Review: Notturno Is a Powerfully Experiential Look at a Land Riven by War

The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.

Notturno
Photo: Super LTD

The common understanding of documentaries is that they’re intended to inform in particular ways: candid footage often complemented by explanatory text and graphics, testimony of witnesses and experts who frame and flesh out the events in question, contemplative pans across archival evidence, and, in the age of reality TV, extended interviews with the subjects themselves in close-up, providing a kind of running interior monologue. (If you’re Errol Morris, you can also get away with a few artistically staged reenactments.) The whole is supposed to add up to—if not a comprehensive view of a particular issue or event—an engaging story that provokes viewers to form a relatively educated opinion on a topic, like whether or not an eccentric big-cat enthusiast fed her husband to a bunch of tigers.

Gianfranco Rosi’s documentaries, though they take on topics of great socio-political import, eschew virtually all of these conventions and thus demand a different kind of engagement—one rooted in empathy for the experiences of his essentially anonymous human subjects. Like Fire at Sea, the director’s Golden Bear-winning film about the European migrant crisis, Notturno opens with a brief text providing a barebones explanation of where and when Rosi and his crew gathered their footage—in this case, over the course of three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon. From that point, though, Notturno is composed of singular vignettes of life in the center of this contested zone, sans contextualizing information, with Rosi’s only commentary embedded in the film’s very structure.

The film weaves the experiences of geographically dispersed people impacted by the conflicts in the Middle East, namely the war against ISIS. The subjects that Notturno returns to include: a pair of lovers in a nameless city whose rooftop hookah date is interrupted by the sound of distant machine-gun fire; an adolescent boy named Ali (one of few names we hear in the film) who provides for his family by acting as a spotter for local hunters and hunting field mice with a BB gun; a Kurdish platoon of female soldiers whose R&R hours are spent watching footage of the war they’re fighting in; heartrending therapy sessions for children whose villages were devastated by ISIS; and a man who silently canoes through a swamp on an obscure journey, against the almost theatrical backdrop of the setting sun and burning oil wells.

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Notturno alludes to the global context of these lives through an imposing image of armored American military vehicles, decked out with oversized stars and stripes like porches in a suburban town, standing guard on a desolate highway—which contrasts implicitly with earlier images of the Kurdish forces’ run-down Humvees. The film also opens with a sequence in which a group of women visit the abandoned prison where, as they express in anguished prayers, their sons were held and tortured by Turkish forces. Rather than giving us a clearly delineated “map” of events from a top-down perspective, Notturno invites viewers to assemble their own understanding from the ground-level footage it assembles.

That’s not to say there’s no perspective here. For example, it’s made clear that, from the ground level shared by filmmakers and subjects, there are no good guys in the conflicts that have been raging in the region for nearly two—or, arguably, 15—decades. Rosi nests a kind of amateur Greek chorus within the film to color our interpretations of the images that come before and after. We return repeatedly to segments from rehearsals for a play to be put on by the residents of a psychiatric home, which appears to deal in epic Brechtian monologues with the history of colonization, tyranny, and sectarianism that has torn the Levant apart. “May my homeland have a God too” goes the plaintive refrain recited by the ragtag group of actors, a slightly obscure but affecting plea from a region that fears it’s been abandoned by God.

If documentary approaches that offer an explicit overview of a particular issue or event implicitly speak in the past tense, Rosi’s refusal to firmly place these captured segments of life within an explicit broader framework might be seen as an effort to keep his images resolutely in the present. The unpredictable power outages and food shortages in major cities, the unsettling presence of foreign armies, the mental and physical suffering of children whose families and neighbors have been slaughtered by ISIS—the dreadful beauty of Notturno’s experiential approach to cinema emphasizes that these aren’t impersonal events on a timeline, but the current life as lived by millions in the Near East.

Score: 
 Director: Gianfranco Rosi  Distributor: Super LTD  Running Time: 100 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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