Abu Sayeed is one one of a
few directors from Bangladesh whose films were shown on some
international film festivals. His newest film Ekjon Kobir Mrityu
is not only one of his most willful one. Three different kind of
films came into my mind: first Citizen Kane by Orson Welles,
Geschichtsunterricht (History Lesson) by Jean-Marie Straub and
Daniele Huillet and the films by Marguerite Duras, her
Aurelia-Steiner-films and Le Mains Negatives (The
negative Hands). The puzzle-structure of Citizen Kane
which recapitulate a human life, the work with text and images like
Duras and Straub/Huillet seem to be united in Abu Sayeed´s most
experimental film.
The film goes through
several transformations. At the beginning there is a famous poet who
suffers under insomnia. He has a strange dream about a woman dressed
in white, a kind of death angel. On the next morning his son finds
the poet dead. With the death of the only visible person, the
narration takes only place in the off. While the family is busy to
arrange the funeral ceremony, including to transport his corps to the
place of his funeral, newspapers and television news are preparing
special features on the death of this poet. What we see and about
what the invisible acteurs are talking goes different ways. Several
time we see a huge printing press and with a bit of imagination it
sounds a bit like an analog film projectior. A human life has
expired. Ekjon Kobir Mrityu becomes now what remains of a
human identity. First of all we see the devices who conserve the
collective memory, TV-cameras, audio tapes and the printing press.
The dialogues by the acteurs which remain invisble are dealing from
personal dialogues between the members of the family, interviews with
his colleagues or contemporaries, editors and journalists are
providing special features for TV and newspaper. Sometimes we hear
dialogues from a phone conversation. If a dialogue takes place in a
newspaper editorial office or in a TV-studio we see only fragments of
persons. They remain totally anonymous. These dialogues from the off
are providing the film with a kind of narration which will never be
illustrated through images. This is exactly what Abu Sayeed´s film
has to do with Duras`Aurelia Steiner-films and her Les
Mains Negatives.
The heart of the film is
an extremely long car ride on a street which is literally cut through
the concrete and datable landscape of Bangladesh – but also through
the whole film. There are traffic jams. Several construction places
are visible. It is a journey through a disgraced and polluted
landscape. When these car travels remind me in Straub/Huillet´s
Geschichtsunterricht than because they are pure traces of
reality which happens outside the limited frame and which remain
equal to the element of fictive narration. In Straub Huillet´s film
it was the real Rome of the 1970s and in Abu Sayeed´s film it is the
presence the real landscape of Bangladesh. And it is exactly the
collision of reality and fiction which gives this film a nearly
dreamlike quality. The more prosaic the film becomes the more it
inspired my imagination.
Ekjon Kobir Mrityu
is a poetic film essay which works on several levels. First of all it
tells about the point when a private life has expired and migrates
first to the memories of the loved ones and later to the more complex
collective memory of a society. As the organic and the spiritual life
of the poet has lapsed, the film tells more and more about the
remains. It is a little truck which has to transport the corps a long
way. The printing press refers not only to the newspapers but as well
to the printed words of the poet which remain like crystallized
traces of his life. How his family deals with the loss and how the
representatives of public life deals with a collective memory, the
film is always looking for the relationship between the material and
spiritual aspect of human lives. As film is, like Godard once said,
“always a documentary about the visible things in the world”, Abu
Sayeed´s Ekjon Kobir Mrityu is such a “documentary about
the visible things” but it detects the traces of a fleeting human
life and it´s poetry. At the end a poem of the dead poet is
recited and it is about the beauty of stars. As stars are often
subject of poetry they are also evident as the fusion reactor where
all the elements arise we are finally made of. Abu Sayeed´s
admirable film is as well a wise and exciting essay on cinema, it´s
material but also it´s poetic and spiritual aspects.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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