Screen Machine

Feature: On motivation in cinema

Of Gods and Men

In his role as Osama bin Laden in the imaginary film Terror in the Shadows, the actor Vincent Gallo asked his director at a pivotal moment in production that question oft-asked by actors: “What’s my motivation here?” Gallo’s director, George W. Bush replied, “You hate freedom”. Thus was a cinematic tendency spawned in which terrorists were assigned character motivations of the most dubious credibility: Hence The Dark Knight’s Joker (“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”) or Derek Frost in the more recent Source Code. The motives of terrorism need not be so obscure but there is a good reason for them to remain so. By keeping the motives of terrorists obscure, one avoids the danger of implicating the terrorised. You can’t talk seriously about the Weather Underground without also talking about the American government killing innocents in Vietnam. You can’t talk seriously about the National Liberation Front of Algeria without talking about the violence of French colonialism. I’m not, of course, implying that victims of terrorism deserve what they get. But motivations and interests do count for something.

They count especially in cinema. Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff is a great film not because it is an anti-Western (Westerns are pretty great thank you very much) but because of the precise way she draws the network of interests between the settlers and the Indian. Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien is a good film because it attributes French collaboration not to a simplistic Nazi ideology but to a specific economy of desire in which status and power rule. You could say that a film is as honest as this economy of desire is lucidly elaborated. In Preminger’s devastatingly honest Fallen Angel, a man finds himself as the prime suspect of a murder but because of the way Preminger artfully sketches the driving motivations of an expanding cast of characters, we develop a sense that anyone could have done the crime. This is the world of Fallen Angel – There is only one killer, but everyone is guilty. To be an interested party is to be guilty. It’s the same story in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother – She loves her son and because she loves, she is already guilty.

The centrality of motivation and interests is Marx’s contribution to historical study. After Marx, we would never again need to be saddled with the mystical sentiment of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” – the faith that the selfish pursuit of profit magically produces the highest societal prosperity. With Marx, there is no god for which everything has a mysterious purpose. There are only people who need to eat, work and fuck. So any film worth its salt (in this sense of a cinema of motivations) is a Marxist film.

The terrorist film of the year so far is Of Gods and Men, a film by Xavier Beauvois that depicts a group of French Trappist monks stationed near a rural Algerian village who come under threat from Muslim fundamentalists. In his review of the film, Glenn Kenny described the film thus: “[I]t is one of the film’s more interesting features that its treatment of faith is kind of, well, materialist”. With all respect to Glenn Kenny (and I do mean that – his blog Some Came Running is worth keeping up with), on this point he is dead wrong. Of Gods and Men’s depiction of the monks’ situation is not in any sense “materialist” but rather deeply religious. Its narrative structure basically operates as a repetition of the story of the Fall. How else to talk about the film’s ridiculously idealised pastoral vision of Catholic monks living in Edenic harmony with the Algerian farmers? When the monks consider leaving the country in light of the civil war sparking up around them, the Algerian locals exort them to stay: You are the branch holding our village up! they cry. What’s missing from this presentation of the monks’ precious selflessness is the sense of how much the whole situation reeks of postcolonial dependency. What about the church’s institutional interest in maintaining dependency: If it’s so important that the village has a doctor on hand, why have the monks not bothered to educate the locals in basic medicinal remedies? (Perhaps they have enough trouble communicating with the simpleton locals through rudimentary hieroglyphs as shown in one scene.)

It’s not as if Of Gods and Men is wholly unconcerned with interests and motivations. There are plenty of scenes of the monks agonising over whether or not to leave Algeria. Will the monks flee for safety or are they just too perfectly selfless? is the film’s ongoing non-question. But as far as the film is concerned, motivations and interests are a privilege reserved for white people only. As far as non-white people are concerned, there are no interests, only attitudes. No causes, only effects. The terrorists and government officials are violent and ruthless in pursuit of whatever they are pursuing but we don’t see what makes them tick – we only see the bloody corpses. And there you have it: the French are peaceful sorts who agonise about moral questions while Algerians are single-minded blood-thirsty thugs. Of Gods and Men is so racist on its face that it’s hard to believe that it in fact won the second most prestigious prize at Cannes, an audience that you hope would be somewhat embarassed with its country’s colonialist history. As my boyfriend remarked after the film, “You don’t see the British making films about their romps in India anymore”.

But the problem with Of Gods and Men isn’t that it depicts the monks as “good” and the terrorists as “bad”. I’m inclined to think that this is probably a fine assessment. Of Gods and Men isn’t wrong in this regard, but it is a dishonest film. It is dishonest because it one-ups Terror in the Shadows by stripping the terrorists of motivations. It is dishonest because it does not own up to western interests in the region – the way the corrupt government of an oil-rich nation was backed by the west with the promise of “economic restructuring”, the way the Algerian government created its own armed Islamist militias as part of disinformation campaigns. The film covers none of this. So what are we left with? A glorified depiction of monks as idiots who mean well (a fine analogy for today’s political left). Of Gods and Men is perhaps the greatest glorification of ignorance since Forrest Gump, but we need less ignorance in the cinema and more motivations.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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