Poto and Cabengo

(Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA, 1980)

There is an unfortunate myth enveloping Jean-Pierre Gorin, who was Jean-Luc Godard’s chief collaborator in the Dziga Vertov Group period of 1969-1972. The myth has it that Gorin must have been the dour, dogmatic Marxist of the two, leading poor old, brainwashed Jean-Luc away from poetry and into the farthest, driest reaches of political extremism and fanaticism.

Yet, if it was not already clear from Gorin’s interviews just after that time, it is abundantly obvious from Poto and Cabengo that Gorin is a vibrant and exploratory filmmaker/film-thinker – linked, in his American context, with true inspirationalists like Manny Farber and Raymond Durgnat (who both reverently cite Gorin), and Les Blank & Maureen Gosling (photographer and sound recordist, respectively, on Poto and Cabengo).

It is indeed a sad index of film criticism’s non-encounter with the open and radical edge of (specifically) documentary cinema that whilst Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) – first screened around the same time as Poto and Cabengo, and sharing with it (in an entirely fictionalised context) many aspects of concern and research – received the usual (if ambivalent, and somewhat puzzled) glut of critical commentaries, Poto and Cabengo went virtually unmentioned.

The only aspects of Poto and Cabengo noted in Australia at the time of its initial Film Festival screenings were those gestures that could clearly and familiarly be construed as anti-documentary in the old Godard/Gorin manner – the extensive use of black leader for segments of the film, and the refusal of typical documentary illusions of image-sound continuity. As for the rest ...

[2023 Postscript: Many years after writing these words, Gorin’s major essay-films finally became available on DVD: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin (Criterion, Eclipse Series 31, 2011), also featuring Routine Pleasures (1986) and My Crasy Life (1992). Gorin has since become a regular commentator for Criterion.]

I am not alone in believing Poto and Cabengo to be a key work of contemporary cinema. Gorin has been able to live and practice what Godard has dreamt of and ruminated on in his video Scénario du film Passion (1982): “The screen is a wall. A wall is for jumping over. Playing leapfrog with yourself”. Jumping over that wall of the screen surface – while still paying due attention to the constructions that go there – Gorin immerses himself in its eventful depths.

There is intense life in this movie: the intensity and creativity of childhood itself, at war with everything that is pressing in on it.

Poto and Cabengo documents Gorin’s involvement with the widely publicised case of Grace and Virginia Kennedy in San Diego – twins of six or seven who, it appeared, had invented their own private language (hence their pet names for each other of Poto and Cabengo). As Gorin films and relates to Grace and Virginia, scientists, linguists and psychologists are proceeding apace in cracking the mystery of their language and the reasons for its existence.

Gorin realises at the outset that this private language will soon be disappearing. His ‘investigation of the case’, parallel to that of the scientists, takes in getting to know the girls’ parents, Tom and Christie; their grandmother Paula; and their various histories. This is a poor family living mainly on welfare, Tom’s sporadic real estate commissions, and money from Gorin’s project itself.

At the end of the film, “six months later”, the family has moved, the children have been separated at home and into different schools, and the fact that they are becoming more normal every day means that Tom’s and Christine’s Hollywood dream of Grace and Virginia becoming “Shirley Temples” is becoming less and less of a possibility. “I got the sense that at the end of this story,” comments Gorin, “everybody would be left high and dry”. It is reported that, once separated, one sister eventually went to work on a factory assembly-line, while the other swept the floor of a McDonalds.

Gorin is heir to the legacy of Jean Rouch. His film speaks, with Rouchian poignancy, of all those forces that strangle life at the perpetually final moment of its bright, beautiful flowering; he details and etches the resistances, surprises, excesses, wishes and dreams of resolutely ordinary/absolutely extraordinary people.

Although it is possible to see the film as a romanticisation of the symbolically foreign and alien nature of Grace and Virginia and their language (“they were foreigners in their own language, and that was their fascination”), it moves from this initial vantage point of theoretically-inspired, distant fascination to an understanding which embraces both the intransigent nuttiness of not-obviously-different folks (Tom, Chris, Paula) and the typicality of even Grace and Virginia (emblem of all kids who flower and are then crushed).

Gorin is heir to Rouch, too, at the level of the film as event. It is premised on Gorin’s intervention and subjectivity; his presence as filmmaker not only sets the ball rolling, but also is a factor in deciding just where and how it rolls in the future lives and plans of the people documented. The event happens and changes in part because he is there – both on a day-to-day level (when Gorin shows up to take Grace and Virginia out on a picnic for the film, he is given Granny as well, so that Tom and Chris can finally have a day to themselves), and also on a longer-term level.

