Page 2 of 2 Border crossing resolved By Mark Engler
And yet, we're living in the moment of the social forums, which are organized
over the network. We're living in the age of the Zapatistas, who in 1994 sent
messages by horseback, messages written on paper, to Internet cafes where they
could be sent out as press releases and could be used to build a global network
of solidarity. We're living in a time when I'm starting to hear tremors from
the labor movement about creating cross-border unions, which will also be built
over the network.
So I think we're in this moment when we don't know who will be more empowered
by this connectivity and by new technology. And that's the battle in Sleep
Dealer. It's over the future of this
connected planet and what kind of globalization we'll be living in.
ME: Beyond immigration politics, the commodification and
privatization of water is a major theme in the film. How did you choose water
as an issue you would focus on?
AR: When I look at dramas of immigration, one of the things that
I find unsatisfying is that they always focus on an internal dream, a dream
that someone has of going to America and making his or her life better. And,
instead, what I wanted Sleep Dealer to start with was this idea that
immigrants from Latin America, in the places where they're born, are usually
living somehow in the shadow of US intervention, that immigrants come here
because we - the United States - are already there.
In my film I wanted to have a presence of US power in my character's village.
And so I put in a dam. The dam controls the local water supply, and it makes
traditional subsistence life much more difficult. In reality, in Latin America,
it's been banana plantations controlled by paramilitaries. It's been gold mines
and copper mines and silver mines. It's been oil fields. It's any number of
situations that have made it hard for the people there to survive.
I chose water because it also has a symbolic and spiritual dimension to it.
When my characters have their first kiss, they are by a little river. When they
make love, they go down by the ocean. It would have been a lot harder to do
that with petroleum.
ME: But, of course, struggles over the control of water are not
purely metaphorical.
AR: When you talk to people about this, the idea that an evil
corporation would go in and take the water from the people sounds so bombastic,
so bizarre, that it feels like science fiction. And yet it's absolutely
happening today.
A lot of people are familiar with the story of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where an
American company, Bechtel, privatized the water, and there literally was a
water war. All of this stuff can sound like a bad Kevin Costner movie - the
idea of a water war - and yet it's one of those realities that, if you were to
graph it, is only going to trend upwards in terms of its intensity in the
future.
ME: The characters in the film are moved to take action about
water privatization. Yet this takes the form of a highly individualized type of
action - they don't join a social movement. I wondered about the absence of
more collective resistance in the movie.
AR: Well, I think you've hit on the Achilles' heel of political
narrative film. Narrative film is driven by psychology and by identifying with
a character. And I think that's why there are so few truly transcendent
political films. In narrative cinema, we're used to identifying with one
person, and so even if the story is anti-imperial or anti-racist or
anti-misogynist, it's usually one character's journey in overcoming those
things.
In Sleep Dealer there are three characters that represent three vast
segments of our society. Those characters are in conflict at first, and then
they come together. And their story is meant to have larger resonance than just
the three individuals.
But I think that devising a narrative where political hope and political power
doesn't belong to one actor, but is somehow made collective, that is very, very
challenging. I look at The Battle of Algiers as an incredible model,
where there is a single character - Ali la Pointe - who we meet, but then his
subjectivity sort of bleeds away from him and is given to a social movement by
the end of the film.
That film is a masterpiece; I am but a learner. When we were writing Sleep
Dealer, we were trying to think about what the future of what a
radically networked social movement would look like, but we couldn't get there.
Instead, I think the contribution of Sleep Dealer is in being a parable,
a myth, that thinks through some of the impulses of globalization.
ME: How did you first come to this type of work?
AR: I grew up in upstate New York, and when I was 15 years old I
met Pete Seeger. Without knowing who he was, I ended up doing volunteer work
for one of his organizations. After meeting him I learned about his life using
music and song as a part of social movements. When I went to college, that's
what I went to study - music and social movements.
ME: So you had taken up the claw-hammer banjo?
AR: I did learn how to play the five-string banjo, actually! I
can still do it. But, at a certain moment, I decided that the banjo wasn't the
future of social movements. And I decided that through film and video you could
express much more complicated and subtle arguments about the world than you can
through song.
ME: I think you're pissing off all of the political songwriters
out there.
AR: With song I think you have an access to the spirit, access to
the heart. But with film we have two hours with people trapped in a dark room.
You can refer back to something that happened 60 minutes earlier in the film,
and you can play with what your viewers remember, and you can build really
intimate relationships with characters. You can lay out both an emotional
journey and an intellectual argument. I don't think there's anybody who will
say that you can do all of that in a song.
ME: Are you concerned with being pigeonholed as a political
filmmaker or having the movie labeled as a "political" film?
AR: I'd be happy to be pigeonholed as a political filmmaker. For
me, making a film is so difficult and so challenging that I only want to make
films that are relevant to the world we live in.
ME: Do you see a trend toward politics, or maybe away from
politics, in science fiction filmmaking today?
AR: Science fiction has always had a radical history, all the way
from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is
a comedic portrait of fascism, up to Gattaca, which looks at the way
that DNA profiling could be used by the government, to Children of Men,
to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46.
Science fiction has always been a space for radical critique on one hand, and,
on the other, for selling Happy Meals. I do think that science fiction today is
at risk of being completely co-opted by superhero movies, big franchises, and
xenophobic fantasies about space aliens. It has that face as well. But I think
the long history, going back almost 100 years, is of science fiction as a place
for forward-thinking, radical thought.
ME: Perhaps unique among these movies you've mentioned, Sleep
Dealer is a bilingual film, with the vast majority of the dialogue in
Spanish. How did you think about language in the film?
AR: We need to know in our guts that we are going into a future
that will be multicultural. I think we are seeing in the news right now that
America might not be the only world power in the future, that English might not
be the international language of choice. So, for me, doing a science fiction
set in the South and doing it in a language that was not English was
fundamental. I'd love to do a science fiction in Nahuatl, or in Tagalog, or in
Pashto. The language is just part of a gesture that says, the future belongs to
all of us.
I think the situation we're in is very striking. It is as if you met somebody
and you asked them, "What do you want to have in your future?" And they said,
"I don't know. I've never thought about it." In the cinema, that's what we have
for the entire global South. We don't have any cinema that reflects on the
future of the so-called Third World. There's zero.
Why is it that we've seen comedies from the South, we've seen romances from the
South, we've seen action movies from the South? We've seen everything but
reflections on the future. To me, the first step to getting to the future that
you want to live in is to imagine it.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with
Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of How to Rule the World: The
Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached
via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.
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