The Tear That Falters
…and the Emotion Without a Name
How is it that a few blocks of concrete might prompt profound feeling? Not a person, not an animal, not any sentient being whatsoever but a collection of blank sarsens composited by a gang of groaning cement mixers back in the early ’60s. You could understand were I talking about the venerable menhirs of Stonehenge perhaps, columns from a temple of the ancients one can only wonder at — where did they come from, how were they sculpted, how transported, how erected, and what was their purpose? You could believe it were I witnessing the imposing sentinel of 2001, Stanley Kubrick’s (or was it Arthur C. Clarke’s) blank messenger from beyond, incomprehensible to the Australopithecines, mysterious to their Sapiens progeny, mesmeric to movie audiences the world and generations over. By contrast, the only message these latter-day steles were intended to broadcast was “Thou shall Not Pass” — hardly incomprehensible, mysterious, or mesmeric.
The Berlin Wall, from which these megaliths were taken, was constructed in the early 60s, initially — I was once given to understand — to prevent West Berliners from flooding into their eastern neighborhoods in the hunt for bargains in the stores. If that were ever true it’s a function certainly never mentioned now, the nature of the edifice — as we have come to understand it — morphing into that of a barricade against liberty. People risked, and indeed lost their lives in attempting to clamber over its barbed crest to gain the enticing compass of the “free world”. That’s the story I expected to find told in The American Sector, a new “feature film essay” co-directed by Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens. The wall, so the intrepid filmmakers explain, was broken into segments, many of which have been transported to the US. From Arizona to Arkansas, Orange CA to Orlando FL, from Culver City to Rapid City to Grand Rapids, from Fort Leavenworth to Fulton, the weighty immigrants stand to attention, troops of the Soviets lately subservient to a new commanding officer. Thus proceeds a gazetteer of the various unlikely settings in which these monoliths, one moment forsaken though the next perhaps defiant, have been somewhat incongruously placed. I described them as blank but that’s not true of them all, some scarred by the sawtooth graffiti of individualism visited upon them back in their home countries, now country, others rendered the canvas for colorful, incompatible art — a visual poetry of irreverence.
The journey through the film, I was telling myself as I watched, would prove predictable, and far from the uncertain odyssey of the exiled giants, which — like the converts to a religion they formerly oppressed perform the rites they once outlawed — find themselves traveling halfway around the world to the very force of corruption, as it was perceived, against which they had stood such resolute guard. The blockade against freedom had ended up itself freed — fragmented maybe, its bits and pieces separated by their wide-flung diaspora, but then you can’t have everything, and if nothing else, those doughty globetrotters have found the asylum denied so many of those who tried to scale their unforgiving faces.
Yet the film is not so simple.
The saga that Velez and Stephens so deftly relate, augmented by a hypnotic score from Sarah Davachi, leads us to a destination few could predict. Yes, that destination is the USA, and yes, we know from very early on in this movie essay that this is where many of Berlin’s standing stone soldiers have settled. But whereas we might have expected the documentary to be some kind of wry reflection on irreconcilable opposites, what we are led to is a sense of the heart of one of those adversaries alone: the nature and soul, replete with their enduring contradictions and paradoxes, of America. The sector of the title transpires to be not the area of West Berlin once overseen by the US but the most American sector of all — the nation itself.
It is through our contraries, Velez and Stephens show us, that we arrive at ourselves.
It was with that realization, which crept up stealthily but in the end overcame me with a power I hadn’t anticipated, that the tears began to flow. I can’t adequately articulate the epiphany the film delivers, nor do I have the language for the emotion I experienced — I didn’t want to think about anything else, turn to anything else, do anything else but allow its unremitting waves to wash over me as I sat helpless in their glorious crash. I was experiencing Aristotle’s catharsis, you might think. But was I? There had been no protagonist, still less any tragic hero, unless you count an oblivious block of concrete or two. There had been no pity, no fear, not so much as a plot even. The fate revealed had not been, as I was so sure it would, that of the slabs, stranded now in a foreign country — I got that angle at the start — but that of a setting, not of a character but a world: the diverse terrains, environs, neighborhoods, nooks, crannies, and vistas of my adoptive country. How to describe my experience then? Awe? Disquiet? Love? Derision? Understanding? Incomprehension? Recognition? Disbelief? Amusement? Bemusement? Sadness? Joy? So much more that I’m failing to identify? Yes, all of these but the sum was so much greater than its disparate parts. In its thrall, I could not stop the tears, rivulets not of purification or purgation — I remain as proudly impure and intractably shot through with as many illicit clandestine thoughts and desires as ever — but a realization possessing both psyche and soma we can never quite comprehend, an understanding the nature of which, somehow, we fail to completely understand.
That evening, this unnameable emotion stayed with me as I prepared for bed, as I closed my eyes, and as I slipped into sleep. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I felt I had woken up and yet I was, untypically, happy to surrender…
In the days following, a question struck me. Why, when coming to the end of so many features, does a tear begin to well, only for its flow to be staunched? The emotion starts to build nicely but is stopped in its tracks. There’s been a story, characters, “arcs”, a dramatic narrative in all its aspects. There’s been an inciting incident, an active protagonist, plot points, points of no return, jeopardy, stakes, reversals of fortune, situations out of control, conflict, suspense, surprise, subtext, action, reinvention and even subversion of the tropes and games that genre plays, and yet… There’s been structure — three acts most probably — a shift at the midpoint, a nadir in the fortunes of the main character towards the end of the second act, rising tension leading ultimately to a climax that results in a victory (or maybe not), the wrapping up of the narrative threads, the final resolution, and just before the credits begin to roll there is for a second the sense of a lump in the throat and a nascent tear in the eye, but what then? The emotion about to possess you vanishes, dies, the tear dries up, and an emptiness sweeps in and you feel robbed, vacant… The movie, you realize, has delivered not emotion but its concocted simulacrum, a mirage that when finally arrived at proves to have been… just that, an illusion.
The eliciting of true emotion defies calculation, recipes, formulae, good behavior culture- or craft-wise, mere expertise, conscious control. Like the inspired workings of The American Sector it surely has to originate with emotion within the filmmaker. They may hide it from themself, may even be unaware of it roiling in their subconscious, but without it, and without its transmission into their material, which may well have sparked it to begin with, there can be little consequence more than that truncated tear, wiped swiftly away along with the movie that preceded it. For me, films that deeply affect me include ones diverse as Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, Chanwook Park’s Oldboy, Max Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame D…, Kernji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and recently, Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo. Far too many others to list, but the experience of watching each of them lives on, synapse by flashing synapse.
Going forward, I will recall the impact of The American Sector, knowing that I although I constantly seek to dissect and understand the dramaturgy behind what I watch — a process I love and teach — I need no longer deconstruct the mystery of authentic emotion when fortune smiles and it takes me in its transcendent embrace.
Peter Markham November 2020
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
