Dani Leventhal | |
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Notes on 4 movies by Dani Leventhal
Dani and I had begun to write just a few words, the usual welcome mats of the English language, the learned hellos, and then I was granted the rare chance to show off her movie at the honcho festival in Rotterdam. It’s a masterpiece I won’t write about here, her half hour Draft 9 (28 minutes 2003) which already contains a lifetime of looking. Perhaps several lifetimes. Is it because I am always so busy shirking the moment that I find a particular happiness in her movies, which are always bruised and dirty and up close to everything? Lacking any means at all, she finds the appropriate distance to her subject, and that distance turns out, in most cases, to be not much distance at all. And it’s not just a matter of her camera, but her open face and hands and the heart following surely right along. Her heart is forever busy jumping up into the light.When Dani’s movie hit the screen in Rotterdam I could feel the room change. It was a serious crowd, there were professionals there, the ones who had seen it all, the ones who’d written the books, climbed the mountain and brought back the tablets, those kind of folks, but when her movie started everything stopped but the pictures. They are difficult and bloodied, and proceed in a crashing collision of instants one after another, yes of course of course it’s all too much, it’s always been too much. But here at last was a room thinking as fast as she was cutting, jumping every jump, joining every disjoint, who could see as fast as she could live inside her camera.
It’s just me I know, because I happened to be there, looking out from the small hole of my personality, but I felt that an artist was born that day, if being born meant recognition. The other cut of ‘artist’ happened a long time ago, when Dani got kicked by her first horse or stuck her face into a pig’s face or who knows when. A long time before she ever picked up a camera that’s for sure. She already had a body trained and opened up for looking, and when she got hold of a camera she just kept on looking, only this time there would be a record, a mark. She used her camera to go further, it was her mirror in the labyrinth, now there was nothing she couldn’t face. Right?
Imagine my surprise a year after Rotterdam when a disc arrives in the mail from Dani with some hard scrawled charcoal drawings and on this disc four new movies made in 2007. Four! Of course the DVD is filled with sound that is distorted and too loud or way too quiet, and there are glitches and bits which won’t play, but through the technical maladies it’s all still there, the same heady jam that made Draft 9 such a whirl.
Some thoughts.
When Show and Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey (12.5 minutes 2007) opens I see a bee on a flower so close that I am also a bee, the camera hovering and swaying, blowing like the flowering stalks. Isn’t she worried about being stung? Or perhaps these are the pictures which arrive after the bees have already landed and sunk their poisoned spears and flown off. But nothing deters her, she stays close, so very close. I am one of them now, because of her old magician’s trick, she turns her camera and then her audience into bees.
Against a yellowed stain of a background a woman speaks about giving birth. She is double voiced, so it’s hard to make out exactly, words and phrases emerge from the scrum. The way these words arrive, the issue of language, this is also labour. The site of production. Language doubles and redoubles, circles round itself. The opening scene is also the primal scene, the unbearable beginning: the bees transfer pollen grains to flowers so that more flowers can grow. Then a voice speaks of birth in a fall into language.
A woman busy licking between the thighs of another woman, the sounds of an animal, the huge hanging tits of a Scottish Highlander. It strolls right up to the camera and Dani says, “Hello,” in a high voice and the horned beast gives her a head butt. The picture vanishes. Can video be as bruised and run over and beat up as a body? It can. It must be.
The subject looks back, the picture that touches, the cost of being so close, of intimacy which in Dani’s world is also and always an animal gesture, an animal closeness. As close as an animal, as close to our own meat and gristle as an animal.
A couple of kids play cards and the light glows around a shirtless body, he laughs and lays down another card as the camera stays down low. This is the rarest of all the abilities that Dani has—she is able to turn the camera on while life around her happens. Nothing stops or waits or freezes, everything is in motion and she is in the middle of this bruised, laughing fragment, looking up into the light. A German child draws a missile . And then Dani’s large face looms into the lens. “I was raised to believe that Israel was the land of milk and honey.” She winds up on a farm on a kubbutz where 2000 eggs a day roll off the conveyer belt and she is charged, along with some others, with spraying the eggs with bleach. (And collecting the sick hens to sell to the Arabs across the fence) After a stint at the metal factory where she was sexually harassed.
A night train pulls in, her grandmother offers her ice cream in a gallery filled with hanging screens and moving pictures. “There’s a suicide bomber over there,” Dani says and then takes a bite of ice cream. They are killing my neighbor’s children and the ice cream still tastes good. They are destroying my corner store but when I buy my ice cream from the other corner store, the ice cream still tastes good. The Others, the Palestinians, the ones displaced and segregated, robbed of their own land and shunted into poverty and deprivation, all this suffering appears on screens, constantly playing, permanently on display and therefore invisible. “You get used to it.” You eat ice cream and this turns the pictures off. It’s a trick, an old magician’s trick. All of my seeing is in my mouth. And my mouth tastes good.
