The question of evil: "Irradiés" and "There Is No Evil"

The last two films shown in the Competition section are in the tradition of political awareness that has shaped the Berlinale for 70 years: Irradié / Irradiated, directed by the veteran Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh; and Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil.  Shown back to back yesterday, they are also in conversation with one another, beyond their historical, cultural and political specificities, since their underlying theme is the value of human life in contexts of evil.  They both have a moral urgency that elicited a warm reaction from the hardened journalists in the press screening I attended.  A few minutes after the Iranian film finished, I overheard a Spanish journalist filing his report over the telephone, saying: “I cried many times”.

In Irradiés, a documentary essay on evil in the 20^th century – name the usual suspects, they are all there – Panh revisits the horrors of history from a perspective grounded in his own family history: the destruction of parents and siblings in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and, ultimately, his escape to freedom via Thailand. He eventually settled in France, graduating from the topnotch Institut des hautes études cinématographiques.  The antecedents for his latest documentary are in plain sight, beginning with Night and Fog (1956), Chronique d’un eté, the 1961 Rouch/Morin documentary, and most of all the work of Chris Marker, with Sans Soleil (1983) coming to mind.  Panh shares here their modernist impulse to see politics from the lens of the personal, and eschewing a Griersonian approach in favor of an experimental form.

Irradiés, however, is not a derivative or redundant work. In the press conference, Panh was asked about his decision to work for most of 80-plus minutes with a three-split image on the screen: the central panel is related but not similar to the two identical lateral ones, using the music as a somber and sometimes discordant counterpoint to the visuals. Panh faced the same issue a young Alain Resnais confronted when deciding on a narrative, visual and sound structure for Night and Fog: footage from the concentration and extermination camps had been used until then as evidence for the Nuremberg trials, and though professionally edited by the Allied teams in charge of the prosecution, they were not arranged for esthetic purposes.   This is a matter that comes in my documentary class time and again: how do you/should you portray “the horror, the horror” without trivializing its nature? Do you/should you make choices that privilege film language over ethics? Peter Jackson approached it, but from another angle, in the drastic shaping of archival footage from the Imperial War Museum for They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

Rithy Panh started by responding that Irradiés is above all a "shout", a reminder of how evil irradiates. His challenge was to keep the attention of the audience past the first minutes of  

watching images of brutality. How to make the images resonate was the director’s guiding principle. If you build the work as a catalogue of horrors, the director continued, the audience checks out.  The rhythmic repetition of the three-split image structure is a form of abstraction that helps the viewer concentrate and dive into the materials. If the images speed by, truth is lost.

An Italian critic friend of mine, noted as the credits were rolling: “Ecco un capolavoro”. Beautifully said.

Shot in Iran under difficult circumstances, Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil is a work of great courage and beauty.  Like Jafar Panahi and other Iranian directors who have gained international recognition, Rasoulof is at odds with Iran’s mullahs, his latest trouble being a pending prison sentence for  “propaganda against the system” – namely his 2017 drama A Man of Integrity, that won the Un Certain Reard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. On the occasion of the Berlinale, which as expected he could not attend, his plight was covered by the accredited press. An empty spot with his name was set up for the press conference.

Mohammad Rasoulof 

There Is No Evil is comprised of four interlocking stories involving a very specific moral choice, to be or not to be an executioner of prisoners, as determined by the state. Like Kieslowski’s Dekalog (1988), individuals are faced with moral dilemmas, for which there are attenuating circumstances, or so it seems.  In the four stories the male protagonists are part of the prison system – a metaphor for the regime at large – but their circumstances and decisions, widely different. The narrative structure of each episode is shaped by the social, economic, intellectual and geographic specificities of each case – the society at large. The viewers find themselves observing life in Tehran and then in the countryside, sharply photographed in the city, and with great beauty in the countryside.  The minute unfolding of the first story sets the tone for the film with its unexpected and stunning twist in the final shot. It is the peg on which Rasoulof, who also wrote the screenplay,  hangs the progressively more outspoken critical tone of the ironically yet poignantly titled film.  It is all about how each character – and by extension ourselves, the viewers, through fear and pity, as Aristotle would have argued – will respond to “the horror, the horror”.  

There Is No Evil shares with Dekalog 5 a profoundly humanistic point of view, a stubborn reminder that all life has value, and that maybe, at some point, facing evil, we will have to make a choice. In the context of today’s Iranian politics, it takes courage – and European production funds – to make such a statement.

The international jury will award the prizes tonight.  I hope that these two magnificent works will be recognized and launched into a long viewing life.