One of the saddest and truest threads is the little psychodrama of hopes and misunderstandings Gorin promotes in Tom and Chris simply by being there as a filmmaker. To them, this can only mean the first sign of Hollywood, and the chance of a starlet career for their children. Near the end, Gorin acknowledges that “Chris was clinging to a dream that my filming had reinforced” as she talks of “movie people” and the “90 day option” which is about to run out without having been taken up.

Poto and Cabengo’s theme is this hope of a release, of relief – set inside the hopelessness of its real eventuality. For the children, too, Gorin provides a temporary release, a line-of-flight from the twin prisons of the institution and the home (where they have been cooped up under the speculative premise that they might be retarded).

In a section entitled “Show Me the World, Mister”, Gorin takes Grace and Virginia to zoo, library, beach, and his home. So much energy released from their beings is truly overwhelming to watch; an energy mixed up with fright and fear of the outside world, and inevitably triggered memories of the clinical surveillance and control that awaits them now, as it has always awaited them.

In the music library scene, Gorin conjectures that the sight of the tape spools must signify the experience of therapy to them – and then off they go, in a last, uncontrollable burst of energy. “I was too slow for them”, Gorin ruefully comments; the camera can barely keep track of their exhilarated twin trajectories around the room (it’s one of those moments of cinema I would take to a desert island).

As well as putting himself into an event/performance with Grace/Virginia, Gorin also stages little performance-pieces (a practice he noticed in Maurice Pialat’s fims) between members of the family: getting Chris to interview Paula in German; filming Tom as he rehearses his bizarre and pathetic real estate pitch (“This house has got four bathrooms and four bedrooms for your seven kids”) with Chris as an enthusiastic guinea pig (“Price is no problem ... I want a swimming pool, a gourmet kitchen and a sunken tub in the master bathroom”).

Poto and Cabengo is a completely worked-over film; it is a model of how a documentary can seize and multiply the eventfulness and significance of its material. (Gorin himself uses the Farber-like phrase “working the material” to indicate the equal importance of post-production alongside planning and shooting.)

Beyond the relatively simple shock-value of anti-conventionality in the persistent use of devices such as black screen, there is an enormous value of articulation and expressivity that goes much further than the standard anti-documentary reflex. The film works on a set of procedures – freeze frame, tape loop, fade out, black screen, fragments of music, photographic stills – which need to be grasped in the manner of research and as an “adventure of materials” (Jean-André Fieschi’s phrase from his early 1970s essay on Rouch translated in Richard Roud’s 1980 Cinema: A Critical Dictionary).

There is nothing mechanically disruptive about these devices, cod-Brechtian-effect fashion; they are always and specifically poetic. The freeze frame in the middle of a shot or movement – allowing a gap for a remark by Gorin, or another piece of direct sound from elsewhere – is about that double edge of vivid intensity, the intensive multiplicity (as Deleuze & Guattari would call it) of a moment in its singular arrangement of sounds, bodies, colours, spaces, behaviours. And this co-exists with the reflective possibility that emerges from the contemplation of a chance configuration, a sudden microcosm, a diagram of relations. Remember what the film teaches us: there are 16 ways to pronounce the word potato …

Gorin arranges the event of the film’s movement and unfolding so that it is a sequence of powerful crystallisations, in this double-edged manner; seizing and heightening the symbolic nature of its material. Take the sequence titled “A Dinner”, at the moment when Tom says the dinner table prayer of grace. Since one of Gorin’s concerns is with when and how Grace and Virginia can wriggle out from under various processes of societal and familial normalisation, he freezes the complicit, disobedient look of the children to each other while the prayer continues on the soundtrack, and unfreezes the image only at the prayer’s conclusion.

At other times, Gorin freezes the image to run a particular remark past again, with an added element: when Chris, during her interview scene, describes Grace and Virginia as “two ding-a-lings who are pretty much alive”, Gorin freezes her, brings up sound from elsewhere of the children laughing, plays her line through again, and only then returns to the image-sound continuity of the talking head situation. The freeze is a refusal of the standard documentary cutaway technique (one that has hidden many evils), but Gorin makes of it much more than just a refusal.

The meaning of his film is inside such moments.

This review is extracted from my long, theoretically-inclined essay “Sixteen Ways to Pronounce Potato, or: The Adventure of Materials (Fragment from 1987)”, which appears in full in Photogénie (November 2013).

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© Adrian Martin August 1987