A woman rescues a pumpkin from a swamp. Dani takes frozen dead birds out of a bag and fondles them. Their feathers blowing in the wind makes them seem alive. From a distance you can hardly tell, until you get up close. And she is always close. Her feet are dirty, her hands filled with bird death. The cat cries. Tarot cards are shuffled. The future, anyone?
A Puerto Rican man on a bus, the camera pushed right up into his face, talks about lizards biting his ears and hanging from his lobes all day when he used to go to school. He is also close with the animals. Why isn’t she scared? Why is she so close, close enough to be hurt by his bad looking laughter which could turn into something else when the bottle runs out.
Finally we are in a bar looking oh so very clean and antiseptic. It changes colour like a mood ring, it is pink and blue and then pink again. Dani is the lonely occupant, waiting at her table. Back in the city, in a designed space, everything clean and orderly and perfect. In other words, no happiness. The camera is not close here, it looks at it all from a distance so that it can gauge the effect of this geometry on the ‘subject,’ the maker of course, it is always the maker who is at stake here. She is always dragging us along, pushing us into the face of strangers, party to another chance encounter.
In the closing scene we see a woman on a tight rope, falling off. The bees make honey but cannot eat it. You want to see a nursing cow and it hits you in the head. And the woman between your legs? The child that comes from that place? The stranger on the bus? For a few moments there are gestures toward child’s play, flights of reverie with the birds, only the birds are all dead now. Now it is time to take up again with the monsters who are still alive, and I among them, dirtied and crushing you, and stepping on your hope without even noticing.
Litau (7.5 minutes 2007) opens with a dance number: is it a foxtrot or a samba, at any rate, it is one of those body shaking rhythm numbers that have left words behind. Three figures move together, lensed up close in swaths of brightly coloured fabric. It might be a her between two hims, there are no faces so it’s hard to tell, might be she’s wearing the pants today, might be he’s got on his best hose and heels.
Meanwhile on the street, near the dirtiest and most beautiful windshield in all of Estonia, Dani listens to a woman talk and scribbles down words like Puha Vaim next to a child’s face. “Or you go to hell, oh I understand. That’s why you’re willing to spend time with me right now,” says Dani. One thing is for sure: this is not an interview like those which may be found in a score of other doc manoeuvers. For one thing, despite the woman’s underlinings and rhetorical repeatings, it is clear that not so much is clear. Between them stretch a lifetime of mysterious experiences. After all that, how can I know you, how can I find you? Could it be here, on the rusted hood of this abandoned car, is this the place where we could make our stand together?
Dani’s journal offers up another face, a star of David, a fire. They are the quickest of sketches, Dani is turning these unknown words (are they a prophecy, a warning?) into these small pictograms so they might be stored and saved and rescued from the present. They are both people of the book after all, it lives inside each of them as a text waiting to be recited. Signs are inscribed in her notebook so she can carry them away. And us alongside.
At this moment the camera tilts and a young girl in a polka dot dress spins round and comes to a stop, and then again and again in the other direction. Smiling. The woman keeps smiling, she is the one writing enigmas into Dani’s notebooks, reciting foreign words. A minute into the scene the camera shifts again and the talker’s face comes into view, it turns out she is a double-chinned, grey haired lady with a broad round face that narrows suddenly and precipitously into mouth and chin, as if their maker had run out of time or material.
A young girl colours a rocket yellow in silence. The mysterious words, pointed, emphatic, underlined, hang over this scene somehow, the way an impression of a room remains if you turn the lights on for a moment and then off. The phantom of a room remains for a moment. And then it too gives way.
A young boy in a bathing suit leans out on a rock, speaking to another boy crouching in the water below. Their mouths are turned away from us, turned towards each other. Unlike the usual cinema, whose inhabitants are always opened, on display, always ‘turned out’ to offer their audience the best view, the best seat in the house, here the views are partial, the codes only partially revealed, what is most often on view, again and again in this tape, is the way others remain a mystery.
Two young boys listen to a radio in a parking lot. “It’s shit,” says one. “I like it,” Dani responds, which prompts the beautiful young one onscreen to curl his lips into an O and dance up and down. It takes about twenty seconds.
A young girl in a red dress climbs an apple tree. Three seconds. (Dani writes me about this scene: In this clip the boy who turned his lips into a vowel and hoots like an ape is the voice-over for the girl in the tree who is now an ape because of his voice-over.)
A Latvian soldier checks documents on a bus. The camera is low and unobtrusive, but right there in front of him. What if he notices? Will he look up and see her, and see us watching behind her? The threat of being seen, of being looked at in the wrong way by the wrong person. Ten seconds.
