...Darwin's Nightmare, a deeply alarming, observant, and investigative examination of the world right now. What's a documentary for?

Well, lets see if we agree on what the film's about. For a doc, that should be fairly obvious, shouldn't it?

Here's what I think it wants to be about: I think it wants us to see the Nile Perch as a metaphor for Europeans and Africa. The perch has eaten everything else out of the river. It doesn't belong there, but ever since it got there, it's destroyed the beautiful ecosystem that made up Lake Victoria. In a post-colonial Africa, the Europeans are still there, still running much of life through capitalism that takes the food away from a famine ridden populace to feed the distant bourgeoise. And the exploitation continues through arms sales to keep the various wars going in Africa to feed western corporate coffers. (OK, maybe I'm overstating this a little, but I don't think by much).

What I think the film is about: poverty, gross depictions of people preparing maggot-ridden fish skeletons to be eaten, Russian pilots with time to kill, maybe there is gun running involved, hypocritical (or clueless) EU ministers, prostitutes that service the pilots that fly in guns and fly the fish meat out (just another example of Euro exploitation of Africa?), fishing and processing of Nile Carp, kids sniffing glue (the scene where the two kids sniff glue had to have been partially staged).

What's missing: If I'm right about what the film wants to be about (open for debate), what we don't know is how would life be different for Mwanza without the Perch Nile, the processing plants, the daily flights? How is this different than other 3rd world rural areas? Was there a bustling economy here before? Is it a result of ecological disaster (the perch) or western exploitation or just the general lack of development in African nations? Is Tanzania better or worse off with this exportable product than it would be without it?

But why does the perch have to be a "metaphor" when everything you describe is fact?

Actually, no, I wouldn't say this at all. In life, things are not always clear; we slowly discover the truth of a situation gradually, experientially. For a certain kind of doc, it should be obvious--like the PBS talking head variety--but I think there is plenty of room for engaging and recording the world in a more subjective or poetic fashion and don't believe every documentary needs to function in the same manner. Darwin's Nightmare is a ground-level observation. It's Hupert Sauper's personal diary as he explores the location and talks to people he encounters. It's not something with which he went back to Europe, wrote a long droning narration, and created charts and graphs in defense of some premise. It's simply him looking and listening and wondering as threads begin to merge--and encouraging the audience do the same.

Hubert Sauper: In DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this "fittest" animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to "get it", unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that's three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.

http://www.coop99.at/darwins-nightmare/dar...ml/startset.htm

The film strikes me as a "thesis" film. Beautiful, well-made, thought provoking, but definitely not made by some one who is searching for something unexpected. And Sauper's own statements about the film seem to confirm this...

This is very much the sound of axe grinding. Sauper's ideas may be laudable, and compassionate in theory, but they are really crudely reductionist -- so much so that I could easily accuse him of a bit of high-minded cultural imperialism in the sense that for him the things and people shown in his film are interchangeable elements in his somewhat unintelligible Western Civilizationist Self-Loathing...

...after all Sauper wouldn't for a second change places with the Africans in his film, nor does he need to. Is this not a more sophisticated and pernicious way of portraying Africans as "savages" perpetual victims who perversely confirm the West's innate superiority? To me, there is something obscene and inhuman both about the spectacle and his "tourism" of the spectacle. Is he himself not guilty of some of this same "arrogance" towards the "third world"...? Does he really care about them -- or are they just a kind of twisted mirror he can use to show "the west" it's ugly face? Triumphalism through self-loathing.

I have no doubt that there is life, culture, even happiness around the lake. But you'd never see it in Sauper's film.

It's not too surprising that the president would go on a tirade given the amount of business the whole fiasco is drudging up for him. It sounds like he's more concerned about tourism than the poverty the film addresses. (And of course, this was alluded to in the film as well.)

It's not a God's-eye-view, fact-heavy analysis but a first person, experiential exploration. Whether Sauper knew where he was going beforehand or not, I'm not sure.

Hmm...I don't know that I would go that far. His film speaks for itself and it doesn't equate what is happening there with what is happening anywhere else. In fact, it's one of the most localized documentaries I've seen, perhaps even to its detriment as a source of information for larger questions.

