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| Miroslav Slaboshpitsky's The Tribe, starring Yana Novikova (center), is a modern masterpiece. |
Silence may be among the most terrifying things in our
culture. Because silence implies an absence – of sound, of company, of life –
we take it upon ourselves to fill the void any way we can. In that empty space,
we hear cracks and creaks and groans and moans, and we ascribe to them meaning,
import, and danger. When the TV is off, the lights are out, and we are lying in
bed, there is nothing but the beating of our hearts and the blood in our veins.
The millions of thoughts ringing in our subconscious echo in the nothingness,
and we are scared. But if the only world you know is silence, what is there to
fear? Perhaps, each other.
Ukrainian director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe is among the most formally
daring, visually stunning, and emotionally taxing films you are ever likely to
see. It concerns a student’s arrival at a boarding school for the deaf and
follows as he becomes a member of the school’s ruling gang and the toll that
acceptance takes on him physically and emotionally. The film is told entirely
in Ukrainian sign language without subtitles, and despite running more than two
hours, it is composed of fewer than 40 shots. There is no other experience in
cinema to match.
On Friday, Slaboshpitsky and one of the film’s stars, Yana
Novikova, were in New York City for a screening of the film and a
question-and-answer session moderated by Indiewire’s Eric Kohn. In an
illuminating and vibrant discussion, they covered topics such as the film’s
remarkable technical achievements, its harrowing violence, and the audacity of
making a film that only a small population of people could fully understand.
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| Yana Novikova and Miroslav Slaboshpitsky at Film Forum. |
“To be clear, I had the concept of the film before I had the
story,” said Slaboshpitsky. “It must be done without subtitles and without voiceover.
It must be filmed like how I imagine a silent movie like the Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin films, or Harold Lloyd, which people can understand in every
country in every place in the same condition, so subtitle is impossible … In
the contract, we have an article that the person who buys the film has an
obligation never to add subtitles or voiceover or anything like that, so I hope
we never show this film with subtitles, not before my death but after, too.”
The difference is that even the great silent comedians used
title cards throughout their films to keep the audience following the story. In
this way, The Tribe is closer to the
works of German silent film director F.W. Murnau, who sought to make films
using as few interstitial cards as possible to allow the story to play out on
its own. His success, and by extension the success of The Tribe, is to achieve unimaginable levels of psychological depth
and inquiry in an essentially wordless setting.
Certainly, there are words, and none of the actors – all of
whom are deaf – was making up any of the film’s dialogue. It simply is not
necessary to understand the words in order to understand the intent. Even in
our daily lives, as hearing-able individuals, so much of our interaction with
others is non-verbal – a glance, a gesture, a smile, or a pose – that
understanding communication without words seems to be an innate part of all of
us.
“I have the challenge to make a film without subtitles when
it was over … so I tried to build a story that the audience can follow,” said
Slaboshpitsky. “In case you understand Ukrainian sign language, I think you can
understand maybe 10 percent more, but I don’t think that you miss something
important. In fact, you can completely understand the words, but the words are
not really important.”
As such, what becomes important is the mood and atmosphere
of the film, and Slaboshpitsky proves deft at building on his audience’s
expectations and the general fear and discomfort caused by silences. Since we
in the audience cannot understand what is being said, we feel like outsiders,
but the use of long takes and Steadicam shots forces us to become part of the
action. This puts viewers in the unique position of being accomplices to
actions over which we have no control, similar to the film’s main character,
played by Grigoriy Fesenko.
He is new to this school, but because power attracts like a
magnet, he is lured into the world of drug dealing, robbery, and prostitution
lorded over by the titular tribe. They run the school like a deaf mafia – which
Slaboshpitsky stressed is a real phenomenon in Ukraine – and theirs is a brutal
rule, punctuated by shocking acts of violence and psychological abuse. When
Fesenko’s character falls in love with one of the prostitutes, played by
Novikova, the whole hierarchal structure of the regime is threatened. Thus, the
downfall of all involved begins.
