Manderlay

Manderlay 9/10 Introducing this 'Part 2' of the von Trier American Trilogy, actor Danny Glover said, ¨The process of storytelling is an enormous responsibility and opportunity.¨ It is one that director Lars von Trier takes very seriously, constantly seeming to question his role and duty as an artist – and whether the duty is to the audience or to art itself.

Both with his Dogme movement films and now with later works such as Dancer in the Dark, Dogville and Manderlay, his answer seems to be firmly towards art as a worthy end in itself – or at least as a serious medium by which to raise (though not answer) questions of social conscience. He makes little or no concessions towards audiences who are not interested in what he has to say.

Manderlay a story about emancipation from slavery (and on a deeper level, of the more topical problems of introducing democracy), continues the Dogville tradition of using Brechtian acting and a semi-bare stage. The immediate dissociation this brings from any semblance of everyday reality, focuses our attention on the issues, in a similar way that Greek tragedy or grand opera is able to do – by insisting that ordinary details are secondary or even irrelevant to the main theme.

Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who takes over seamlessly from Dogville's Nicole Kidman) travels across America with her father and comes across an isolated town where slavery has not been abolished. With a pure heart, god intentions, and the power of her father's lawyer and henchmen behind her, Grace makes well-meaning but unfortunate, ill-informed attempts to put things right. She never stops to question the fact that she knows best, or whether her high moral values are appropriate or whether they will win the day. Not unexpectedly, there is much trouble in store for her.

Manderlay's high points are that it is deeply philosophical but at the same time highly coherent and accessible. It asks important and necessary questions about the nature of freedom and democracy. Such questions, and the discussion which this film makes possible, are urgently needed in the light of such unsolved dilemmas as Iraq, the philosophical basis for the removal of Saddam Hussein, the introduction of western-style democracy to countries like Iraq (or even Afghanistan). The broader practical problems (also tackled by Manderlay) of how to restore power to those who have been disenfranchised, whether by slavery, colonialism, dictatorships or market forces, is one that applies to many countries, irrespective of the morality involved.

The weakness of Manderlay is that the USA (and its internal and foreign policy) is an ideal example for any artist tackling such issues – as it's visibility provides a common focus throughout the world. Sensitive American citizens (and politicians) however will mistakenly see the film as simply anti-American (which is not too difficult) and avoid it. This means the people in power who most need to see it (as they need such fora to find answers) will probably avoid it.

But von Trier has discharged his duty as one of the most intelligent artists of our time. He has discarded sensational entertainment, using art as a tool to help us think outside the square – and his thinking is both profoundly stimulating and fully accessible to those with the patience and inclination. Does art need to tantalize our senses? If so we would miss out on some of the finest literature, the greatest plays, anything that did not provide immediate sensory satisfaction. Works such as Manderlay help to firmly position cinema as one of the great intellectual arenas of art – one that has the power to inform, enrich and enlighten.

I watched Manderlay in the run up to the Presidential Election. I was moved by it. The film is certainly topical with two weeks to go before we have the opportunity to possibly elect the first African-American President. I believe to do so would make statement to the people of the world that this experiment we're conducting with Freedom can work. What it has taken to get us to this point has been harrowing. This nation fought a Civil War, which helped to put an end to the institution of slavery. But there has been constant slippage (a polite word for the continued institutional racism) that led to the need for legislation to correct injustice. The Civil Rights era is now past and still racism continues. Blacks have had to continue to put their lives on the line to expand the Rights due them. We might now though witness the election of a black man as President. Racism will not end as a result of course but what a leap forward. It has taken the disaster of the past 8 years to get the country to the place where this is even possible. No W, no Obama.

Von Triers makes demanding films. I understand some people's aversion to his use of a sound-stage in both Manderlay and Dogville. It took me a bit of time in Dogville to adjust to the artifice. For me though, making the adjustment brought the issues and ideas he's dealing with to central focus in the film. No need for a real plantation in Manderlay. But the continuing enslavement does go on and it goes on in the film in the plantations of our mind. It goes on despite Grace's attempts to correct people's behaviors and beliefs and end the racism. We don't seem able to end it in this nation either.

Overall IMDb users have been much kinder to Manderlay than the critics have been. Many, perhaps a majority of the negative comments, take exception to the fact that Lars von Trier is a foreigner and worse yet a foreigner who has never set foot on American soil. That is not a problem for me. I have never been in Germany but I know that what happened in Germany and Europe in the 30's and 40's was wrong, was evil. My opinion as a non-German about the Holocaust and the war itself should not, cannot be discounted. It is probably more valuable for the German people to have a sense of what their actions created but am I not allowed to speak to those issues? Am I oversimplifying here? Perhaps.

