Director: Caroline Aydee Bergmann
Running time: 20mins
Critically evaluating any film is a subjective process, guaranteed to hinge at some point on an individual’s preferences, or application of key definitions. Speaking about experimental films is even harder – because you are faced with the extremely personal call of whether something was or wasn’t intended experimentally. After all, some filmmakers absolutely do use the tag to excuse shoddy, unimaginative, or crass work – mistaking it as a great get-out-of-jail-free argument.
“Oh, you thought every technical aspect of my work was bad? No, it’s just experimental… clearly you didn’t get it.”
And of course, there is technically something to that argument. You can’t prescribe something as ‘not experimental enough’ when you are only ever guessing as to the film they hoped to make. But while it might be easy to shrug “well, who’s really to say what is or isn’t ‘experimental’?”; part of my remit is to select a showcase event in September screening Indy Film Library’s best films in this genre. So, at some point, I can’t get away with being so non-committal…
In the first few minutes of Caroline Aydee Bergmann’s experimental documentary Assembling Paradise, you might argue that the use of the e-word is a little cynical here. Initially, this is reminiscent of a montage of someone’s holiday photography – experimenting only in how long it can get away with lingering on each image. Often, it feels it has come down on the side of ‘far too long’.
Mercifully, though, if you can retain your patience beyond the initial grating imagery of tranquil palms and immaculate hotel facilities, and Bergmann begins to build a wordless picture that still has plenty to say. Speaking to its hyphenated intent to deliver a documentary – a format where audiences often expect a subject matter to be chewed up and regurgitated into their mouths – experimentally, that is much more daring that the initial clips of this serene (sterile) resort suggest.
Taking place in a holiday villa in Ubud, Bali, the achingly slow cinematography cycles round every inch of the locale in painstaking detail. And the picture that eventually emerges is of a ‘reality’ in silent decline; an ideology thought to be the end of history, quietly circling the drain. You might argue I am reading too much into the focus on this holiday retreat. Experimental films often present liminal spaces for audiences to meditate and reflect on whatever is bothering – and this is just a clean, well-maintained space for someone to come and collect their thoughts in peace. But the thing is, so is a graveyard.
In this particular resort, we find ourselves among a host of what might be described as cultural tombstones. Constructed by civilisations as a monument to supposedly unchallengeable, unshakable ruling elites, they now stand as memorials to the hubris which led each to fall in their own time.
In this space, statues still stand from the pre-colonial period of Indonesian history – while ornate pillars harking back to that era still stand tall at the foot of the villa. Inside the house, the signifiers of what came next adorn every wall – with European imperialism represented by a library stacked with Dutch-language tomes on World War II, Winston Churchill. But these also stand as historical curiosities too now – hinted to by a magazine issued to soldiers from the Netherlands during their murderous (and unsuccessful) attempt to retain control of the country.
Then there is the modern day – not necessarily one free from imperialism, but one where it is packaged differently. Old orders have fallen, but hierarchical living remains intact – re-enforced now with economics rather than direct coercion. The villa is technically part of an independent Indonesia, then, but the only local with access is the one we see cleaning it for the next (probably white, probably American) high-roller who decides to winter there.
Why would I assume that is the identity of most of the customers passing through? It might have something to do with how the villa is made up to accommodate their stay – not with beds in the already luxurious building. But with beds abord a refurbished private jet parked in the yard – emblazoned with ‘MILTON FRIEDMAN’ along the side, and complete with a hideous portrait of that self-assured grifter sprayed onto the tail. Inside, there is also a desk, clearly made up for business (or at least, for a monied pretender to larp scenes from Glengarry Glen Ross), with a smaller model of the same plane on it. This time, the lauded hero of capital sprayed onto the side is WARREN BUFFET.
It is infuriating in many senses, to see how in this supposedly post-colonial society, the people involved still live their lives beholden to the whims of tasteless ghouls from Europe or North America – while having the ‘free will’ not to is completely negated by the abject poverty that freedom would see them subjected to. For more than three decades, people have heralded this new-old-hierarchy – and global capitalism’s victory – as the ‘End of History’, and even considering that they might be right is deeply sad.
There is a great punchline, though, which I feel Assembling Paradise does its best work playing up. All the time, Bergmann’s cinematography has placed this venue, and its iconography, in the heart of dense vegetation. Again, on the surface, early on in the film, it might simply feel like this is a picturesque backdrop that you would instinctively use as the backdrop for your vacation photography. But as time goes by, the looming forest encroaching on the lawn tells a different story. The ideological reality the latest incarnation of the villa extolls is no more permanent than either of its previous identities. Indeed, trees, vines, moss and flowers are already creeping toward the tail of that hideous aeroplane – while the paint from Friedman’s face slowly fades and flakes away.
History hasn’t ended. And in the end, this house and the forest will simply envelop yet another tombstone, for a past that billed itself as endless.
Assembling Paradise has the potential to try the nerves of many audiences thanks to its slow start, and largely unspoken messaging. But for viewers with the patience of the forest, it offers up a creative visual essay on the impermanence of ruling class hegemony – whether dominant ideology casts itself in stone, or in iron.
