Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

ac eee ne a ce ta SD a Waiting for Morning,* Kroekers documentary about the material of God is Not a Fish Inspector-— the stakes are never precisely defined for the principal characters in Kroekers narrative films. Fusi Bergman's struggle to preserve his right to use and keep his fishing net and his boat is a vain one, not because he loses at this level, but because the powers who govern these physical trappings of his identity have ironically determined to be indulgent, to turn a blind eye to the old man’s illegal but inconsequential selfamusements. Fusi loses because he fails to recognize the nature of the game he is playing, the identity of the players, and the stakes which are not only different from but much higher than-he is willing or able to admit. Accordingly, his loss does not take the predicted form. That is, he suffers not merely the apparently threatened loss of license, net, and boat (a loss which would, in any case, only be part of a game he can understand, and turn into anecdote and personal myth), buthe is abruptly stripped of illusion, an illusion providing him with his idea of dignity, self-worth, even of his boyish role as “a man.” The theme of betrayal rooted in the shattering of a character's selfillusion is evident in Kroeker's earliest narrative film, a short, elevenminute adaptation of Tolstoy's story, How Much Land Does a Man Need ? The story, as Kroeker tells it, is presented without Tolstoy's progressively-defined deceiver: the devil cum muzhik cum peddler cum head-hunter of the Bashkirs cum kibitka is pragmatically collapsed into the sole figure of the landowner (whose costume is, incidentally, reminiscent of that of Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal). The land-owner, as the agent of calculated, pre-meditated betrayal, is presented neither (as he is in Tolstoy's story) asa projection ofthe devil himself nor (as in the tale within the tale of the original) merely as a figment of the the traveller's unconscious world of dream. He is a physical being who in the few acts he undertakes is deftly developed into the agent of disillusion and death. While the traveller imagining that he is extending his own future holdings-— increases the dimensions of his circular journey, the landowner (in the film) foreshadows the travellers end by creating a gravemaker cross of the traveller's crook, and drawing concentric circles with his stick in the sand to suggest the travellers irrevocable movement toward death. The villainous scheming of the land-owner is projected most forcefully, perhaps, through the series of close-ups of faded red ribbons marking areas of land presumably circumscribed at earlier times by earlier unwitting victims of the land-owner, The audience in this stylized, parable-like film with its formal, objective, voice-over narrator is thus made explicitly aware of the irony surrounding the travellers blind ambition. Like all Kroekers protagonists, whose determined drive to actualize their own myths of self has both propelled them forward and blinded them to the reality of their condition, the traveller has been defeated from the very beginning. Typical of Kroekers narrative structures, there is, in How Much Land Does a Man Need ?, betrayal, and a blurring of its agents. Tolstoy's — and Kroeker's — traveller is not merely self-deceived ; he is in fact preyed upon by some ubiquitous human force acting within his environment -— a force that epitomizes the very complexity of living that Kroekers elemental characters refuse to acknowledge. In Capital, a psychologically more ambitious and dramatically more subtle film than God is Not a Fish Inspector, Kroekers theme is again given form: here, Abel Shizter (much like Fusi Bergman, who outwits fish inspectors) dupes rough loggers who periodically come down from the north into town to cash their paycheques and buy beer. Kroeker alters the original text by fleshing out the character of Shizters son, young Billy Boy. By the end of the story Billy, who is a kind of apprentice to his con-man father, has (with echoes here of Emma, in relation to her father, Fusi Bergman) power over his father. Itis power subtly and inevitably insinuated, growing out of the real power Billy actually controls throughout the story. After all, it is he who is responsible for overhauling the radios that allow Shizter to sell the bandaged and dressed cars from which he makes his capital. "You can always tell a good car by the tone of the radio” is one of Shizters practised lines: “Poor radios are a signal that you're getting TIESSEN a poor car.” He continues: “They might be able to disguise a poor motor or transmission... but the radio always gives them away.” Shizter needs Billy's radio precisely for disguising the knocks in the engines of the briefly-revived machines he slyly pawns off on his gulls. In expanding the role of Billy (especially at the end) in his version of Valgardson’s story, Kroeker not only (as he puts it) “fleshes out what is ultimately an anecdote ;” he not only “provides a moral centre for the story,” but also formulates yet another plot that reflects his views on self-deception and betrayal. As in God Is Not a Fish Inspector, the interlocking of the lives of the principal players takes on the character of a game in which power resides with him who is most adept at the efficient violation of trust-in God!s Nota Fish Inspector, anold man's daughter; in Capital, an old man’s son. Kroekers interest seems not so much to be in the mechanics of betrayal itself as in the nature of the character who invites the breach of trust. This is undoubtedly why Capital, in its literary form, struck him as a mere anecdote. The central characters in all three of these films are desperate men — by-and-large old men pre-occupied with attempting to order, control, and keep neatly packaged the myths central to their view of themselves in relation to the world. Fusi Bergman, for example, is absolutely obsessed with the activity of fishing, yet the audience knows that he does not need to fish to survive physically. He simply revels in the imagined naughtiness surrounding his psychically legitimate pleasure at involvement in his culture’s centuries-old rituals — catching, filleting, and wrapping his fish a naughtiness which sustains him in the face of his daughters religiosity, reinforced by religious programming on tape-cassettes packaged in and imported from America. What Fusi collects is unimportant; he does not even bother to eat what he has caught. Shitzter, in Capital, packages Cars and verbal cliches ; the traveller in How Much Land Does a Man Need? tries, with his ribbons, to package land. For each of these men, their desperate need to have, or seem to have, some kind of control over their eerie nen ann ee ee a 17