First posted December 1, 2023.
A weekend of Wim Wenders…and wonders: not long ago, late at night, under starless skies, marching at top speed to escape a ghastly cinematic event—his new film (Perfect Days) about a transcendentally enlightened toilet-cleaner in Tokyo, w/ unspeakable commentaries—
I, insanely debonair in dark glasses, needing to dim high beamers in and around the Princeton campus—
collided, knee first, with a seemingly invisible, large (decorative?) concrete block in the middle of a campus walkway and flew over it, landing left hip-first on the pavement in an inglorious sprawl. Before too long, I saw a helping hand: I reached out, was pulled upright, and then to my and everyone else’s astonishment, simply marched off to my car (and in high dudgeon slammed into another lamppost, just out of chagrin).
Touched by time, I am still apparently your somewhat flexible flyer (not Rosebud, but a sled). I examined my red and purple bruises: they were a bit offside the places that would have led to inanition and death. And so, returned to life, I could now stop to reflect on their preconditions—on what had prefigured this attack from Nowhere. It was that movie—Perfect Days—a romantic celebration of the introduction of public toilets in Tokyo (the civic innovator on hand), a fiasco of feel-good fakery that put me into the rage that darkened my perception. For the toilets, always already spotless, are, as it were, anthropomorphized as Master Hirayama (played by the dashing matinee idol Koji Yakusho), the soul of a handsome, beautifully dressed, devoted expunger of filth—as spotless, judging from his nightly stint in the bathhouse and his ascetic ways, as every pre-cleaned bowl he addressed. The script? Cogently described by the Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri as “something your cousin could write”—I would specify: my cousin Morton, the B- sophomore at NYU—for the edification of polite, uniformed Japanese 13-year-olds.
Wenders and his team of writers and public officials, whose toilet movie inspires stunned disbelief, had shrunken away from its nuclear possibility—that a filthy and not a spotless urinal might produce stronger, harsher thoughts, viz., as in the great historian Jules Michelet. A passage from his Journal, cited by Georges Bataille, hints at what it took for him to feel the suffering of the people: “In the course of his labors it would happen that inspiration failed him: he then would go downstairs and out of his house and enter a public urinal whose odor was suffocating. He breathed deeply, and having thus ‘approached as close as he could to the object of his horrors,’ he returned to his work.”*
I, on the other hand, was reduced merely to mulling bitterly the device of repeatedly screened daily drudgery, which had blinded me to my stone. For fresh thought, I turned to Phil de Semlyen of Time Out (since, as Kafka put it, “A certain [kind of] truth might be found only in the chorus [of voices]).” Phil writes: “Like a Japanese Jeanne Dielman, Hirayama’s daily routine is carved in stone: pick up a coffee from the vending machine outside his small apartment, clamber into his van for his daily rounds, sound tracked by his collection of American new wave album on the car’s tape deck (yes, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ gets an airing).”
Keith Uhlich, in Substack, finishes Hirayama’s repeated daily ritual, which viewers must endure: “He has a quiet lunch in the same park where he’s sure to snap a picture with his late-20th-century film roll camera, or perhaps uproot a small sapling that he’ll take home to his lovingly tended indoor garden. After work he goes to the same restaurant and bathhouse, then comes home to read (Faulkner and Highsmith are on the docket) and sleep. Rinse, wash, repeat. … Perfect Days is Jeanne Dielman without the shocks to the system.”
I am inspired by Phil’s and Keith’s allusions to the relentless repetitions in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (“The Greatest Film Ever Made,” thus Sight and Sound). But I am en route to a far sterner context for this topic of repetition and (as you have seen from above) the stone that defines the unbroken ritual and literally admits no passage: it will hurl you backwards and, if you are unlucky, it will kill you.
If one is to study onscreen daily ritual repetition for its exemplary character as what Heidegger would call an existentiale, an inexpungeable “category” of human life, then go to The Turin Horse, the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Good ecology, once more: I will cite A.O. Scott of The New York Times:
The Turin Horse [is] a slow and solemn black-and-white film set in a 19th-century wilderness …; The universe as Tarr depicts it is a harsh and cruel place, indifferent if not actively hostile to the striving of human beings and other dumb animals.
The film’s first image is an extended, deep-focus tracking shot of a man and his domestic beast of burden trundling across a desolate landscape in a howling windstorm. […] What follows—seven days in the life of the horse, his owner and the owner’s daughter—is a kind of Genesis story in reverse, an account not of the world’s apocalyptic destruction but rather of its step-by-step de-creation. The wind continues to howl, and existence seems to grind to a halt as darkness swallows everything.
[…] The lives of the young woman and her father, who live in an isolated house with a dirt floor and a wood-burning stove, are circumscribed by the routines of survival. Each day brings a series of tasks undertaken with ritualistic gravity … [etc.]