Two boys look into the guts of a car. One of them shirtless and lean, both of them blonde and too young to know any better. A girl smiles shyly behind them. She knows everything but lacks the agency to act, caught inside her gender trap. Action is left to the unselfconscious and unaware, the know-nothings. They gesture to something beyond the field of vision speaking in Lithuanian. Ten seconds.
Two children describe a soft shell crab encounter in German. “Was it alive before?” asks Dani. They never answer.
A woman lying by a river. Or dead. Or asleep. Pink top, brown pants, black rubber boots. Dead or alive, she is also part of the natural world.
A walk down a stairway with carefully close attention paid to the wooden banister, the camera follows its turning and twisting downwards. For some a road of yellow bricks, for others a wooden hand rail is enough.
Horses watery and close. Soft-eyed, they graze each other. Their soft touch is also a look.
A woman lies in bed, the camera pans over her in a post (pre?) coital haze. She is seen with the softest possible eyes. The eyes of a horse, for instance.
A football match on TV. (Could this also be love?)
Street musicians stroke their violins and cellos while Dani’s camera returns to the car seen at the tape’s beginning. The woman with two faces, large and small, has picked up her child, the one who turned and turned. They white out and the movie is over.
Litau is a prayer of moments, of tender strangers met in passing, but met full on. There is no holding back or opportunity for rest. She has made a composition using fragments of incomprehension. Litau refuses to wrap up all these encounters into a story, or pretend they are part of a single gesture. Instead we are offered the raw, unremembered stuff of living. Dani is always in the midst, pushing her face up close, trying to find a way to get through the scar of language which names and separates, which binds and heals, like the spine of a book opening and closing.
9 Minutes of Kaunaus (6 minutes 2007) the title says but the tape is only six minutes long. The other third has been shorn away, left to the imagination as a promissory note. In a Lithuanian synagogue young Domas Darguzs whispers his wide-eyed truths to Dani. His miraculous confession informs her that this place was made of materials belonging to ancient Egypt, and that world peace will arrive when we can look on with love at the art of living that stands before us as statues. “Awesome,” Dani answers and he replies, “Yes it is.” Wherever her subjects are, this is where Dani is. She meets them over and again, whether child or bird or insect or holocaust survivor.
In between his testimonials from the other side are moments from a goat farm. The goats suckle on artificial nipples protruding from a nipple tub, or in another protracted scene they are attached to milking machines. The udders well and secrete milk like an ejaculating penis, again and again, caught in the infernal cycle of production.
Fire snakes from Egypt, gold discoveries and the mystery of death all pour of Domas’s mouth. One image gives way to the next in rapid succession like one of Dani’s tapes. His pictures are made with words, issuing from the space between his first set of teeth, and the small shifts of focus which allows his face to enter the frame at a speed which permits us to receive him. Like oracles past his orations are casually transcendent, it is a sermon delivered not from the front but the very back row, where all the buried and forgotten truths may be met again by anyone young or innocent or animal enough to receive them.
3 Parts for Today (12.5 minutes 2007). There is something about a bird lying on the ground that doesn’t look relaxed or at ease. It lies there in a cascade of grey and white feathers, heaving with breath, the yellow bill opening wide and all I can think is: how awful, how wounded. And how beautiful. It must have hit that harsh brick wall and fallen here, in the last beautiful light where Dani (does she ever sleep?) has found her.
Yonatan Shapira (named in the opening title as “The Refusenik”) talks about joining the Israeli army after the first Gulf War and becoming a helicopter pilot.
Grandma Leventhal is lensed centimeters away from her left elbow, the camera pointed straight up into a wattle of neck and the sagging flesh of her arms. She takes a pill and then a cracker. “I just don’t know why the pill doesn’t go down without you tasting it?” Dani asks/says. How can experience be masked, buried, repressed? Are we in the land of metaphor here? The denial of even the most rudimentary rights for Palestinians is somehow equivalent to a pill swallowed by Dani’s grandmother whose taste (or reality) is covered over by a cracker. Here is a politics searched for and unearthed and returned to again and again on home turf; in pictures of home, friends and familiars. The problem, the difficulties are never “out there,” but also and most importantly “over here.” How to find the necessary distance or closeness with the camera in order to be able to find them?
From a television screen a documentary fragment once again shows Yonatan Shapira speaking Hebrew, though the clip is silent (and shot home movie style, in what looks like someone’s living room where he speaks in front of a small group of folks) yellow subtitles permit language to be applied. “And then a little seven year old girl started running towards us. On one hand I saw this little scared girl… maybe she’s going to explode… I shouted but she didn’t stop…”
Incredibly at that moment a young girl gets up and walks by Yonatan. He can only smile and shake his head. “Yeah that girl was just about that high… but then I shot a warning shot in the air, the girl froze like this, for me it was like being hit by hammer on the head. For months afterwards I couldn’t forget that moment, and then I told my commanders I’m not doing this anymore.”
