Ben
Rivers has sort of made the Day for Night
of experimental filmmaking (but not nearly enough so). To make matters even
more challenging, he did it in the Morocco. That sort of explains why his
meta-docu-hybrid turns into an adaptation of Paul Bowles’ short story, “A
Distant Episode,” but not really. Regardless, Rivers gets uncharacteristically narrativey
in The Sky Trembles and the Earth is
Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (trailer here), which screens
during the 2016 Portland International Film Festival.
It
all starts out innocently observational as Rivers documents the Moroccan-based
Galician-French Oliver Laxe directing the indigenous cast of his upcoming The Mimosas. It is a rough shoot, but
apparently there are no occupational safety regulations to slow things down. In
its way, the sight of the crews’ land rovers crawling through the desert is not
unlike Truffaut’s film crew descending on their location in his ode to
movie-making. Things seem to be proceeding well enough, but for some reason
Laxe takes an unplanned hiatus. That will be a mistake.
While
following one of the Reguibat nomads that so fascinate him, Laxe discovers he
was in fact their prey. Like the linguistics scholar in the Bowles story, the
director is abducted, has his tongue cleaved from his mouth, and is forced into
a surreal form of slavery. Wearing a full burqa suit made of tin can lids, Laxe
becomes their dancing bear, performing his weird jig to their percussive music.
On
a superficial level, Sky Trembles, etc.,
etc. operates as an anti-colonial tale of comeuppance. The appropriator now
must dance to the tune of the formerly colonized. However, the implications of the
Islamic nomads’ violent brutality and their open practice of slavery are hard
to skirt. The Reguibat are really just a dehumanized as their victim here.
Frankly, it is probably only their reputations as cinematic provocateurs that
have protected Rivers and Laxe from charges of racism and islamophobia thus
far, so kids, do not try to adapt this Paul Bowles story at home.
