DETERMINATIONS
Although this story is spoken by an actress, it has the ring of truth, and in fact it was taken from the reminiscences of a French woman in the 1950s. Part of the scene’s effectiveness comes from the nonlinear way in which it is ordered. We first hear of a repugnant act of violence, and then of another one that occurred years earlier, and only then do we understand that one caused the other. This pattern, of seeking out causal and other connections between different forms of oppression, violence, and despair, is the principle underlying this recent Canadian film, which has its U.S. premiere tonight at Chicago Filmmakers.
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Not all of these facts are apparent on a first viewing of the film, because Hockenhull’s method follows the rules of neither the documentary nor the political diatribe. He does not tell a linear story because to do so would be false to the multiple connections between actions and events in the world. Nor does the film advocate any one method of thinking about causes; it is not pedantic. Instead, the viewer is flooded with a dense clutter of images and sound: scenes shot in a variety of cinematic styles, shots filmed off a television screen, rock and punk-rock music, diverse voices speaking and reading various texts. In one scene, footage of a street prostitute soliciting clients is accompanied by two texts read simultaneously. One describes violent acts against women, the other is a rather poetic and idealized text about love. The viewer is thus forced to make a decision about how to listen to the texts: Which one? Or both? Or as a weave of word-sounds without meaning? One is encouraged to arrive at an independent judgment about the relationships between the texts, even though Hockenhull’s sympathy for one of the texts is clear.
A large part of Determinations is spent recounting some of the ills of the world. The U.S. defense establishment’s nuclear overkill and Canada’s participation in that is a primary target (the bombed defense plant made cruise-missile parts). A viewer seeing a small portion of the film might be annoyed by its sometimes shrill tone. But as the work progresses, its repetition of facts combined with variations in form and style suggest a film that is far less sure of itself, or of any absolute answers, than one might think at first.
However dense the skein of specific meanings that Hockenhull elicits from his material, what is most impressive about the film is its overall emotional impact. As in the films of Yvonne Rainer, which Hockenhull admires, personal and public issues are not separated but are presented as inextricably linked. The aggressive collage form and the constant stylistic shifts of Determinations finally lead the viewer to experience a crushing despair. This is the case even when it seems as if those shifts are also producing clear meanings. In the juxtaposition cited above, for example, the viewer can’t help but feel bombarded by the color video-montage and its loud music, which have the opposite effect of the black-and-white bridge scene with its quiet story telling. On one level, this difference supports the meaning cited–the noise of the world denies us rest–but on another level, it is just one of many moments in which the stylistic shifts prevent our feeling either a smooth flow or a clear contrast at the point of transition. Instead, the new images and sounds act as if to deny, even obliterate, the previous sequence, almost as if the film were destroying itself. The accretion of such shifts means that we’re permitted no consistent sense of physical space. At such transition points, a void opens up; one feels oneself staring into a whirlpool, into which all of the material of the world, now drained of its meaning, is being irretrievably drawn.
Near the film’s end, in one of its more choreographed scenes, a woman reads a text about the history of the arms race. While the woman walks back and forth under a highway viaduct, the text ascribes all the initial arms escalations to the United States and identifies all the Soviet Union’s actions as “responses.” The camera follows her by moving repeatedly to the left, then right, and sometimes it continues these movements even when she can no longer be seen but is still heard offscreen. The camera’s back-and-forth action and reaction are clearly intended as a metaphor for the escalations described in the text. If the film’s poetic qualities come largely from the sense that its style generates a self-negating void, perhaps its strongest positive statement is achieved through the negative arguments–the analysis of what is wrong, rather than the construction of an ideal world–of this and other scenes. Hockenhull protests the ways in which oppression and violence perpetuate themselves, in ever-widening spirals. Whether the camera moves to the left or right, whether the cause is the United States or the USSR, is really not the point. The point is that if humanity is to survive–“We will either survive or die as a species” is another text in the film–we must learn to escape the cyclical traps of action and reaction, of the industrial and cultural noise that is increasingly filling our planet, and denying us our selves.
