special about FilmeFobia? Its absolute ambiguity of status as a gesture or object. What is it: a psychodrama, an elaborate gag, an exposé? It is astounding what viewers – highly intelligent viewers – simply do not register in this relatively short but agonisingly protracted feature: such as the Brechtian ruptures of the participants’ reactions being directed and rehearsed! The film is structured as a slow reveal, but the ambiguities are never dispelled. They merely get deeper: Bernardet really does have AIDS (he wrote a book about his condition in 1996 [and in later autobiographical publications]) and is approaching blindness, and quite a lot of what he says resembles things he says in his own interviews down the years – while, at the same moment, he is clearly also playing a part, with no small amount of gruesome jollity, for Goifman’s conceptual, meta-film project. (He was initially approached to collaborate on the script, but agreed to be involved on the condition that he figure only as an actor.) Add to this the fact that some of the participants in the project (the director included) really do seem to be flipping out at various points. But FilmeFobia, by its end, turns around almost 360 degrees, even if you haven’t been aware of the gradual metamorphosis: and if it’s about anything, it’s about the pretend-director’s mad dream of using the ritual of fear and phobia to produce a “true image” from the reaction of the sufferers … Not at all far from the emblematic figure of Dennis Hopper as Mickey Ray in Ferrara’s The Blackout (1997). Yet this impossible quest for the “missing image”, the ultimate “truth in an image” that Bernardet keeps musing about, is pervasively contradicted by, on the one hand, his own encroaching blindness and, on the other hand, Goifman’s increasingly avant-garde attention to sound as overtaking and finally virtually replacing the image (surreal Godardian detail: every fear-ritual dispositif comes complete with a live sound mixer!). FilmeFobia is among the essential film events of the 2000s. Get ready to fight it out.
© Adrian Martin March 2009 |
