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UNIVERSAL HOTEL
script
photographs / drawings
REVIEWS
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THIS FILM REVIEW
by Jonathan Rosenbaum gives
an excellent sense of UNIVERSAL HOTEL.
"PAST LIVES, PRESENT PUZZLES
Universal Hotel
Directed and written
by
Peter Thompson.
Rating
* * * *
Masterpiece
El Movimiento
Directed by
Peter Thompson
Written by
William F. Hanks and Thompson.
Rating
* * *
A must-see
By JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
Peter Thompson, who teaches photography at Columbia College and makes
personal, autobiographical documentaries, is a major, neglected filmmaker.
He's made five films, and the latest, El Movimiento, his only feature,
is having its world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center on January
16 and will be shown there again on January 19 -- both times with the
1986 Universal Hotel, my favorite of Thompson's shorts. (Thompson will
lead a discussion at the Friday screening.)
Philosophically and aesthetically,
Thompson's films are as beautiful and provocative as any contemporary
American independent work that comes to mind. But they're also packed
with secrets and resist being paraphrased or even decoded -- one reason
they aren't better known. Another is that his first four films, all shorts,
were put out on a single video by Facets in 1987 and have seldom been
screened since.
The early shorts are about
Thompson's parents and about his research into the lives of two wartime
prisoners in Dachau, which took him to Europe and Central America. El
Movimiento concerns the life and work of a Mayan shaman and healer, Don
Chabo, who was born around 1915 in the Yucatan, and his only apprentice,
University of Chicago anthropologist William F. Hanks. Thompson also figures
in El Movimiento as both the narrator and a part-time protagonist, but
Don Chabo and Hanks periodically take over these functions, making Thompson's
role less clearly delineated than in the earlier films.
This is an obvious difference,
but the shorts and the feature have many striking elements in common.
All five are troubled and troubling meditations on history and epic efforts
of retrieval, concerned simultaneously with the shape of entire lives
and with fleeting experiences -- a duality that makes them both elemental
and elusive, weighty and light, concentrated and diffuse.
It's also significant that
dreams are often given as much attention as objective facts -- and are
even viewed as objective facts. In El Movimiento Thompson and Hanks recount
their own dreams at separate junctures, and Don Chabo uses drawings and
reenactments to convey the visions and experiences that led him to become
a shaman in his mid-20s, after his family had died of starvation. All
three characters seem to periodically exchange roles, adding to the confusion
between objective and subjective realities. After Don Chabo burns candles,
chants, and sprinkles water on plants, he says, "Cut," and at
that moment is clearly the director. Earlier he looks through Thompson's
camera while Hanks addresses him, and soon after, Hanks films and addresses
Thompson. Much later we learn that Hanks's role in healing Don Chabo when
he was seriously ill led him to resume the apprenticeship he'd abandoned.
Thompson's work since the 1981
Two Portraits has become more broadly conceived and more densely populated.
The 28-minute Two Portraits -- the first part of which describes his father,
the second his mother -- consists largely of elaborate reworkings of found
materials that come across as highly objective and detached in certain
ways and extremely personal and private in others. Universal Hotel (1986,
23 minutes) and Universal Citizen (1986, 23 minutes), another diptych,
combine objective and subjective elements even more elaborately and ambiguously.
In the first Thompson chronicles his research into experiments by Dr.
Sigmund Rascher at Dachau in 1942, in which he nearly froze a Polish prisoner
and then got a German prostitute to warm him up; Thompson uses photographs
from archives in six countries and recounts a subjective dream set in
what he calls the Universal Hotel. The second film is a multifaceted personal
travelogue that brings us to a real Universal Hotel, in Guatemala, and
to the same public square in Siena that appears at the beginning of Universal
Hotel; at the center of the film are Thompson's offscreen meetings with
a Libyan Jew and former Dachau inmate who works as a smuggler in Guatemala
and refuses to be photographed.
Extratextual considerations
play an important role in all four of these films. The notes on the Facets
video Films by Peter Thompson allude to the "father's suicide,"
though as far as I can tell, nothing in Two Portraits does. Thompson has
described the main themes of Universal Hotel and Universal Citizen as
"the emotional thawing of men by women, the struggle to disengage
remembrance from historical anonymity, and nonrecoverable loss,"
though nothing in Universal Hotel indicates that the "thawing"
it's concerned with is emotional and not simply physical. Thompson emerges
clearly as a character in Universal Citizen, which alludes to his wife
and their adopted Puerto Rican daughter in Chicago, but here too the things
we aren't told about the characters seem just as important as the bits
of information we get; indeed, in spite of their confessional aspects,
all five of Thompson's films are dominated and even structured by these
absences. We never discover the reason for his interest in filming the
smuggler, nor do we learn why he's fascinated with Rascher's experiments,
apart from the allusion to emotional thawing.