For a first-time performer, Novikova is absolutely
magnificent. Really, the performance is marvelous regardless of experience
level, but as someone who had never previously acted, Novikova brings a remarkable
amount of skill and professionalism to a part that asks an incredible amount of
her. She bares herself completely, body and spirit, and brings us into the life
of a young girl who has resigned herself to the options available to her and
made peace with the things she must do to carve out a life for herself.
“I asked my mom, ‘Do you think I could become an actress in
the future,’ and my mom was like, ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s possible.
You’re deaf. Deaf people in movies? There’s no deaf people in movies,’” said
Novikova through a sign language interpreter. “I felt kind of bad about it. I
went to school, and I was never involved in any acting classes or courses or
opportunities … I kept looking for something that could help me reach my goal
of wanting to be an actress. Then, it just so happens that I was asked to be in
this movie, The Tribe, by Miroslav,
and I was so thankful for it. I was so inspired by the whole thing, and that’s
how I begun, and now I’m going to pursue acting after this.”
Most of the actors in the film are first-timers – according
to Slaboshpitsky, there are more than 300 deaf actors in
The Tribe – but none, not even Fesenko, who is also brilliant in
the film, endured as much as Novikova. One sequence in particular is certain to
become infamous among viewers of the film. An illegal abortion, played out in
one long take, is about as raw and grueling a viewing experience as I have ever
witnessed. In a packed house at the Film Forum, the scene left grown men
sobbing, and at least one person was so overcome he or she had to be removed
from the theater.
Novikova spoke at length about the process of researching
and preparing for the scene, as well as the physically and emotionally draining
experience of shooting the scene. She said there was a medical professional on
set to advise both her and the character performing the procedure, and the shot
was repeated over and over until the full impact and realism of the scene could
be transmitted on film.
“They explained to us how this goes and what’s this and what’s
this process and really broke everything down for us to understand and digest
it,” she said. “Once the director felt like we were comfortable with it and we
understood what was happening, we filmed it. It took all day, and we kept
rehearsing it again and again and again for days, and we kept reshooting it
again. If we made a mistake, we shot it again. Again and again. We had to make
sure it was done in the right way and capture it, capture the true emotions,
the raw, gritty emotions in that moment.”
The sequence – in its preparation, shooting, and final
presentation – is a microcosm of the film itself. Slaboshpitsky took it upon
himself to present a society rarely considered by the rest of the world, and
his responsibility was to show it as it exists. There is no Hollywood sheen, no
artificial drama. It is just reality as experienced by an overlooked and
underserved subculture. In digging into the muck and brutality, Slaboshpitsky
exposes a raw nerve, aching for relief and screaming out in pain. The Tribe is a masterpiece that argues
there is no relief coming, and the screams are simply echoes in a silent void.
I don’t know that I always appreciate my New York
experience as much as I might, and that may be because my idea of going
outdoors is to bury myself in a movie theater for two or three hours at a time.
Every once in a while, though, events conspire to remind me I don’t live in
just any city. I live in New York City. Thanks to Martin Scorsese, the Museum
of Modern Art, and the Film Forum, yesterday was full of those events.
In that vein, the New York Museum of Modern Art is hosting
“Scorsese Collects,” an exhibit of 34 classic film posters from the Scorsese
Poster Collection. The pieces run the gamut from Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s gorgeous The Red Shoes
to John Ford’s The Searchers to
Scorsese’s own Mean Streets. The
beautiful collection is a tribute to an increasingly lost and marginalized art.
In the center of the room, there hangs a 6- or 7-foot
tall poster for Carol Reed’s magnificent The
Third Man, the imagery for which focuses on the stunning climactic foot chase
through the Vienna sewer system. I have seen The Third Man five or six times, though never on the big screen,
and while staring at the film’s promotional art, I remembered the NYC Film
Forum was screening the film through the end of the week. That was all I
needed, and I headed out the door of the museum, caught the train downtown, and
settled in for two hours of one of the greatest mystery movies ever put to
celluloid.
If pressed to name the top 10 films of all time, I
would put The Third Man right there
in the conversation, and its wonder only grows in proportion to the size of the
screen showing it. The stark, Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography
still stuns, the writing is razor sharp, and Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles
provide two of the great screen performances of the sound era. Welles, in
particular, is just luminous, a true movie star, as commanding a presence today
as he was when the film was released in 1949.
