The Notebook is covering the NYFF with an on-going correspondence between critic Doug Dibbern and editor Daniel Kasman.
Above: The Monopoly of Violence.
Hey, Danny,
Great to hear from you. It’s comforting to learn that your own feelings about this year’s festival mirror my own. Like you, I always love the months of September and October because the festival and its press screenings represent, to me, the traditional highpoint for a sense of a cinephile community here in the city: I always feel a rush standing in those long, snaking lines outside the Walter Reade, seeing old friends and acquaintances, waving to each other across that vast auditorium, recognizing the faces of nerds I barely know, and always dumbstruck by the hundreds of faces of other critics and journalists and industry professionals whose faces I’ve never seen before.
One thing about those annual reunions I feel most nostalgic for today is the auditory qualities of those congregations. In those crowds, we have to raise our voices to be heard: the collective excitement gives birth to an acoustic cloud that forces conversations to become even more animated, as we trade opinions about the films we’ve been seeing with acquaintances we may not have talked to since the last time we bumped into each other in some revival house lobby months earlier.
The particular culture of New York, it seems to me, creates a specific style of cinephile friendship: the city is so vast, populated by so many thousands of educated, artistic weirdos that our social networks are inherently dispersed and disconnected. Film buff friendships in New York are never as tight as we’d like them to be. And the qualities of moviegoing itself exacerbate this sense of communal disconnection. We go to the movie theater—rather than watching at home—precisely because the theater isolates us, roots us in our seats, immobilized, alone in the dark. The isolation we eagerly impose upon ourselves intensifies the aesthetic experience. But this isolation is, ironically, also a communal experience: we are each one small part of the larger audience, after all—a collective, though, that has tacitly agreed that it cannot allow itself to communicate with each other in the midst of the aesthetic experience itself. That’s why those rare moments of communion in the theater manifest themselves through sonic means: the shared laughter, synergistic shrieks of fear, the awed hush—like a collective gasp—at the moment the film comes to an end when we understand how deeply moved we all were together, followed by the concomitant waves of applause. Perhaps surprisingly for what is typically understood primarily as a visual medium, we create a sense of community at the movie theater mostly through the power of sound. I think it is that collective vibration that I’ve been missing most these past few days.
So it was comforting to read your thoughts about Lovers Rock. I haven’t gotten the chance to see it yet myself, but it was nice to hear you echoing so much of what I’ve been feeling about the experience of the festival in this strange year. Your letter reminded me how much we inevitably read our own concerns into works of art—and how I am, perhaps, reading my own concerns into your letter as well. That is, I was struck to see you writing about the same subjects that have intrigued me in the movies that I’ve been able to see—the intertwined themes of isolation and community that the pandemic has brought to the forefront for both of us, but also a fascination with the qualities of sound as a force that can bind people together. It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that you found yourself yearning to turn up your car radio as way to create a sense of communion with others at the drive-in or that you were so moved by the improvised collaboration of honking horns.
So maybe it was a coincidence—or maybe it wasn’t—that I kept thinking about those same themes echoing throughout each of the four films I’ve been able to screen so far: Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, David Dufresne’s The Monopoly of Violence, Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI, and Song Fang’s The Calming, each of which I enjoyed. Dufresne’s and Pollard’s films—the former a documentary about the yellow vest protests in France, the latter about the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.—make an especially good pairing about the ability of collective forces to reshape our world.
Dufresne constructs his film by piecing together videos that people out on the streets shot with their smartphones, which he intercuts with interviews of (mostly) liberal political theorists, several protestors, and a couple men involved in law enforcement. And because he organizes the film with an intellectual framework—the title comes from Max Weber’s notion that the defining trait of the modern state is that it reserves for itself the legal right to commit physical violence—the film makes us think about the idea of the crowd, which necessarily inspires us to ruminate about the masses’ ability—or inability—to shape its destiny in a democratic culture.
