The Invisibles

 

by STUART KLAWANS

 

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Not Rated; directed by ; starring .

 

The Day After Tomorrow

Rated PG-13; directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Dennis Quaid, Jake

Gyllenhaal.

 

June 21, 2004

 

When you go to the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, you

expect the screen to be a window onto the world. Feature-length

documentaries will outnumber fiction films--the ratio this year is 16

to 3--and even in the latter category, fact will predominate over

artifice. You will get glimpses into Israel and Palestine (Paradise

Lost, One Shot), Peru (What the Eye Doesn't See), the two Koreas

(Repatriation), India and Pakistan (Born Into Brothels, For a Place

Under the Heavens), Africa (Liberia: An Uncivil War) or Iran (Leila);

and however maddening, disquieting, bracing or astonishing these views

might be, you look forward to seeing them directly, as if through

nothing more than a sheet of glass. What you might not expect--although

you get it anyway in this seventeenth annual edition of the festival,

running June 11-24 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater--is a

riddle: When is a window not a window?

 

The answer: When it's in Persons of Interest by Alison Maclean and

Tobias Perse.

 

Persons of Interest addresses the cases of about a dozen of the Muslim

men in the United States who were imprisoned after September 11, 2001,

on slight charges, if any at all, and held without trial for a year or

more. You already know, of course, that our authorities shut away many

people back then for nothing more than being named Muhammad. You also

know, without believing a word of it, Attorney General Ashcroft's claim

that he was rounding up only terrorists, or those who knew terrorists,

or maybe lived down the block from somebody whose second cousin knew

someone. But unless you belonged to the family or legal team of a

detainee, you probably do not know the name and face of anyone who was

locked away, nor could you readily get such information on your own.

Our government prefers not to say who, or how many, it held. (Human

Rights Watch estimates the number at more than 5,000.) So Maclean and

Perse have done us a valuable service by showing some of these people

and their families and letting us hear their stories. Window metaphors

suggest themselves: The filmmakers have shined a light on the

situation, or let in fresh air. And, sure enough, the interviews take

place in a bare room with whitewashed walls, with a glowing window

niche at the left.

 

Then, about halfway through the film, the camera moves around the room

until it offers a glimpse through that niche, which you see is not a

window at all. The room is built on a soundstage. The niche opens onto

a view of electrical cables and floodlights.

 

If Persons of Interest had a different subject matter, you might

interpret this revelation as a routine gesture of academic skepticism.

Yes, the film is a representation. Yes, the stories being told are

stories (apart from the claims to truth that they make). But after more

than half an hour of listening to people's bewilderment and outrage and

sense of betrayal (so many insist that they came to America to be

free), after watching these witnesses break down in tears or hunch into

themselves or lift their faces as if pleading with an unseen judge, I

lost my breath at the sight of that dark enclosure where an opening had

been promised. There is no play of appearances in the window that is

not a window, no liberating distance from the subject matter or the

self, but only suffocation. The outside has disappeared.

 

And what if I had seen that nonwindow on a different week? I watched

Persons of Interest around the same time that Mr. Bush made his

reassuring declaration that he would tear down Abu Ghraib prison: a

public relations ploy that might have been suggested to him by Homer

Simpson, and was pronounced as if under Homer's tutelage. Who else

would expect to be praised for destroying evidence, and in a criminal

case brought against himself? No one laughed at the speech, though. The

giddiness is gone even from the war party, many of whose members now

adopt a somber tone to boast of their growing wisdom. Even they know

there's no sunshine behind that opening toward which Mr. Bush points,

but only machinery for maintaining an illusion.

 

In this year's Human Rights Watch festival, the films show you

Peruvians struggling with their false-front democracy; Koreans

grappling with the mutually reinforcing lies of North and South;

Palestinians traveling through a homeland that seems to vanish right

under their feet (Like Twenty Impossibles, by Annemarie Jacir); good

citizens of Illinois tearing holes through the fictitious justice of

the death penalty (Deadline, by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson).

Whatever the individual merits of these films--I believe they're

variable--they all set you thinking about what a real outside might be,

there, beyond that window we can't get through.

 

For information on the series, go to www.hrw.org/iff.