Invisible Faces

Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories)
by Rick Hancox (6 minutes, 1982)
Wednesday, November 23, Mendel Art Gallery Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Songs of Experience Film Series 2011

In Waterworx, Rick Hancox, Canada’s most influential home movie maker, revisits a golden palace when he is at last old enough to be young again, and shoots only what he can’t see. The entire film occurs twice, like a round dance of memory, the second time with the addition of computer titles that re-animate these storehouses of recall. There is a ghost in every frame, along with a loss that hosts no regret.

- Mike Hoolbloom

48
by Susana de Sousa Dias (50 minutes, 2010)
Wednesday, November 23, Mendel Art Gallery Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Songs of Experience Film Series 2011

Every image in Susana de Sousa Dias’s film, 48, was made by a criminal wearing a cop uniform, culled from the secret detention archives of Portugal’s police. Each individual shows a turning point, a confrontation of power, a decisive moment. The filmmaker seeks out these survivors today, and they tell their simple complicated stories, of their torture and disfigurement and survival. In other words, they demonstrate the cost of having a face, the cost of seeing a face like this one. So, in place of a face lined with its terrifying memory marks, there are photographs, floating up out of the darkness, staring back relentlessly, pouring words out of their asymmetries, reflecting on their time inside. And in this divide between an old photograph and a present-day testimony, there is room enough for an audience to bear witness, to accompany the time it takes to speak against the law.

The pictures show their subjects in profile and from the front. They are state pictures, taken by the dreaded PIDE (political police) during the 48 years of Salazar’s dictatorship, from 1926-1974.

“I ended up living for everybody else,” the first photographed woman tells the filmmaker, her breath and pauses and swallows as much a part of her diction as any testimonial aside. After all those years of her detention, her photographs hardly bear the light of looking. Another says, “From me, they did not get the pleasure of seeing a tortured face.” There is no hint of triumph in his voice, no sense that there is even the possibility of victory left. But there remains something in him untouched and unmoved by his years of abuse; he speaks from the other side of the world. How much of his feeling he must have had to shut away in order to maintain this small hope for himself, what kind of effort to maintain the vigil of his dignity. He held the possibility that this dictatorship would not take root everywhere in his body, that some part of him would resist, some small spark, and from that spark, one day, the entire government would crumble. And it did, even though they were arrested by the thousands, night after night.

“After 18 days of not sleeping, how can a heart keep beating?” one asks, but it does. It survives, even when he has been carried too far. One of them finds a moment of empowerment in having his picture taken: “The face is what you decide.” Empowerment also comes from withholding information from the police. Outside prison, it was difficult to keep state repressions out of everyday conversations, there were things that could and couldn’t be said, and worn and looked at. And sexually, as one former inmate describes, “It’s as if we had no hands.” The body and the body politic. The liberation, the way out, to defeat a regime where there were no longer children — “We were all old, we were all the same age, wearing the same clothes” — necessitated beginning each sentence, each encounter, with the testimonies on offer here, for instance.
- Mike Hoolbloom