THE DOCUMENTATOR
The Documentator opens with a long sequence of various military parades. We see troops and tanks marching before the main title, before any characters are introduced. Just after the main title we see a video game whose object appears to be the killing of a camel; the camera then pulls back to reveal a young man playing it, who we later learn is an assistant to Raffael, the main character. This transition between the parades and the video game implies a link between personal acts of violence, even in play, and the consequences of militarism. By beginning with military footage, the makers of this extraordinary three-and-one-half-hour Hungarian film also place the personal and dramatic action of their work in a larger social context.
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Raffael is an entrepreneur in a Hungary that is making the transition from communism to capitalism. He, with the help of his motorcyclist assistant, appears to be importing and distributing videocassettes illegally. His business generates large profits, which allows him to support a gorgeous blond girlfriend and helps him pursue his hobby: building up and viewing a large archive of tapes of news events. Early in the film he begins watching some of these tapes, and suddenly the viewer is immersed in footage of Martin Luther King, Paris in 1968, the Cultural Revolution in China. We do not return to Raffael’s face–we are no longer seeing these images through his eyes. They go on for so long that they take on a life of their own. As momentous world events pile atop each other, sequence by sequence, this video footage takes on a peculiar feeling of weight, as if the collection of images were almost a solid mass. Certainly the viewer’s memory of this news footage and of the opening parades remains strong throughout the dramatic scenes that follow.
The film ends with a short, apparently disconnected burst of images, which is to the filmmakers’ credit: if deaths near the ends of films are used to tie those works’ threads together in a neat knot, the end of The Documentator unties those threads. The very last image is of a black-and-white reproduction of Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist, which has been seen twice before in the film. The contradictions inherent in the story are recapitulated formally in this imagery. The characters’ strivings all involve crossing barriers or exchanging things not meant to be exchanged: smuggling videos across borders, bartering love for money. It is thus perhaps appropriate to end the film with an image of a great color painting of the Renaissance reduced to a 20th-century black-and-white reproduction seen on video. The Documentator portrays a world in which the existing order is breaking down, but no new order has emerged to replace it. Instead we are adrift in a flood of imagery, in a realm of shifting relationships.