With this barren ritual, we have now come to journey’s end, the point of it all: Agnieszka Holland’s film Green Border, a crushing 2 ½-hour Polish movie about the plight of refugees attempting to cross through Belarus into Poland and the E.U. and being hurled repeatedly, back and forth across a border like an immoveable stone … until many perish. Crushing for the viewer, if one still has room to be crushed.
The film is a docudrama, embedded in the real history of a crisis. Late 2012, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, encouraged refugees from the Middle East to apply for visas to Belarus (for a price), promising that they would be received cordially and then bused to the green, forested border of Poland for quick (illegal) entry into Poland and with it, the European Union. Once in the European Union, they would then be free to cross as many borders as needed to arrive at their journey’s end. The film depicts an engaging Syrian family—a devout Muslim grandfather, his secularized son and daughter, and their three children—one of whom is the especially appealing boy, Nur. They have arranged for transportation from the airport at Minsk to the green border and, in some haste, allow a cultivated English-speaking woman from Afghanistan to join their party. The goal of the Syrian family, who have escaped ISIS, is the home of a relative in Sweden; the goal of the Afghani woman, the “USA.” They will not arrive; Nur will drown in a swamp.
The border is, as it were, an immoveable stone with especially cruel edges, an 18-foot barbed-wire fence. You can get from Belarus to Poland if the Belarus border police—for a fee of $300—make a small opening in the barbed wire and push you through. But you will not enter Poland—except for the guns pointed at you by the Polish Border Guards, tasked with hurling you back into Belarus. The guards are sadists, with one conscience-stricken exception (of him, later). From Belarus, the migrants then attempt a somewhat more concerted, more indignant entry into Poland; they are met with corresponding brutality by the guards. This process repeats itself: that is the daily routine carved in stone at the green border, men women, and children being pushed back and forth through barbed wire. The migrants are more than the figurative football lobbed between the political heads of Minsk and Warsaw: they are vulnerable flesh, bearing the real and lethal scars of their ordeal—unwitting players in a vile ideological game played out in a deadly forest.
Yes, in theory it is possible to gain legal entry into the E.U.: you apply for asylum in Poland, except the application will prompt the bureaucracy to identify you as you wait at the border, when you will again become the booty of the Border Guards. Or you can attempt to slip past them, somehow, and wander into rural Poland in the hope of finding food, clothing, and shelter from citizens willing to risk arrest and punishment for helping you—a refugee who has entered the country illegally.
The first and most crushing chapter of the movie is the sufferings of the Syrian family; the second, the efforts of a group of dissidents, Grupa Granica (Border Group), who literally risk their life to bring food, clothing, and especially medicine to the sequestered refugees. The ethos of the group is individualized in a woman psychiatrist, shown at first on Zoom treating an affluent, on-and-off bourgeois drug addict. Evidently ready to enlarge her care for men and women suffering greater harm, she joins the Border Group at a cost: she will subsequently be arrested and humiliated (strip-searched) but freed, unlike the migrants, because she can afford a lawyer. The sly moral is that your personal neurosis is best cured by active solidarity with the sufferings of others. This matter of degrees of suffering will make the movie’s final point, when the repetitive tormenting of the migrants is contrasted, months later, with the radiant hospitality extended by the Poles—literally the former Green Border Guards—to an influx of Ukrainians. A well-dressed Ukrainian woman in relatively comfortable transit worries whether her little bird in a cage will suffer from the cold. The irony—if that is the word—the disparity of treatment—is crushing: these migrants are white Christians, unlike the men and women trapped at the border. But hospitality to these enemies of Moscow is a given thing, as is inhospitality to refugees who might be grateful to the Stalinist Lukashenko: these are the “higher” issues not diagrammed in a film that goes to the fates of individuals. The bourgeois drug addict, for one, is also “cured”—this is the lesson—when he shelters a trio of black immigrants from North Africa, who have been smuggled in by truck. They could enter Poland and have its creature-comforts only because that one conscience-stricken border guard pretended not to see them and let them in: he is cured by altruism. The cure, to judge by example, is available to members of all social strata: it is good for body and soul to risk your well-being in caring for others.
I return to my beginnings, to Perfect Days: we could admire Hirayama’s acquisition of soulful self-sufficiency if we could believe he endured the slightest sacrifice in caring for the bodies of others. That is the content of the movie: the director’s style is to carve the hero’s repeated daily ritual in stone. I offer my own fall from a stone to introduce aspects of life missing from Perfect Days: anger, exceptional darkness, accident, and pain, precisely elements that escape ritual … but could be ritualized by acts of political sadism, as we have seen, in Agnieszka’s very grim, but also suggestively healing Green Border. I was saved by luck and could live to write this personal appreciation; it would take more than luck to save the political refugees. It would take the will and daring of political activists, among whom, foremost, with artistic skills shaped to a purpose, is Agnieszka Holland.
*citation courtesy of Benj DeMott.