The Act of Living
“The night scares me so much,” confesses a courageous Yazidi pre-teen girl to a therapist, remembering the period when she and her younger sister were captured by ISIS. Anyone who was seen crying would be killed, they were told; it turned out to be a vacant threat, but the sisters were still beaten, and now they are attempting to exorcise their memories by drawing pictures of them. Does it help? We never find out. The night continues to haunt her, but is the day any better? No sun shines on Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, which finds the Italian filmmaker back on the road and on unfamiliar ground (and water, again, so much water) after two award-winning films shot in his home country (Sacro GRA, 2013; Fire at Sea, 2016). Notturno was entirely filmed in the so-called “Middle East,” or, to be more specific, the area where, beginning in 2006, the Islamic State was active and seeking to erase the regional boundaries that were established at the start of the 20th century by any means necessary.
Notturno seeks out and finds the humanity in the victims of this war—whether in these and other children, mothers mourning their dead sons at the location of their murders, or another mother, in the dark, listening to voice messages from her kidnapped daughter—but Rosi approaches his subject, which has been dealt with in straightforward “horrors of war” fashion innumerable times, with a conscious attempt to subvert viewers’ expectations of what a documentary focusing on the victims of war should look like (in a visual sense) or accomplish (in a narrative sense). (The scenes of anguish are brief and effective; the children and their heartbreaking drawings, for example, occupy ten minutes of screen time at the film’s centre.) After an opening, characteristically Rosi-an scrawl that briefly provides historical background, the film plunges viewers into disparate scenes of characters living lives during wartime or its not-toodistant aftermath, with little apparent concern for drawing explicit links between them. Only after a while do we return to a chosen few: a young boy who we eventually learn is named Ali, who hunts to support his family; a collection of survivors in a Baghdad asylum who are mounting a play that summarizes Iraq’s history; Peshmerga soldiers going about their daily business; a man in a canoe doing…what? patrolling? hunting?… captivatingly illuminated by the distant fires of the oil wells we might associate with Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992).
But even as he returns to these stories, Rosi provides little information as to how they got where they are or even they are, preferring to capture the here and now, which will surely open him up to criticism of the most pointless kind. is a film that is shot, as Rosi says at the beginning, “along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon,” but at the same time is specifically about erasing those artificial borders, albeit not in the way that ISIS proposed. looks and sounds like what we would associate with a bigger-budget feature film, not something shot and recorded by one man over a threeyear period. Often bereft of dialogue, the images are carefully framed, and ultimately speak just as loud as words—nothing needs to be said. It’s as if the unfamiliarity or newness of the territory—or maybe the presence of genuine danger, which was also there in his best film, , (2010)—has propelled Rosi to aspire to an elevated, almost classical aesthetic, composing shots with high Fordian skies and sparse yet affective close-ups.