A blank post (or is it a chimney, a tower?) with a frayed red rope attached stands tall, the rope so hardly there by the time it reaches the far end of the frame that it seems to hover miraculously in the wind. The camera tilts to reveal it is the stem of a windmill.
Yonatan returns and contrasts the exhilarating lift off of his helicopter with the devastating effect these military machines bring to their target.
All at once we are offered experiences soft and hard. Raw and cooked. Dani feels along the seam of the real until these moments of contradiction erupt.
She films her father in temple singing with his eyes closed, softly chewing. The word “peace” passes through the air and some guitar and then there is some shuffling of hymnal pages. Isn’t this word already a question? How can there be peace in the synagogue when this religion has been used to bludgeon and displace an entire Arab population?
Then Dani appears out of doors in jeans and a hoodie brandishing a bowl of muesli and fruit which settles into the middle of the frame. She talks but we don’t see her face at first, her words and mouth are off screen. (Some illusory wholeness, some easy place of seeing and knowing is endlessly deferred or troubled.)
“There is a Jewish law that says that you shouldn’t eat alone. I just had a meeting with Yonatan Shapira, and here is this activist, a Combatant For Peace, and it was so funny because I showed him this video that I made of him, of the lecture that he gave, and I have mixed the footage of him being a helicopter pilot with this bird. I have footage of this bird that had just fallen, a little fledgling, and he was like ‘Did you give it some water? What did you do?’ It didn’t even occur to me to try to save that bird. It was just this beautiful footage.”
A woman wrapped in a gold mylar sheet makes her way towards the Ignalina nuclear power plant in the distance. End of part one.
Part two opens with a set of titles.
Antje Muller's grandpa was a Nazi. One night we went out dancing with my friend Unis, a Turk. He knew I wanted Antje and he hit on her right in front of me.
A woman in red calls out of a megaphone, bikes park near the windmill. A picnic of bread and strawberry jam ensues. At an amusement park mechanical camels race across their prescribed tracks, digitally slowed. A woman in a red dress walks gingerly along rocks in water. A pair of hands knit red yarn against a luminous red cloth background. Dani and a handsome man and a woman under a blanket on the beach. There is laughter and music, the shutter speed is slowed, the pictures blurry and intense. He speaks German and Dani is so close, their feet are far away and a horizon of Black Sea just beyond them but the faces are close, the touch of the blanket fills the frame.
The woman lying there face down, never saying a word, somehow between ‘them,’ the man speaking German and Dani’s playful accusations. Wait, wait. Is this woman the ‘Antje’ mentioned in the titles? Dani laughs to cover over her bad feelings (why do women do this so well, so often?) but it’s clear she’s hurt. Why is she hurt? I grope backwards across the line of pictures and find myself looking again at those intertitled words (“Antje’s Muller’s grandpa was a Nazi”) and especially the words she uses for love. “Hit on her.” To have the beloved taken away, seized, to have one’s hope stepped on so that another’s might hold sway, all this is “hit on her,” taking a hit. Where to turn after this beach, why is there room under that blanket only for two? Dani records an enormous tree with a deep scar running along its length. I am this tree, this body of water, this unspeaking woman. Love is a hit.
Part 3
The voice of Steve Reinke erupts over pictures of a kosher Schawarma stall, and then two Canadian geese duck their heads into water in perfect time, turning around some unseen centre. Steve speaks a text of Dani’s and it is delivered casually, or at least its laughing interruptions, its abrupt stop and starts, give it the impression of verité. He talks about meeting Shapira, the Refusenik, and then about prayer, the gods that live outside and in.
“The difference is that I’m no longer praying to an outside force, a force which reinforces my own insignificance. Instead I’m looking inside and the inside is always there. It’s there 24/7. This other God outside sometimes doesn’t seem to be there, sometimes seems to have receded into the distance or listening or not listening. But the one on the inside you can feel it and see it in other things it’s just always there. So I can call on it, I can remember it. It gives no reason to escape into instant gratification of sex or booze and then the rebound from these things which is a kind of loneliness or emptiness.”
The two birds fuck, that doesn’t take long, both raising their necks alternately as if in triumph or release. And then they are back to ducking their heads under the water and using their bills to send water running down their backs. Like so many other pictures that Dani collects, they are so beautiful. They are also the end.
Yonatan Shapira’s refusenik remonstrations are interwoven with moments of Dani’s family (her grandmother and the pill, her father singing), her broken love in part two, and finally a sort of reconciliation (God is inside) while the geese fuck and bathe and swim right on.
So now of course I am waiting for more. It’s enough for now, I’ve seen these movies and re-seen them. They are humming right along to the same tune that delivered Draft 9, so muscular and fearless and camera ready. Now I want more, at least enough to fill the granaries, the distribution houses, the screens of festivals in years to come. Let it rain. Let it all come down.