DEFEAT POINT A Film Storyboard II parte (NARRATIVA) ~ di Sibilla Petlevski - TECLAXXI

 

NARRATIVA

Sibila Petlevski

An excerpt from

DEFEAT POINT 

A Film Storyboard

ParteSeconda

 

His grandmother Louisa, who led a famous dance group with her husband, was the Mother of the Clan. And you guessed it – the woman from my dream who invited me to a local park to meet her grandson. When I searched for photos and videos from the park, I came across a traditional drum dance class – lo and behold, right next to the children’s playground where I had been invited in my dream, then a group of younger women, led by an older woman, praying for peace in a meadow by a tree and giving thanks for the recovery of young people who had been cured of drugs and alcoholism.

 

“So, you got in touch with him? – the philosopher asks impatiently.

 

Would you get in touch with him? – I counter-question.

 

Where the Skeena and Kitsumkalum rivers flow into each other, there was an Indian village. Fur trading and gold prospecting were the main activities along the Pacific coast, and in the 1890s a steamboat line was established up the Skeena to Hazelton. The chronicles of that place record the fact that a blacksmith named Tom Thornhill was the first to permanently settle near the area now known as "Little Canyon" on the south bank of the river. But in fact, it is the story of his wife – Eliza Thornhill, a brave Indian woman who was the sister of Walter Wright, the chief who orally recited the text recorded in the book Men of Medeek. While working in the hop fields of the Fraser Valley in the 1880s, she met Tom. They got married and settled on the land between the Old and New Bridge. As a First Nations woman, Eliza had no right to her own piece of land: only Tom, as a Briton, could claim part of the territory where traditionally she would have had the right to hunt game and fish.

 

Eliza was a breadwinner skilled at setting traps, but she also brought in money from fur sales in Port Essington. Tom, in a reversal of gender roles, grew a large vegetable and flower garden, selling his produce to the ship's helmsmen. Tom's health was weak, so Eliza, who knew local conditions better than he anyway, increasingly took on jobs that were considered men's jobs. This was not unusual for early settlers throughout British Columbia and Canada: much of the care for survival during the region's intense fur trade period was done by the resourceful and hardy Aboriginal women. Eliza died in 1907, and local legend says that she died as a result of falling into a game pole she had set up herself. Until 1916, the stream along the area where Eliza set traps was officially registered as "Eliza Stream". It was one of the few, if not the only place in the province named after an Indian woman. This “mistake” was “corrected” by the administration by the 1930s. The place where a strong woman lived and died was renamed the generic geographical name “Sockeye Creek.” In the 1970s, historian Floyd Frank lamented the renaming of the creek, saying that only a few, the elderly and knowledgeable, remained to bear witness to the human geography of the place. Without people to remember, he argued, Eliza’s story would fade. But what was her real name, as it was pronounced in the Smʼalgyax language? The space where people live, work and die is always experienced, from a human perspective, as a stage for fate. Who knows what she called the stream that, together with her, lost its right to its original identity? Does every memory have the right to a story and, more importantly, does oblivion have the right, when it finds its narrator, or in this case, its narrator – even if only in a dream – to allow seemingly nothing to be created again, to allow a fiery bird to rise again from its own ashes, from self-immolation as a point of personal defeat?

 

“To tell you the truth,” said the philosopher, briefly taken aback by what I had confided in him – “I would have contacted him. Yes, I would contact Mike, why not!”

 

And then a dilemma arose in him about whether it was really wise for a woman, a foreigner at that, to contact a man she only knew from photographs of his masks, ceremonial hats and totem poles and from a newspaper interview in which he said that carving treats the post-traumatic syndrome of a man who had “done a lot and seen even more”. Would this cause a problem for his spouse – a doctor of science whose eyes darken every time someone from outside tries to lightly follow the tribal trail through the land which, although today is parceled out according to the Western system of ownership and intersected by a state border, as a historical territory belongs to those who had it “since the beginning of the world”.

 

If it is the sacred ground of the spirit of a people, isn't it natural to first turn to that Spirit and ask Him whether it is permissible to set foot on someone else's territory and whether there are any rituals of passage and rules of decency?

 

Which of the two will deal me a worse blow? Will their child "have mercy" on me while she dances clumsily and shakes off - like snow - the white feathers inserted into a small ceremonial headdress made by her father? And if they eventually adopt me, will they still say to me one day:

 

"Go back where you came from!"

 

"Something is bothering me," I told the philosopher. "It seems stupid even to me, but as a woman I am afraid to approach him first. Perhaps this fear is not entirely unfounded: after all, the spirit of patriarchy still walks on our Western, civilized, neatly divided land; an arrogant giant disguised in the colorful costume of daily politics, sometimes in rainbow colors, with a turban made of the flags of Western democracies! 'Let's contact Mike together – as husband and wife' – David suggested to me'. So, what now? Two men whose advice I would gladly listen to without necessarily following - my long-time love and you, the philosopher - are telling me practically the same thing. You both suggest I hide behind the lie of shared responsibility. I won't, everyone is responsible for themselves".

