NOTTURNO – The night consuming the people of the Middle East
After incredible success throughout the documentary festival circuit, NOTTURNO, from FIRE AT SEA director Gianfranco Rosi, is now streaming exclusively on Mubi.
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“NOTTURNO” by Gianfranco Rosi: 8.5/10
For three years, Gianfranco Rosi filmed armed conflicts in the Middle East along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, witnessing the scars of violence and destruction left across their harsh landscapes. He captured the Notturno (night) that seems to be spreading endlessly over this surviving humanity. Without depicting the spectacular aspects of war, he ingeniously observes its consequences on civilian populations. He records an offered or subjacent emotion without exploiting it and turning it into pathos. Working on the resilience of humanity, Notturno consists mainly of static shots in which the protagonists suddenly appear. Gianfranco Rosi captures the awakening to life – a man using his voice and his drum to fill the silent streets of his slumbering city – that prevent the places he is filming from becoming relics of the past.
In Notturno, war is omnipresent. It constantly intrudes into the soundscape, punctuating it with distant shootings. These sounds intermingle with a daily life that the civilian population is trying to preserve, like a couple smoking hookah whose sounds merges with the noise of gunfire. Armed conflict is a relentless looming crisis, as apocalyptic as the Iraqi oil refineries igniting the nights of an impoverished hunter, which fuels the melancholy of the past and annihilates hope for the future. The bodies that Gianfranco Rosi films are thus subjected to the inexorable languor of the present. Struck by monotony and waiting, the Kurdish soldiers watch for an enemy who does not show up and find heroism only through fighting videos broadcasted on the Internet. In Notturno, the paradox of the military body is truly expressed by a reinforcement of the body seen as a tool, such as the groups of running soldiers that methodically emerge in the opening sequence, and the physical constraints imposed on a body that has remained organic, such as the back of a Kurdish soldier worn out by the hours spent in the swivelling turret of an armoured fighting vehicle shaken by bad road conditions.
This languor of the present also shapes the fate of the civilians left behind. Gianfranco Rosi films a young boy, the eldest of six siblings, who must provide for his family. When the first cars are driving along the earthen roads made impassable by the early rain, he leaves to offer his day's services for a dime. The filmmaker films his impassive face torn by fatigue and boredom. Through these close-ups, he restores a certain dignity and a singular identity to this boy, interchangeable in the eyes of passing employers. Notturno honours martyrs whether alive, like the boy, or deceased, by remembering their lives and deaths. The most intense sequences are those of these two mothers mourning the loss of their loved child. One is listening to the voice messages left by her daughter who was abducted by ISIS. The other laments the death of her son in the former prison where he was tortured and killed by the Turkish state. Through her words, the walls of the cell become her son's body (« as I touch the wall, I feel your blood ») and the prison metamorphoses into a mausoleum. As a result, this prison no longer belongs to the torturers but to the memory of the victims.
Notturno documents this difficult process of re-appropriation and transmission of the pain. In a muddy refugee camp, the filmmaker refers to the short film J'ai huit ans (1961) in which Yann Le Masson and Olga Poliakoff, based on an idea by René Vautier, explore the traumas of the Algerian war through children's drawings. Here, the children are the Yazidis massacred by ISIS. In the details of their drawings that they explain to their teacher, the horror emerges through the red colored stains symbolizing the blood of the beaten children whenever they cried in captivity. A suffering made collective in order to begin a long healing process - as shown by a stuttering child who describes his own traumas through the drawings of his classmates. Similarly, a doctor rehearses a play with his patients about the Homeland's loss in Baghdad's psychiatric hospital. Through theatre, patients put into words their traumatic episodes and personify their respective countries. In these sequences, Gianfranco Rosi reawakens a revolutionary spirit, though fictitious, that befits the people’s will for self-determination. In this endless night imposed by the ambition and greed of tyrants and Western powers, Notturno offers a beacon of hope.
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