Ambivalence and anger on the island of Spinalonga
L'Ordre — Jean-Daniel Pollet (1973)
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— Last week, I mentioned Jean-Daniel Pollet. I mentioned him and then moved on, quickly. But he has been rattling around in my head. He still is. So much so that I, because this is basically a dressed-up stream of consciousness, am going to write about him for this week’s newsletter.
— Ernst Bloch looked backwards. For the writer of The Spirit of Utopia (1918), the failure of utopian vision—of utopian thinking itself—does not tar or diminish the radiance of utopia, or its possibility. Ruined utopias embody an ‘anticipatory illumination’ (das vor-schein). These thoughts are pre-appearances, and they are connected to the present. “Like an explosive” (he says). They have not failed. Thinking, failing. This alone pre-appears the possibility of a radical (and “explosive”) transformation. Bloch is very fun like this.
— More. The dead-yet-present doesn’t belong to the past at all. Ruins persist. You can trip over them. Quite literally, they can fall on you. The dead-yet-present is something we consult and observe and receive, even though its context has evaporated. It has (or part of it has) survived. It has latched on. It thrums and vibrates. For Bloch, this is the “tradition of the future”. Handle it carefully. Jean-Daniel Pollet also looks backwards. Unlike Bloch, he is not thrilled. Unlike Benjamin (or his angel of history), he is not terrified or overwhelmed. No. He is bored, repetitive. But he is also very angry.
— L'Ordre (1973) is a scintillating and lyrical film. Intoning, recursive. It is a mausoleum which also happens to be the most living (and livid) place in town. Typically, Pollet was not concerned with individuals (say, 1964’s Bassae or 1963’s Méditerranée), but with the tides and structures of history that shape and all too often obliterate them (like waves, he calls them “monotonous”); of the detritus that history leaves behind. Here, however, an individual speaks. Enter Raimondakis.
— Raimondakis, a leper, speaks for those who—through a mixture of befuddlement, ignorance and cruelty—were, over a course of decades, conveyed to the harshly barren island of Spinalonga, far from the bodies (and eyes) of the well. I don’t actually know a great deal about these events, except to imagine—like all such happenings—that they were stupid and careless. The island, as we see it today (and as it is reanimated by the testimony of Raimondakis), is a wasteland. Scrub-covered rocks. A flat, motionless sea. Concrete buildings. Abandoned corridors. From 1903 to 1957, the island was a leper colony. Its last resident (a priest) did not leave until 1962, in order (so explains Wikipedia) to maintain the Orthodox tradition of commemorating a person so many days and weeks and months and years after their death. Its entrance (somewhat horrifyingly) was known as Dante’s Gate (because the patients did not know what was going to happen to them when they arrived). With the arrival of more effective medical treatments (and a more progressive approach to public health), it would be one of the last leper colonies in Europe.
— Strange how Werner Herzog also made a film (called Last Words, 1968) about Spinalonga; a short about a man—a lyre player—who refuses to leave the island, and is (eventually) removed by force. Like Pollet, the film features moments of wandering point-of-view footage shot amongst the ruins and remnants. But much of it is otherwise static (actually its best trait, and I really like this film, is the way that characters repeat their lines over and over again. Where Pollet was visually repetitive, Herzog chooses to be phonetically so).
— Where were we. Yes. We are left to imagine what it—Spinalonga, the leper colony—was like. Raimondakis does not so much explain its territories and terrains (he really doesn’t need to), but instead speaks about the people who came to reside here. He speaks of their lives and their loves. Moments of obvious humanity (people, after all, are people). The barbers. The work. The funerals. And these lives liven these otherwise unspeaking structures. What does it matter what the stone says? Pollet cares (I think). But they don’t answer him (I think). Raimondakis articulates a dystopic vision that we should all be concerned about; where society’s dumbly dubious definition of the “well” becomes increasingly constrained, incoherent.
— So. Ruins persist. L'Ordre bounds between three discontinuous yet integrated formal structures. One, a compassionate and livid monologue delivered by Raimondakis, a former prisoner-resident of Spinalonga. Here, Pollet’s camera lingers on his unseeing eyes, his cigarette, his hands. It is a graceful and blistering film-as-portrait. He speaks. He shares. He appeals to our reason and our emotions. I suppose he’s talking to us, the viewer. Not Pollet (necessarily). This segment, shot in black and white, hammers us, just as it diverts, radially, toward archive footage of the island’s patient-prisoners. Also black and white. Sidebar. Pollet’s own voiceover, his own narrative, often creeps and crawls in. “What does leprosy do? What does [sickness] do?” Sidebar. I’m reminded of Forough Farrokhzad’s own film about a leper colony, The House is Black (1962).
