Anfal offscreen

It’s a twenty minutes walk from the Grand Theatre cinema in central Copenhagen to my girlfriend’s apartment in the hip Vesterbro area. Her apartment isn’t that hip, though. In fact it’s just a small room and a shared kitchen. I’m sitting by her red round table writing this. Staring out at the sun and rain that I left behind a few minutes ago. I don’t know why I’m smoking and drinking coffee. All I wanna do is write.

Offscreen is the third and latest movie by upcoming art director Christoffer Boe. As usual he’s more interested in the media itself than in what he actually does with it. And once again he uses a story of love lost and desperately regained as his central excuse. Only, the novelty has worn off, and his short-comings as a storyteller have become ever clearer. Leaving us with a nonsensical catastrophe of modern cinema.

Let me assure you that there is nothing flattering in my use of the term ”catastrophe”. Offscreen doesn’t have the same epic quality of failure that other titles did. Such as von Stroheim’s Greed that was butchered down from nine hours to one and a half hours, or Michael Cimino’s recently re-released Heaven’s Gate that almost ruined United Artists, and marked the end of an era where certain directors worked outside of the production company’s control.

As far as Offscreen goes I’m sure production costs have been just as cheap as the movie itself. Everything is filmed in everyday surroundings with a handheld digital camera, and apart from lead actor Nicolas Bro who has the misfortune of portraying himself – or at least his public self – the rest of the cast doesn’t get much screentime.

Basically it is a story of the fall and decline of a man whose wife chooses to leave him. And understandably so. In spite of Nicolas Bro’s attempt to add some real life quality to his performance, we’re painfully aware of his acting. His personality comes across as completely one-dimensional, as does his relationship with his wife, and the love story suffers from the banality of high school drama class performances. The gradual disintegration of the central character and the eventual downward slide into madness and murder even more so.

What troubles me is not that Offscreen is such a poorly conceived and realized movie. There are plenty more of its kind out there. But I find it troublesome that it represents the height of Danish experimental cinema today. A home video camera in the hands of a celebrity actor filming himself. Is this really what’s supposed to continue the rich heritage of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Lars von Trier? Is this the follow-up to such masterpieces as The Idiots and Dogville?

If we are to believe the critics, I’m afraid it is. They continue to praise the work of Christoffer Boe in its entirety even though its only claim to fame is the occasional – admitted! – sublime imagery and editing. Perhaps this is due to a lack of competition which then again is due to a lack of interest in innovative thinking and experimentation. A lack which runs like wildfire through a country hailing to cost benefit analyses and the traditions and virtues of half a century ago.

In the years following World War II most afflicted countries were hell-bent on peace. Including Denmark. And we were willing to pay the price. Literally by way of household consumer goods and status symbols. Metaphorically by way of a narrower outlook on the world outside of family, career, and country. The nuclear family, as it came to be termed. How ironic! And how sad that we’re once again opting for it. Even now when globalization is rampant, and the Earth so much smaller than the fields of a backwaters farm.

Walking the distance from the cinema to my girlfriend’s room, I chanced upon a gathering at the City Hall Square. Some hundred or so people were listening to a man declaiming from a small platform in a language I didn’t understand. A couple of handwritten signs in English informed me that it was a demonstration protesting the Anfal genocide in which Saddam Hussein allegedly ordered the killing of almost 200.000 Kurds in less than half a year.

A presumably Kurdish woman in her mid-twenties handed me a leaflet when I walked by. It encouraged the Danish government to put pressure on the Iraqi government to get them to acknowledge and apologize the genocide. It also told me that today is the first day of the trial against Saddam Hussein on this very topic.

Reviewing all of the above I guess I might have spent more words on the Anfal genocide, and less on Christoffer Boe’s puerile Offscreen. But somehow I believe the two things to be connected. And in some intricate chain of events which knows of no innocence, I wouldn’t be surprised to find the movie the cause of the tragedy. A fiction claimed to be reality interlinked with a reality claimed to be fiction.

Whatever the exact nature of the relationship between Offscreen and Anfal, I’m sure that the one needs the other more than they care to admit. Art needs reality to create life. Just as reality needs art to preserve life. Without each other they become meaningless. Like lost lovers clutching memories forever gone.