|
One of the recurring themes in Latcho Drom is the role of spectators and audience. Early on,m there is an image of a 'dancing' bear, (a mainstay in Russian peasant life and folk stories) which is quite upsetting. The camera gets close enough to show the iron ring piercing the nose of the bear, its muzzle and its pain and confusion as the bearhandler pokes it with a stick and yanks its muzzle-leash. It's a painful close-up, and the audience laughs and cheers and the children shriek delightedly. Here the audience doesn't really comprehend the performer's pain, or even grant the right to suffer as we suffer, and the audience is excited by its proximity. In another scene we peek alongside a young man, as he looks into a building packed with people, a closed society. There is sexuality, and passion and song and dancing, all enclosed, and we are shut out from it. Peeking in through the bars with vicarious and voyeuristic pleasure. Still later, waiting in the cold at train tracks, are the first Northern-European 'characters' in the movie, a blond woman in expensive furs and her little blue-eyed boy. They are silent, and the woman seems sad, cold, dazed. Across the tracks, a whole party of gypsies are building a fire, talking, gesturing. The boy crosses the tracks and holds out a few coins, requesting a song. The camera is from his point of view, looking up at the whole crowd of romany people. The man with the violin laughs, they all laugh, looking down at him, huge and dark, foreign but not unfriendly. The boy is a little ashamed, embarassed, confused. The violinist puts the coins back in the boy's pocket and begins playing, as the rest of the gypsies clap and sing, watching the boy. The little boy dances, clumsily, but with growing enthusiasm. They smile at him. Warming up, he looks across at his mother. Crossing back to her but facing the gypsies, he dances more, stumbling, smiling, and the mother laughs, watching her son. He's watching the gypsies, openmouthed with excitement. A young gypsy man dances across from him, agile and quick. With this last image what's epecially striking is the absence of an adult white male gaze. (All along, spectators are children, a young (north African) man, or other gypsies.) That is too easily the tourist gaze, the exoticising, colonial gaze. to look at with ownership, with too much confidence. Gatlif reveals how privileged people who are also subject, in some ways, to domination, may be more likely to understand what there is to envy in the life of the gypsies. Fellowship is not as common among the dominators, unless you are all the way on the inside. I think many white women and children, for example, often suffer from a certain kind of loneliness and envy (mostly-white suburban punks and hip-hop kids can be seen this way). I do think it's true on some level for all people in privileged position. I'm not excusing poor behavior, but it is one of the ways racism/classism/dominating etc., warps white people/people in power, even in relation to each other. |