counter-directive

Denis Villeneuve's 2010 Incendies opens with a shot of desert shrub, the hillside of an anonymous land and moves back and within, inside the window of the building. This first gesture of framing, of moving away, has the effect of calibrating, as it were, the sense of movement that is also eclipsed. In this opening scene, the camera turns to the young boys waiting and being prepared in a blank building, an otherwise empty room. There is an obvious contrast between the serene and unoccupied hillside and the latent violence involved in preparing these young boys to fight--slowly, details are registered: small bare feet, large combat boots, worn and textured fabrics, the buzz of the razor, wisps of conversation between the boys. The smallest detail, then, reflects this desire to efface, to be effaced, to move away, as one that works against (or in a counter-direction to) the film's forward-spiraling Oedipal story, which in the end casts as tragedy all those moments that are nonetheless registered as atrocity. As Georgio Agamben notes, following Hegel, the question of shame involves a tragic understanding of the relationship between guilt and innocence that results in the "guilty-innocent person," or the figure of "innocent guilt" (Remnants of Auschwitz 96). Agamben continues: "What is tragic is, on the contrary, for an apparently innocent subject to assume unconditionally objective guilt. Thus in Oedipus Rex..." Agamben includes as a part of this logic "recourse to Befehlnotstand" at Nuremberg, not only as a matter of escaping condemnation but also of making their "situation appear in terms of a tragic conflict" (97). What the counter-directives perform in Incendies is a certain refusal of this tragic momentum, one which registers the impossibility of occupying these moments exactly by allowing the viewer this moment of interiority. From this perspective, what is feels impossible to withstand (or uphold) is something like the space between the aesthetic and atrocity. Nihad and Abou Takar are like the two figures of the survivor that are for Agamben one: "It is as if the symmetrical gestures of the two opposite figures of the survivor--the one who cannot feel guilty for his own survival and the one who claims innocence in having survived--betrayed a secret solidarity. They are the two faces of the living being's incapacity truly to separate innocence and guilt--that is, somehow to master its own shame" (94). Sandy cliffs release Nawal from prison; it is not shame, but the impossible injustice of guilt which presides.

picture: Lubna Azabal, Incendies