This Week in Cinema (10.31.06)
Death of a President and Lunacy
By Beth Capper
Published: November 1st, 2006 | 4:21pm
Before it was even released, the Film Four production Death of a President was all over Fox News. From any brief synopsis of the film’s content, it’s not difficult to see why. Death of a President is a pseudo-documentary set in the aftermath of the assassination of President Bush in Chicago in the year 2007. However, contrary to what you might have heard, this supposedly incendiary film is not a celebratory portrayal of how much better things would be if someone offed the bible-loving Texan, but rather, how much worse. Still, Republican news stations aren’t known for their in-depth research.
The idea may be controversial, but in reality, the film is a fairly poor example of an attempt to enlighten and politicize audiences. Death of a President revolves mostly around the trial of a Syrian immigrant named Zahra Abi Zikri, suggesting that if someone were to assassinate Bush, it would undoubtedly be used as yet another justification for the “War on Terror”, wielded, after Bush’s death, by the much more frightening prospect of vice-president Dick Cheney. The cleverest aspect on display is that, for the most part, the film uses real footage of Bush, Cheney et al, only employing actors as the subjects (including witnesses, family members and suspected assassins) interviewed in the “documentary”. If we weren’t aware already, film-maker Gabriel Range and his excellent editorial team show us just how easily images can be manipulated to create a fictitious happening. However, the films imagination doesn’t reach very far beyond suggesting that yet another amendment would be made to the Patriot Act, thus giving the police and FBI unlimited control over the people in some kind of 1984-esque way (power which, especially considering the recent amendments making torture legal in America, they seemingly already have).
The main problem with Death of a President is that so much more could be done with it. The ramifications of such an action are surely multiple – we’re taking about making a martyr of a president who is demonized the world over. Death of a President is a weak attempt at making a revolutionary political statement. If you want to know how they got this idea past the censors, go and see it.
“There are two ways of running an insane asylum”, says director Jan Svankmajer(Alice), staring blankly into a rolling camera. “The first is with total freedom, and the second is the more traditional method of total control. But there is also a third, which combines the very worst elements of the first two. That is the madness that we live in everyday.”
This is how Lunacy (Sileni) — the most recent cinematic undertaking from the acclaimed Czech director Svankmajer – begins. It’s quite an introduction, setting the tone for the nightmarish scenarios that follow. Based on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, as well as borrowing from the writings and biography of the Marquis de Sade, Lunacy uses insane asylums as a metaphor to question the illusion of freedom and methods of control employed in contemporary society.
The film follows Jean Berlot who has been having a recurring nightmare about being institutionalized against his will, because his mother died in an insane asylum. He meets the Marquis, who offers him a place to stay and while there, Berlot witnesses a scene of debauchery and blasphemy in a church on the Marquis’ property. Denouncing the Marquis, Berlot tries to leave, but the Marquis offers him a chance to cure himself of his nightmares. He takes Berlot to an insane asylum where the inmates have complete freedom in order to help him overcome his fears. What follows is a clever portrayal of the two kinds of methods of running an asylum that Svankmajer alludes to in his introductory speech.
Svankmajer uses his trademark stop-motion animation in between scenes, where pieces of meat and animal entrails creep around like fleshy insects. The significance of these, apart from dramatic devices to demonstrate madness, isn’t quite obvious until the ending where, as an addendum to the narrative that has followed, Svankmajer shoots rows of pre-packaged meat in a supermarket. Drawing parallels between his narrative about insane asylums and the society that we live in, Svankmajer is suggesting that we, as a people, do not look beyond the way society packages things for us. If you’re looking for madness and horror this Halloween, look no further than the world outside your front door.
Issue #35
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