 

Mike's grandmother Louisa, even after her death, knew how to save her grandson from the jaws of war, how to protect him from the Wendigo's contagious breath that spreads the infection of hunger for crime. She awakened in him the memory of the blow of a stick on a drum and the rhythm of the stamping of the feet of tribal dancers. And yet, there was in her posthumous tenderness something similar to the bias of maternal love that my heroine Anđelka felt for her son: Marino was a skilled carver, and he was a skilled kneader of clay, but he was only conditionally an artist – his works were best in the air, in the emptiness of a gesture that follows an imagined outline. He never managed to "hit" the face, and in the end the iron bodice for the woman's torso always remained empty. Unlike Marin from my book Defeat Point, Mike succeeded – a little too late, but still. He achieved his goal in service to the community, and if there was any crime, his rough hands redeemed him with the first cut of a chisel on wood. I, on the other hand, received a call in a dream, along the matriarchal line of inheritance of the right to a story. The philosopher was disappointed:

 

          “So you're not going to contact him?”

 

But I never said anything like that. Maybe I will, one day, if he sings a victory song for me, one created “before time itself” that doesn’t shout a war cry to exult over the defeated but laughs from the perspective of those who survived.

 

 

***

 

A film storyboard is traditionally divided into two columns, the left one for the image and the right one for the sound. The language of the storyboard must be such that there is no room for doubt about how the author intended each individual shot. But what happens when the storyboard director is not the author in the “true” sense of the word; when the relationship between the image of someone’s suffering and the moan that accompanies that image with sound is determined by social circumstances in historical time, and when doubt is the only ethically acceptable interpretation of the scene?

         

I thought I was the only one who watches the closing credits all the way through, except perhaps for supporting actors and extras who sometimes manage to find their names in the credits of the film in the list of thanks written somewhere in the tiniest of letters.

 

This “rolling” from top to bottom, usually in small print, is as fast and inexorable as life itself. Sometimes it is easier to sign out of life than to admit that our role is smaller than the letters; that we existed for ourselves, but not for others; that we have remained unnoticed, socially invisible and that therefore no one will even ask for our name, and that is worse, much worse than oblivion.

 

At the beginning of the new millennium, Lars von Trier made the “avant-garde drama” Dogville and a lot of clever things have been written about this parable of evil in which about twenty citizens of a small town are presented, one after the other, as warm-hearted, common people with easily forgivable, small and in some ways even likable flaws. It will become clear in the course of the film that behind the simplicity and apparent compassion of the so-called ordinary man lies the bloodthirsty and primitive nature of a predator, as, after all, long before von Trier, and in the stories of one of the best writers of the American South – Flannery O'Connor – and that it is indeed hard to find a good man, as the title of one of her books says. The minimalist scenery, more appropriate for theater than film, the visible lines of the "floor plan" for the actors' movement, and the down-to-earth metaphor of the so-called "floor plan" direction that exposes the mechanism of social life in a small town, seemed "pretentious" to critics. The terrifying moment of the hypocrite's self-recognition – the duplicity of those watching, and especially of those interpreting von Trier's parable, made the film difficult to interpret: it took time for the public to accept the simplicity of the message that the author literally uttered when he saw that he had no choice but to verbally, outside the medium of film, point out what should be clear to everyone:

 

"Evil can appear anywhere, if the situation is right".

 

All of this is today, when critical reception has settled down, a more or less accepted interpretive commonplace, but there is something that almost everyone missed, and they missed it because they left the screening hall as soon as the closing credits began: in the background behind the names, some other faces appeared – painfully real. Perhaps the director subsequently "directed" the photographs of the poor, toothless wretches, dirty children and laundry drying next to a shack – perhaps he stopped the moving scene in a simulation of photographic memory. What is certain is that he at least partially used Walker Evans' photographs, which, through a disturbing dialogue with the text of the American writer James Agee, document the lives of impoverished farmers during the Great Depression. “Let us now praise famous men” – says the title of that book published in the 1940s.

 

But why am I talking about this in the closing credits of the novel “Defeat Point” – prose that "wrote itself" for me in scenes that, strangely enough, still leave no room for doubt about how I, as the author, imagined each individual frame. The relationship between the image of someone's suffering and the sound that accompanies it, as I have already said, is determined by social circumstances in historical time, so the space for doubt about the ethically acceptable or ethically unacceptable interpretation of my scenes has shifted to you, who are witnessing my point of defeat. There is no word with which I could thank you for this acceptance of responsibility.

 

[First published in Croatian: Sibila Petlevski (2023) Točka poraza. Zagreb: Sandorf.

Copyright 2023©Sibila Petlevski. Translated into English by the author. ]

 brave, who do not agree to live in the time of lies; to people who are not afraid of freedo

SIBILA PETLEVSKI

 BIONOTA

Sibila Petlevski, born on May 11, 1964 in Zagreb, is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright, librettist, literary translator and editor of literary and scientific publications, researcher in the field of theater and interdisciplinary science, full professor at the University of Zagreb. She has written twenty-five books of different literary and scientific genres, edited eight scientific books, and compiled and translated an anthology of American poetry.

 photo by ©David Gazarov