It's an interesting argument, but I almost wonder if it isn't more rhetorical than formally-based?

I'm reminded of the 1993 Pulitizer Prize-winning photograph by Kevin Carter that depicted a starving Sudanese child kneeling before a vulture and the amount of criticism that was leveed against that photo versus the amount of awareness and aid it brought to the plight of Sudanese children at the time.

Who does those kinds of documentaries anymore? The BBC? Bulgarian TV? All I ever see are these "subjective" shaky cam dear diary things...It'd be nice to see some Ophulsian or Lanzmannian rigor (passion and reason combined) sometimes. Those guys are documenting something -- Sauper is making a rhetorical argument. He's Michael Moore in a safari suit.

Definitely to its detriment -- I would have like to have seen exactly what percentage of the GNP the nile perch business contributes, or more than innuendo about the gun running. This stuff always makes me think of the whole "regarding the pain of others" essay and it's relation to the ideology of the documentary. I'm in the middle of a Dziga Vertov piece, and so I'm still thinking about this stuff.

I guess what really bugs me about Sauper's kind of thinking is how "entitled" it is -- he comes out of a tradition of thousands of years of "ecological disaster" -- that disaster that we call civilization, and all these clowns can do is smugly lecture African countries on how they are doing it somehow wrong...these things are only exactly what European countries (and the U.S.) did to get in the dominant positions that they maintain today. That's what strikes me as paternalistic and touristic about it.

In any case, don't see any viable alternatives in the film being proposed for the economic development of Tanzania.

I don't object to the portrayal of squalor -- I object to its' simplified poetization (i.e. photos like that) -- these things have concrete and complex causes...but who'd want to watch a documentary about that, right? It's so much easier to feel cheap emotion at kids sniffing glue on the corner or prostitutes being killed by johns -- something they do, unnoticed, on every corner of every major city in the world.

The fundamental ambiguity lies in determining if shock images really do mobilise people. During the debate, one viewer thanked the director for encouraging her to pursue her struggle as a militant. Does this mean that shock is therefore a mobilising force? This same viewer also admitted that when she saw the film with some friends, they were left speechless. Other conversations with viewers have also confirmed that the film overwhelmed them and brought on a certain resignation.

One viewer indicated during the debate that, for him, the film gave rise to a huge sense of guilt. Is it cheap psychology to remind people that feelings of guilt help the ego? They only make you cry for yourself. Can these crocodile tears explain the film’s success? Or is it that since cinema translates reality, Sauper has found a means of representing the disgust that we all presently feel with regard to the state of the world? If this is so, he is therefore revealing a situation that is simply representative of our times.

Because they receive a lot of media coverage, shocking images sell. Members of the public take great pleasure in them. They ask for more. A surprising phenomenon of self-punishment causes them to rush to see a film that they know will upset them and from which they will not be able to extract themselves. This falls under film’s function of collective emotion-sharing with regard to common references. Seen on an individual level, and in a different context, Darwin’s Nightmare would not have the same effect. The television viewer would perhaps change the channel to a less dismal or troubling programme. In film theatres, there is a sort of almost religious mass where the members of the audience comfortably seated in their chairs share the horror they hold for the world’s dreadfulness. They can then speak of the shock they underwent and enhance it in the eyes of their friends, while inciting them to share in it. Emmanuel Ethis has shown that “it is reassuring to be collectively afraid” (3). He also demonstrated that this is done among people who come together according to common interests, in this case people sharing the same political and humanitarian tendencies. In the cinema, like elsewhere, demonstrations in most cases only convince those who are already convinced.

The film was lauded almost everywhere (Angers, Toronto, Venice, etc.) and it took the French box-office by storm. With the invigorating exception of a few sceptic voices (cf. Phillipe Mangeot’s excellent article in Les Cahiers du Cinéma), critics have been unanimous: do not miss this “alarming summary that calmly dissects the most terrible horrors” (Première), this “superb documentary that is so reminiscent of a detective novel” (Télérama, which declared it film of the year), this “new apocalyptic vision of Africa” (Les Inrockuptibles), this “breathtaking plunge into the cynicism of the most powerful and into the bowels of misery” (Rolling Stone), this file that is “as tense as a thriller, as nerve-wracking as a detective novel and as compelling as a melodrama” (Ouest France), this “gripping film noir” (Libération).