So Dufresne’s movie is about the idea of the crowd, but really about two competing ideas of crowds: the yellow vest protestors and the phalanx of black-clad, militarized police, who make their identities invisible behind helmets, face shields, and masks. And though Dufresne clearly draws his positive inspiration from Weber, the titular theorist, his film is guided perhaps even more so by its antipathy to the legacy of the philosopher Gustave Le Bon, whom the film mentions only in passing. The first great theorist of the crowd, Le Bon was an ultra-conservative monarchist whose antagonism toward the masses and democracy was informed by his hatred of the Paris Commune of 1871. Le Bon saw crowds as inherently irrational and violent. Individuals within crowds, he maintained, necessarily became suggestible, lost the ability to reason, gave up their will to charismatic leaders, and reverted to primitive, instinctual behavior. Despite the obviously illogical nature of his assertions, Le Bon’s theories became widely influential in the early twentieth century, inspiring even liberal thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, who in turn influenced following generations, who became less and less aware of their own debt to the ideas of that crackpot reactionary. The notion that crowds are inherently irrational still permeates our culture today, especially among the flag-waving fascist apologists who collaborate with the current American administration. But especially these days, when we see tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter protestors joining together rationally, peacefully, and positively, and when we see almost everyone on the subway in this notoriously brusque city willingly wearing masks, we can all see how idiotic and pernicious Le Bon’s ideas are.
So it was exciting to see Dufresne arguing in favor of the masses, humanizing the protestors. He can see that new technologies have democratized our understanding of crowds. Before, our conception of the group dynamics out in the streets was filtered through the corporate media. Like many liberals, Dufresne starts from the assumption that regardless of the liberal inclinations of most journalists, the mainstream media will necessarily frame its stories not so much for some conservative general audience but for the hierarchical systems that provide its funding. With the technological democratization of information, though, his unspoken argument goes, we can now see the political situation from a richer variety of perspectives.
But he knows that visual perception alone cannot win the hearts of his audience; he humanizes the protestors not so much because he lets us see through their eyes but because he lets us hear their voices. I especially love his repeated technique of showing us smartphone footage, then projecting that same video onto a wall, where the people who were in that footage stand up in front of the moving images of themselves and explain in their own words what was going on. Their language humanizes them, but it is ultimately the timbre of their voices that makes them three-dimensional and makes us believe their stories and feel for them.
Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI is similarly interested in the masses and group dynamics. Here, the ostensible subject is the FBI’s history of spying on Martin Luther King, Jr.—and especially their efforts to record his sexual trysts as a means of eventually shaming, intimidating, or blackmailing him. Here, too, Pollard organizes his film around two competing types of collectives. On the one hand, he presents us images of civil rights protestors marching in unison and images of King flanked by his wife and children or his advisors so that King is never just a heroic figure standing on his own but is always instead the leader of a disciplined team—indeed, of an entire culture. Pollard presents the FBI, one the other hand, as a very different type of collective: one of his interviewees notes tartly—with a nod toward suspicions about Hoover’s deeply repressed homoerotic desires—that he had a specific type: white, well-built, clean-cut, and conservative men. So the FBI, too, has a shared identity. Pollard allows us to see the faces of Hoover and his men more than Dufresne does with the French police, but in their physical and institutional conformity, they too eventually feel somewhat faceless.
Appropriately for a film whose subject is audio recordings, Pollard, too, understands that sound has a greater capacity than the image for making us identify with his characters. He deploys the human voice as the primary vehicle to create an individual identity out of the crowd, which, in turn, humanizes the crowd itself. It is King’s voice—his poetry, his timbre, his cadences—and the narration of his colleagues like Andrew Young and Clarence Jones hovering on the soundtrack that ultimately gives life to our sympathies for the liberal collective against its conservative establishment antagonists.
One of the many things that the pandemic—and the utterly incompetent and inhumane response of our current administration—has stolen from us is our annual tradition of re-establishing our sense of a collective cinephile identity here in New York. We need to reignite this cooperative force again and again as a way of reminding ourselves that watching movies is not merely a passive activity, but a powerful way of making meaning together in the world, a powerful way of trying once again to forge a link between art and democracy. I’m thinking back to your desire to turn up the car radios and honk your horns as a way of creating a sense of camaraderie with the people who’d been sharing your aesthetic experience invisibly all around you. I, too, have that same desire to share once again the vibrations wafting through a room with others, renewing old friendships and making new friends out of strangers. With that in mind, after I send this missive off to you late this Sunday night, I’ll turn up the volume on my Bluetooth speaker and play the Revolutionaries’ “Kunta Kinte” and Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” on YouTube; maybe I’ll even hum along a little, sending my own sonic vibrations across the city out your way in honor of all our movie nerd friends and acquaintances we should’ve been reuniting with this week, reaffirming our shared values once again. It is their awed hush at the end of the film and their exuberant applause that I miss most, that audible sign of our small community’s collective yearning to use our love of art to begin healing the world.
See you in person again someday soon, I hope.
—Doug