Furthermore, the subjectivity
in these films is itself subjective. Writing a few years ago in the Reader
about Universal Hotel, Fred Camper noted that Thompson accompanies the
still photos of the German medical experiments "with a narration
so mechanical that it implies no degree of emoting could capture SS-perpetrated
horrors," and it's easy to see how he could conclude that. But I
think Thompson's uninflected offscreen voice reading his own texts in
Universal Hotel and Universal Citizen, in the first part of Two Portraits,
and in portions of El Movimiento evokes Robert Bresson, in that he's suppressing
overt emotional expression to make room for other kinds of emotional expressiveness,
such as rhythm and the meaning of the words. When he was a young man Thompson
toured Europe as an accomplished classical guitarist, and his concise
writing and concentrated delivery have a power that's highly musical and
that's affecting precisely because it isn't embellished by anything resembling
acting. I doubt it's a coincidence that the least accessible of his films
is the second part of Two Portraits, the only film in which his voice
isn't heard.
The first thing we're told
in El Movimiento, quoted from a 1562 chronicle, is that the name "Yucatan"
-- where practically all of this film was shot -- derives from the inability
of the Spanish explorers and Mayan merchants to understand each other's
language. When the Spaniards asked, "What is this place called?"
the Mayans responded, "We do not understand your language,"
the short version of which is "Yucatan." As we hear this we
see successive 360-degree pans around 360-degree still photographs of
the Yucatan village where Don Chabo lives (the end of the last photo shows
Thompson facing the camera), implying a slightly less skeptical view of
the capacity of language, in this case film language, to communicate.
This simultaneous display of faith and lack of faith are characteristic
of the film as a whole and make an interesting comparison with the dialectic
implied by the beginning of Universal Hotel and the end of Universal Citizen,
both of which use the same footage of a woman walking diagonally across
a public square in Siena, away from the camera and out of the frame. Over
the beginning of Universal Hotel Thompson says offscreen, "1981.
I see everything from a distance from my window in the Universal Hotel,"
and then we hear phone calls pertaining to his research in which he speaks
in English and Italian, then in French, and finally in German and English;
we don't hear anything about what the woman's doing or why. Over the end
of Universal Citizen he explains that in 1982 he bet his wife that she
couldn't walk to the white fountain in the Siena square with her eyes
shut. "`Oh, that's simple,' she said, `It's right in front of me,'"
he continues, while we see the same woman retreating -- and straying far
from the fountain. (Whether this footage was shot in 1981 or 1982 is only
one minor mystery among countless others.)
As the end of Universal Citizen
and the beginning of El Movimiento make clear, Thompson's films are based
on metaphors that make clarity and obscurity opposite sides of the same
coin. "We don't have a path," Hanks says, paraphrasing Don Chabo
toward the end of El Movimiento. "Just a few brief clearings in the
woods. The rest of the time we're lost and looking for things that can't
be seen." The title of the film is explained in a sequence in which
Hanks is taking a shower and telling Thompson that Don Chabo accepted
the premise that the overall movement of his work as a shaman and healer
could be filmed even if the work itself couldn't be. The use of the word
movimiento reflects this fascination with simultaneous clarity and obscurity
in that Spanish isn't the native tongue of Hanks, Don Chabo, or Thompson;
Hanks also says that he didn't know any Spanish or Mayan when he first
encountered Don Chabo during his anthropological research.
A sense of mediation, translation,
and continual refocusing is apparent in this project from the outset.
Hanks has to serve as an interpreter of Mayan for Thompson as well as
for us, and Don Chabo's selection of Hanks as his only apprentice implies
a compatibility between practicing anthropology and practicing folk medicine
that Hanks can't accept. Ideally Thompson -- who uses an innovative rotating
overhead camera that implies a holistic vision -- might serve as a mediator
as well as chronicler of this troubled apprenticeship. But as the film
periodically shows, the filmmaker isn't any more capable of taking in
everything than the teacher or his pupil; the difficulties in his own
shifting relationship with Hanks are also taken up toward the end of the
film.
What we see of Don Chabo's
medical practice is straightforward and fascinating. We watch him treat
a sick baby with plants and prayers that are part Christian and part pagan,
refuse to help a woman who wants him to cast a spell on another woman
(explaining that he doesn't do evil, he only cures people), advise an
old man that there's no medicine to cure his aches and pains, try to teach
Hanks how to read crystals before concluding that it "isn't the time
yet for him to understand," and perform an exorcism for a young woman
whose mother claims she's been kidnapped by Satan. Throughout these and
other episodes he appears no more foreign, mythical, or out of the ordinary
than Hanks or Thompson; if anything, he's more lucid and transparent,
perhaps because he appears to have less to hide. Thompson has pointedly
made the pagan elements every bit as consequential as the Christian ones,
deepening the impression that this is a mystery story without a solution,
albeit full of illumination."
CHICAGO READER,
January 16, 2004
For a short biography of Jonathan
Rosenbaum
and for information on the many books he has written:
http://www.chireader.com/movies/rosenbaum.html
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