This film noir. Is this reference to a film category the key to recognition? Is it this feeling of déjà vu that convinces us? In the film we come across nocturnal secrets, the balance of light and dark, a fixation on eyes and on silence, an investigation which gradually reveals a plot that turns out to be bigger than first believed.
What then is this strange fascination with a truth that is revealed through crushing blows, but that every one knows so well – the neglect, the frightening immorality of the world? If the public is so fond of demonstrations of North-South relations, it would have acclaimed Olivier Zuchuat’s Djourou, A Rope Around Your Neck, which went unnoticed. What is it that allows us to confirm the “objectivity” or the “evidence” of Darwin’s Nightmare (Chronic’art)? Since when is an image objective or evident even though it is the result of a process of construction?

Second, your documentary leads audiences to believe that the export of fish to
Europe creates poverty in Tanzania; a conclusion that is made especially
shocking by including reports of famine in Tanzania at the time. While some
earlier studies supported this view, economic and social realities are infinitely
more complex and more recent studies (LVFRP 1999; LVEMP 2001; Ikwaput in
press) argue the contrary, namely that the fisheries have increased food security
and reduced poverty. Experts could have conveyed this scientific understanding,
which would have allowed you to portray a more balanced story to European
viewers about the impacts of the fisheries.

In fact, in 1999-2000 there was a ban on exports to the European Union, which
according to your story should have led to much more food and prosperity for the
local community. However, the ban was not well received by local fishers and the
wider population. Nile perch is not very popular with local consumers, and
moreover, local communities had come to depend on the social and economic
gains that the export provides. The loss of the export market caused significant
unemployment, loss of income, and misery at the local level.

Third, while every person on this planet has the right to tell their story, we wonder
whether the night watchman of the Fisheries Research Institute that you use as a
major source of information and analysis throughout the film is the appropriate
person to assess the impact of international trade and fisheries on local
communities. Next time, instead of interviewing the night watchman, we invite
you to visit the research institute during the day so that the staff inside can help
to answer some of your questions.

Doug wrote: I dunno, maybe I'm such a firm believer in the intrinsic worth of Bazinian ontology that I think documenting what one sees can be innately beneficial, even without all the arguments and data. I don't think a talking head documentary on ths subject, with CGI graphics and manicured academics sitting in libraries, would've had the same impact.

I'd distinguish between Moore and Sauper quite a bit, actually; one gives us arguments and tells us what to think and the other gives us impressions and asks us to think ourselves.

I like personal essay films, in this day and age I don't think think a documentary needs to give us "all the facts" (as if one ever could, or as if the fact of a child sniffing glue isn't a fact). We're drowning in information as it is. If done well, the genre can even seem more honest because it's readily owning its subjectivity.

Not to dismiss masters like Ophuls or Lanzmann, or the Marker of A Grin Without a Cat. (In fact, I've been dying to see Ophuls' new edit of The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime for a couple years now, and Milestone claims it's on its way to DVD this fall.)

but Sauper's facts seem pretty solid; at least the week I spent researching the perch, the lake, and international arms dealing after seeing the film validated that those issues are indeed acute and far-reaching. The film doesn't tell the whole story and it doesn't try to; perhaps reviewers have been too quick to describe the film in terms of its facts and not its impressions and tones?

I could see that, but my reading of the film was much more as a defence of Africa and a critique of its exploiters (and their empowerers). I didn't get the impression he was wagging a finger at the Tanzanian people at all.

And I'm all for an international consensuses based on growing awareness of past mistakes made by individual countries. It's a sad fact that those countries that took the most liberties with people and reources are now those countries that hold the most power in the world, and reforms will likely only happen in ways that will benefit them, but I still think it's valid to recognize an injustice or devastation and demand that the buck stops here. The less hypocritically that can be done, the better, and those in power should have to sacrifice something.

That would be nice...but is this really the domain of an artistic document? In truth, I grow a little weary of critiques of films that "don't offer solutions," when the problems being addressed are incredibly large and complex.