— Pollet again. The illness—he says—is not simply the presence of symptoms. The “other” illness (pause) “is forming us”. Illness, or at least our backward attitudes toward illness, make us ill in turn. In 1938, a local tycoon offered the islanders a telephone. “Everything”, explains Raimondakis, was done “to avoid it from being installed”. Pollet’s camera pans, quickly, away, upwards, from his face; focusing on the microphone above his head. “One went to Spinalonga knowing it was to die there”.
— Ruins persist. The second, interleaved formal element of the film is a disorienting, repetitive study of the island of Spinalonga, a now abandoned leper colony. A rocky, dispassionate lump of rock long since gone to weeds and ruin. Illness, unwellness, are—for Pollet—a form of distance difference. And that distant difference has a spatial organisation, for Pollet is concerned with articulating the structure of otherness, the biopolitical bifurcation between those who are (deemed) ‘well’ and those who are (deemed) ‘unwell’. Of course, for Foucault—jump cut, sorry—power is exercised not only through specific ‘technologies of knowledge’, but through practices of circulation and dis-circulation within a given territory. The island is really a prison, impounded by the sea. The territory itself (without walls, without bars) is inescapable.
— Ruins persist. The third formal element of the film (easily confused and confounded as the island of Spinalonga) is a similarly recursive point-of-view exploration of another leper colony on the outskirts of Athens. It is here, after years of terrible exclusion and the eventual closure of the island colony, that the lepers were relocated. The ill, again, were located elsewhere; away from the environs of the healthy.
— I found L’Ordre to be a deeply compassionate and humane film, but also very angry! A clunky observation, but a true one; how Pollet channels Levinas in his careful, sympathetic encounter with alterity. That relationship always, always being asymmetrical, where “self and other can never merge, [or] be subsumed in each other”, while the self remains more responsible for the other than for themselves. This is the radicalism of Levinas. And it is the radicalism of Jean-Daniel Pollet, too; never allowing his own narrative to clobber or submerge that of Raimondakis, and always, always persisting with a filmic form that privileges the point-of-view, even if it makes for disorienting watching (on our behalf). His camera tilts and pans and tips. It rushes (or walks) forwards. It gazes up and down over the walls, the water. For a moment, we’re a resident; bored, repeating, trapped. The island isn’t very big (I think). The views might be beautiful, but not when you watch them again and again, over a course of years. Beauty can become oppressive, after all.
— And this, really, is where the ambivalence creeps in. Unsurprisingly, the place that Raimondakis and his fellows was relocated to was not really very different from Spinalonga. In fact—as he explains—it was in many ways a lot worse. Where Spinalonga enabled the lepers to fashion a community of interdependence, a utopia of reliance and solidarity, the extra-Athenian site severed these bonds and thrust them, without compassion, into the maw of a world that did not trust (nor want) them.
— The camera pans across rotted walls, tracks the crumbled stones of the island’s buildings. From the sea, it doesn’t speak. The camera rushes forward along desolate streets. It sways this way and that. It tracks across the stone lids of graves. It peers into darkened crevices and through (back and forth) a windowless window. It approaches (strapped to the front of a car) the gate of the Athenian hospital. It arrives and it arrives and it arrives, looping and repeating. Always arriving, never departing.
— Raimondakis pities us, the ‘not-unwell’. In this “jungle of a life”, this “furnace”, only they have found “a goal”. On Spinalonga, the lepers were their own masters, he says. In the newly created Athenian hospital, they became, simply, patients; and their autonomy was stripped away. The world, finally, did not want them. One final indignity. There was no “place in the world” left for those who returned. Pollet. “It would have been better not to leave”. Raimondakis. This life “brought sorrow and tears”. Once the leprosy has been cured, you are “are still leprous”. It keeps us away.
— “The concept [of] utopia already contain the elements of the utopic reality that is missing, and it is from this knowledge and experience that utopia can be realized” (Bloch). The past (however obliterated) might contain within it the possibility of the utopian. Of transformation’s change. This, perhaps, is what makes the anger of Pollet and Raimondakis more than muffled fury. It speaks to a better way to live.
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