I think, in some ways, von Trier's not being an American gives him some needed objectivity. I found the racial issues raised in Manderlay, to go to the heart of how racism works in this country. And right now in the United States of America we are witnessing a nation having to face it own demons concerning race once again. Many may not be able to vote for Barack Obama for no other reason that he is a Black Man. Many of those people will find another rationale for their vote.

I am glad I watched Manderlay at this time. It really does deal with some very crucial issues we as a nation have not always successfully faced. We have a chance to do something new but we need some clarity of vision about what we stand for as Free People. I feel Manderlay did a good job in helping clarify for me how we're all in this together. This was not an easy film for me to write about and I apologize for the political nature of what I have written.

Von Trier's Brechtian Gamble On Manderlay This time "liberal" is a dirty word By Jayson Harsin

"The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society . . . America must be born again!" — Martin Luther King Jr. 1967

"Dear (American) liberals, You're Idiots! Love, Lars."

In a nutshell, that is the message of Manderlay, controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's latest effort. Yet Manderlay is a complicated film that will produce multiple interpretations. Some will walk away calling it racist and anti-American. Others will find it a condemnation of Bush's war in Iraq. Yet, as I say, it is mostly a critique of American liberal politics. A condemnation of conservative racial politics is its point of departure. The film's complicated style and extreme plot produce intentional uneasiness.

Von Trier has cited German playwright Bertolt Brecht (right) as an artistic inspiration; yet one may wonder if he is reinventing the Brechtian wheel, one that Brecht himself admitted did not turn for others as he had wished.

[...]

On one level, the film is set in 1930s Alabama, on a plantation called Manderlay, where 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is apparently still being practiced. Continuing the narrative of Dogville, Grace (now Bryce Howard), after touring with her gangster father (now Willem Dafoe) and his thugs since her departure from Dogville, stumbles upon Manderlay with her father's entourage. She is alerted to the anachronistic existence of slavery by a slave who asks her for help. Her father asserts that this is a "local matter," echoing a common Southern response to Federal intervention in race problems that was often coded through "states' rights." It specifically recalls the language of Martin Luther King's powerful "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he responded to Southern clergymen who had accused him of, among other things, being a meddling outsider.

White liberal American intellectuals will no doubt have a hard time resisting identification with the white do-gooder Grace, who, like the North, the Federal government, and the social worker, believes that race relations at Manderlay are in moral terms not a local matter. "We have a moral obligation," Grace says to her father, as she persuades him to loan her gangster firepower to oversee her reform initiative.

But King was African-American and Grace is white. Should that matter? It matters in terms of Von Trier's audience (mostly American art cinema liberals and European intellectuals). It also matters for the history of white social and policy reactions to "the race problem," liberal and conservative responses, from segregation to integration, welfare to workfare, white flight to affirmative action. Grace's color is extremely significant. Resonances with Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and Absalom, Absalom can also be found in the simplicity of the white liberal Northerner's analysis and solution to race problems. In this sense, Von Trier's provocative film is perhaps above all else an indictment of American liberalism (or liberal individualism), domestically and globally. All of these aspects should be considered through the lens of his Brechtian alienation techniques. Otherwise, this turns out to be one of the most ignominiously racist films since Birth of a Nation.

First, domestically: the historical debate about freedmen and resistance to them is important. While one could go back further, the contradictions of the modern liberal-race problem invoked by Von Trier date from the end of the Civil War. From 1865-1867, white southerners made very little effort to welcome African-Americans into a reborn American society (symbolized by the historically altered Constitution). The Ku Klux Klan together with the Black Codes terrorized African-Americans physically and deprived them of education and the legal franchise. While some American historians have noted the important changes of freedmen and -women marrying; establishing households, schools, and churches; owning 20 percent more land during the Reconstruction years — others emphasize that even so, the country did not solve the problem of race. And the South in particular, in terms of land reforms, enfranchisement, and education, was not ready to change of its own accord. Many African-Americans exercised agency and made valiant efforts to become self-sufficient, yet they faced no little opposition from the planter class and some poor whites (even though evidence exists of some alliances between African-Americans and poor whites).

While Von Trier's film does little to emphasize the efforts made by African-Americans to exercise their freedom in the ways I've noted, it is virtuosic at portraying the structures many faced when they set foot off the plantation (symbolized by a shortlived character who, venturing off the plantation, waits for a sympathetic woman, a white reformer like Grace, but finds bloodthirsty white men instead). The role of a traveling salesman huckster also portrays the white mediation of emancipation through debt peonage and sharecropping. The failure of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 brought a more precarious period of civil and economic life to African-Americans in the South.

