Blackwater Fever

Christ in his Agony meets a newborn Christ!

Blackwater Fever is a real film of ideas apart from a drama of Gesicht Und Gestalt. Although with a rather revolutionary approach, because there are no new ideas to be found. Or you would have to call the reintroduction of the old existentialist debate modern; the one that was relegated to the scrapheap forty years ago by structuralists and again by post-modernists more recently. Frisch once again takes the essential questions from the existentialist period seriously here, and in particular the legendary controversy between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Fernhout behaves like someone hesitating between the characters of Sartres Revulsion and Camus The Stranger. Does he resemble the arch pessimist and gloomy man Antoine Roquetin or does he have more in common with the depersonalized "stranger" Meursault? Frisch's film looks as if he wishes to be associated with Sartre's dark vision, and then Fernhout is reminiscent of Camus "stranger".

But ultimately Frisch surprises by giving a voice to the often neglected third party in the existentialist debate, that of the Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel. For this is a film with a mission. More than an artistic road movie, it is an impertinent access to a mystical experience. Blackwater Fever is primarily a filmic essay agitating against the nihilist Fortuynism that in the Houellebecqse world view has more or less all the contemporary avant-garde in its clutches. Artistically and morally, Blackwater Fever is then a film of supernatural proportions. Frisch is no fundamentalist, no born again Christian, but he has an uncompromising morality that will not succumb to the conditions in the world. He looks in the mirror and sees a murderer, it is stated in the introductory monologue, and how can he live with that? He rebels against himself, and forces himself to make a film like this one in order to show us the world as it is. You just have to accept then that this is reminiscent of Christ's Gospel and that you are seeing the history of Christian thought pass in front of your astonished eyes! Although it is anything but dogmatic, Blackwater Fever is an ideological, evangelical road movie that is reminiscent of the fate of the Christ. All Fernhout's suffering refers unmistakably to His never forgotten Agony. Or rather Blackwater Fever is the latest of so many filmed versions of the Gospel of Jesus! With the necessary variation woven into it! For when at the end of the film Fernhout takes a baby into his arms which has been abandoned to its fate, no one misses the fact that we have the surprising image of a Christ at the end of his life taking the young, newborn Christ into his arms again. We had already guessed that the Mercy of God was resting on Fernhout's shoulders, now we see a heretic variant of the Incarnation - formulated by Saint Augustine in church terms. Or as the minister in a simpler manner hammers into you Sunday after Sunday: Mankind is not able to come to God because of his sin, but the absolute, qualitative distance between God and Man is bridged by God Himself in the Incarnation. What a surprise: Saint Augustine and Gabriel Marcel as script doctors for an avant-garde film in which Incarnation and Reincarnation enter into a marriage.

That is what happens when a weeping Fernhout, as if in an oblique lament, surrenders to the baby with all his emotions. And drags us along with him so that we too know ourselves reincarnated in that tiny Christ. Frisch offers a "Reincarnated Incarnation" as the answer to all our questions about life. Yet here he does not in the least resemble that converted essayist Willem Jan Otten, who vents his hypocritical, Christianized chitchat in the monthly NRC magazine. In the twelve minute closing scene, we see the consequences of what blackwater fever can do to people, we shudder, but slowly the mood is transformed as it were into a vision of high expectation. Fernhout, by now himself infected, lands up in a reservation of plague sufferers. Miserable little huts must protect these pitiable, scarcely protected naked bodies a little against the sun. But, a miracle, - all these pathetic little bundles of human misery - like the ones seen in the propaganda for Charities - quickly turn out to trump Fernhout's dusty apparition. You see how their sense of their own worth and pride quickly transforms their mutilated bodies into shining beings. They suddenly incorporate that pure atmosphere that you come across in the surviving images of ancient cultures. They are wonderfully carved statues that have come to life and radiate the power of an inner self not perceived.

Fernhout's face gains in the final scenes a tonality of classic allure, like the bearded countenance of Christ! Frisch and Fernhout both lay themselves bare, as if their dispute might be sublimated thus in a conciliatory scene. All the prior experiences unite here in a happening of abruptly remarkable absurdity, as old-fashioned as it is contemporary. In the barren desert of Namibia, with a few huts as sole protection from the sun -no more than a few poles with a roof of leaves upon them - here, the essence of life, The Life, has been portrayed. Here are naked, black people, in what must once have been a familial relationship but now split apart by the cruelty of man and nature. They each stand on their own island, thrown back on themselves in their total isolation. And between them Fernhout wanders like a lost, beaten and blinded tourist. We wander with him in his shadow, locked in the camera's gaze as he is. And then that face, upon which we are increasingly deeply concentrated, can no longer bear it. Frisch's camera has fulfilled its quest: the stoicism of this face that still knew how to give itself an attitude in spite of dust and misery and blindness and fever, breaks open and he bursts into tears on seeing an abandoned baby on the ground.

And in this crying we see something occur that makes the film the classic that it already now is. For an hour long, we have been kept in tension in an increasingly deepening impasse. And then there is the old-fashioned apotheosis, it is crystal clear. Up until now the most beautiful study in existence of a crying face was naturally the one that Carl Theodor Dreyer made of Falconetti in his film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. The mysticism characterizing a face so expressively there, obtains a moral variant here. Falconetti's face speaks volumes. Fernhout shows an empty face. And because Ferhout can reveal no secrets that do not exist, Frisch can fill in Fernhout's features according to his own ideas. For neither Dreyer's religious-emotionalism nor Bas Jan Ader's sentimental tone in his I'm too sad to tell you can be of service in this definitive portrait of the post-modern metrosexual, lost in his own moral desert. Frisch poses no verbal questions and does not wait for long drawn-out answers. The profusely flowing tears watering the moral desert of the existential human being have their own power.

Roeland Fernhout used to be nothing more than a face for childish films. Five years ago, that face demonstrated what Frisch must have had in mind truly precisely. He knew how to use this face in order to mount it among unforgettable images in the Pantheon of film classics. Now that point has come, yet Fernhout disassociated himself from his role long ago. Fernhout found the director an anathema, shocked as he was at how Frisch treated the local inhabitants in Namibia, the crazy way the director behaved. But although it has been five years since the shooting of the film, he has still been unable to make peace with the director. For he still does not understand that in Frisch, he had found his ideal director. Does not Fernhout know of the existence of Antonin Artaud?

Whatever metaphysical interpretation you give it, and no matter what philosophy you think you can derive from this ethic-aesthetic expression, Fernhout's wonderfully transparent fit of weeping is open to every interpretation. That fit of weeping is more than anything the weeping of the contemporary metrosexual. It is the ultimate fit of weeping in which he succeeds in attuning the viewers' emotion to his own. An unimaginably intense "sur place' at the condition of matters in the world.

And at the same it is more than merely a filmic delight: this is more than the screen, for it embodies the poignancy and the true character of Antonin Artaud's theatrical philosophy at the same time. An appallingly fascinating double ecstasy, both filmically and theatrically! Frisch has opened Antonin Artaud's box of tricks in order to thus involve Fernhout in his madness. Frisch had evidently a typical drama in the Artaud tradition in mind, for which he simply took Artaud's theory of the theatre of the plague literally. In Blackwater Fever the plague really is the plague, and the notorious blackwater fever does not only physically corrupt the local population, but also the traveller Fernhout. He is physically completely shaken and eroded. And discarded as empty. A spectacle wearing traveller who becomes a Blind Traveller.

It is simply phenomenal how Frisch has thus succeeded in transforming Fernhout, the-metrosexual-who-so-celebrates-his-liberty.

Paul Groot, art critic