It’s been a great year for documentaries so far, with “The Last of the Unjust,” “The Missing Picture,” “Finding Vivian Maier,” “The Unknown Known,” and the offerings at the Art of the Real retrospective, and the list of laureates grows longer with the release this Friday at IFC Center of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s “Manakamana,” which may be the best documentary ever made on the basis of a dubious premise.
The filmmakers follow the narrow limits of a self-imposed rule, and their obstinacy courts cinematic disaster. They set the movie entirely within the capsules of a cable-car line in Nepal that connects the ancient mountaintop temple of the title with a neighboring village. The film’s two-hour duration is filled solely with a dozen ten-minute trips, to or from the shrine, with the camera fixed in place and looking straight ahead at the passengers (ranging from one to three people, plus a shipment of goats).
“Manakamana” was made under the aegis of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, which, in its mission statement, explains that it
The group’s theoretical guidelines have resulted in a mixed bag of work, including “Sweetgrass,” in which shepherding comes off as nothing more than the way it looks to the filmmakers’ camera, and “Leviathan,” in which the intensely social activity of commercial fishing is reduced—albeit with a delightful, if unenlightening, visual agitation—to a series of sensory jolts. The emphasis on physicality links these movies with such recent work as “All Is Lost,” as well as with a long, dull, conventional run of dramas that wear their mild political consensus in their self-restricted sense of form.
But “Manakamana” is, in important ways, different, and better, because the enforced intimacy of its premise invites precisely the sort of controlled, analytical observation—and discussion—that those films lacked.
The movie’s first twenty minutes—featuring, during the first trip, an elderly man in a traditional hat and a young boy in a baseball cap and, in the second, an elderly woman travelling alone—feature no talk at all, and the valley that the cable car traverses is seen only in slivers and fragments, through the large window behind the passengers. This sequence, wordless but not silent (it’s filled with the noise of the car, its rattling vibrations as it passes the towers that suspend it), led me to fear the worst—that the filmmakers had fallen prey to the confining principles of “Leviathan,” in which passive, near-static portraiture takes the place of engaged interaction.
But, to quote Joseph Mankiewicz, people will talk, and, in “Manakamana,” talk they do, in the presence of the camera (which, given that they look into it, is apparently unconcealed), and what they say turns out to be even more important than what they do. It’s a middle-aged woman, during the third trip, who reminisces with her husband about life before the cable car, when the journey took three days (their discussion also involves economics, and the need to decide whether the woman or one of the couple’s daughters would make the pilgrimage).
Three older women, during the fourth trip, are the most voluble participants, and their talks deliver the core of the film. One woman, the most freely discursive voyager in the movie, looks at the valley and takes note of the widespread development of well-built houses, where, formerly, there were none, and then reminisces: “When I think of the old days, these times seem better. But no one respects us… . When I remember the old days, life nowadays seems all right. Back then, it was hard to survive.” But her relieved modernism is followed by her engaging and fervent account of the legend of the goddess Kalika, to whom another nearby temple is devoted. It’s the central scene in the movie, emphasizing the crucial paradox of technological modernity coexisting with, maintaining, and fostering traditional practices and cultures.
Three local rock musicians travel to the shrine with a lighthearted, cynical air, twiddling their camera and casually joking, whereas two traditional musicians, chatting about the financing of the cable cars and talking about the noteworthy sal trees below (which other voyagers had discussed as well), take out their sarangis (four-stringed violin-like instruments, played with a bow) and, after tuning them, break into an earthy and soulful sort of Central Asian bluegrass that seems both inspired and sanctified by the presence of the land and the proximity of the temple.
Similarly, a North American woman, fixated on her camera and telling a friend of her frustrated plans to write during her trip, makes a sharp contrast with the two local women in the next sequence who, returning from the temple, eat ice-cream pops with some comical difficulty; the younger one remarks wryly, “We didn’t get milk as children,” and the older one rejoins, “That’s why we don’t know how to eat this.”
Such scenes embody the wisdom of Philip Roth’s observation, after spending time in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia: “The trivialization, in the West, of much that’s deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.” In “Manakamana,” what’s “deadly serious” isn’t a result of external repression, as it was behind the Iron Curtain, but a result of material hardships and strong traditions. The tiny cable cars in which Velez and Spray film become the high-pressure condensation of vast currents in world history.
But, for all its formidable virtues and delights, the movie tips its hand, somewhat unfortunately, in the end credits, which attribute the camera work to Velez and the sound recording to Spray—thus answering the question that bothered me from start to finish. There’s nothing in the movie to suggest the presence of the filmmakers, no sense of the participants’ consent to being filmed, no notion of their interactions with the filmmakers or any organizers of the production. They don’t feel subtracted or elided from the filming but merely suppressed: a gesture that could signify modesty and respect, an ostensibly selfless devotion to the movie’s participants and subjects, comes off as quietly evasive. The filmmakers’ own affective world, their equipment, and their bearing are a closed door behind a sealed wall. Not only won’t they open it, they leave no place to knock. Their silence isn’t resonant; it’s stifled, and stifling.