And yet Manderlay makes claims to a historical context in the 1930s. Here von Trier's dramatic vehicle of slavery existing in the 1930s is again more metaphorical than realist. The point is that while the furniture of racism was rearranged, it was still the same racist edifice. In addition, the role of an African-American leader is played by Wilhelm (Danny Glover), a house slave entrusted with knowledge of the entire Manderlay plantation rules and governance. Echoing views of nineteenth-century African-American leader Booker T. Washington, Wilhelm's analysis is that under the conditions at Manderlay, his people will meet a better life by consenting to the old social structures. The fact that armed gangsters must enforce the redistribution of social roles on one piece of property, which disappears when they disappear, is not a little reminiscent of Reconstruction military occupation of the South and its aftermath. To read on, see the full review at http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/51/manderlay.htm

Anti-American or not? This seems to be the most important question for many American viewers when deciding whether to like von Triers trilogy of films about America. Uninteresting as the discussion may be i must still say that i don't think it's anti-American, rather it just shows a very bleak view of humanity in general.

In my opinion Dogville was an amazing film. Even though it was artificial to the core with it's theatrical style i still felt it all the way to the bone. Seldom have i seen such an arty movie that still worked so well. Amazing actors, a story that is brutal and inhuman and an amazing ending. Doing a follow-up to such a movie is not easy, and yet von Trier has promised to make two. Today i saw Manderlay and the question is if it lived up to the expectations given by Dogville.

Right from the beginning Manderlay is at a disadvantage compared to Dogville. The theatrical style with it's stage-like setup and minimum of props has already been done and is not as unique as it was when Dogville was released. Also the lead actress Nicole Kidman is missing, replaced by the (at least to me) quite unknown Bryce Dallas Howard. Also James Caan as her father is replaced by Willem Dafoe. So how did they do? Willem Dafoe is in my opinion one of the most talented actors today in Hollywood and he does excellent here as usual, Bryce Dallas Howard on the other hand is rather pale as a replacement for Kidman. Don't get me wrong, Howard does a decent job of tackling the lead and she fits rather nicely in the movie. However she lacks the width and depth in her acting that Kidman has honed through the years and Howards version of Grace feels more shallow and a lot less haunted.

Otherwise the actors are, like in Dogville, the main attraction. One of von Triers main skills must definitely be bringing out the best in his actors. Everyone performs well despite the demanding format of the movie. The minimalist style demands it's actors to perform well at all times as there is no room for mistakes and nothing to cover them up.

Dogville is in my opinion a better movie than Manderlay. The story is more multi-layered, the actors (especially Kidman) are better and the moral points are presented in a much more powerful way. Yet Manderlay is undoubtedly also a good movie, as well as a good continuation of the story about Grace. If you enjoyed Dogville and accepted the format in which it was presented my guess is that you'll enjoy Manderlay. Part of the point of watching Dogville for me was that it was food for thought and Manderlay also gives you reason to think. So even though this was not as good as Dogville i'm still not disappointed.

I've only seen the film once, but I felt that the most consistent interpretation was strictly about arrogant imperialism. I found myself first seeing through a very direct lens of a slave narrative/American liberal white guilt. This is an easy interpretation that lives on the surface.

The film then transformed into a statement about the presumption that "we" can teach others how to govern when "they" may have a system that works better in their context. The system in Manderlay was not overseer/slave, the system was socialism/communism and each "slave," as Grace saw them, had his or her own specialized role. The inhabitants of Manderlay were free within their system, but Grace was so completely blinded by what her culture had taught her about "freedom" and "democracy" and the inferiority of all other ways of life. The democracy she implemented was a complete farce. Their society did not function when the arrogant outsider who thought she knew what was best for them began implementing her system with force. The most direct comparison is "operation iraqi freedom" and other US nation building exercises or sponsored coups.

I found many other characters to be representations of a global system of oppression. The card shark was an international lending institution like the World Bank or the IMF and the "prince" was a corrupt leader who sold out his people for a cut of the profits of the international business elites (like Marcos, Suharto, or seemingly countless others).

I was very pleased with Manderlay and thoroughly frustrated by simplistic the reviews I read of it. I feel that this film falls apart with a straightforward viewing. As a white guilt slave narrative the film is mediocre. As commentary on imperialism and an absolutely corrupt global system, the film is a wonderful composition. I can't wait for Wasington.