Film thoughts: Darwin's Nightmare
Last night I watched Darwin's Nightmare, a 2004 documentary by Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper. The oddly-named documentary (which makes me think it's going to be scientific or involving biology or something like) describes the social and environmental outcomes of the Lake Victoria fishing industry in Tanzania. Nile Perch was introduced to Lake Victoria perhaps 40-50 years ago, and as a non-native predator, it has apparently destroyed the world's second largest lake's eco-system, decimating many other fish species in the lake, which has had the further effect of contributing to the de-oxygenation of the lake, making it less able to sustain further life. In addition to the environmental aspect, the people living on and around Lake Victoria have (according to the film) turned entirely to fishing - only the fish doesn't stay in Tanzania. Far too expensive for the locals (so they starve), the enormous Nile perch is cut down into palatable fillets and flown to Europe. Meanwhile Tanzania (at the time) was experiencing serious famine. The film points out that the lack of better opportunities brings many villagers to the shores of Lake Victoria to work in the fishing industry, and they are often joined by women who work as prostitutes, not just for the locals, but also for the European pilots and crews that fly large cargo planes into Mwanza. The film hints from the beginning that these airplanes must be bringing something to Mwanza, but everyone insists that they arrive empty and leave full of fish. It isn't until later in the film that a Russian pilot finally admits that he carries tanks and guns into Africa and leaves with fish and produce. Mwanza's airport has virtually non-existent security, and (as the air-traffic controller admitted) a large amount of unscheduled flights, so it's a prime location for arms smuggling.
I found the film troubling and provocative from a couple different angles - on the one hand, I understand that the film is trying to point out the extremely exploitative relationship between Tanzania (and by extension, Africa) and Europe in which Europe takes natural resources and provides arms to fuel armed conflicts throughout the continent. The poverty and the desolation is horrifying. The environmental outcomes are horrifying. BUT, I was disturbed by some of the imagery that the filmmaker chose to use throughout the film. One in particular was of Tanzanian men in the fish-packing factory in which a very dark-skinned man stares at the camera while persistently sharpening his knife - this is the kind of image that I think could really feed into any fears and prejudices of the intended European audience. It wasn't the only one, and there were many other disturbing moments - disturbing for various reasons. For example, according to the film, 2 millions Africans eat what Europeans won't - the waste and refuse from the fish factories, the perch carcasses - these stinking, rotting, maggot-infested remains are trucked out to the countryside where they are piled on racks to dry or be smoked or otherwise prepared. Working in one of these squalid outdoor facilities is extremely hazardous - the rotting fish produce toxic gasses that make workers very ill and can cause them to lose their eyes. But the workers are grateful because despite the dangers and risks, they earn a little more than subsistence farming.
One bit that really made me squirm was of Eliza, a Tanzanian prostitute who is awkwardly pulled down into a chair beside one of the Russians in a bar, and she begins to sing a Swahili song whose refrain is "Tanzania, Tanzania." She looks straight at the camera and sings beautifully and expressively, but the Russian man persistently joins her in the chorus, not respectfully, but most likely because he is drunk and it is the only part of the song he can understand. We later learn that Eliza was stabbed to death by an Australian customer.
One of the most heartbreaking moments is of two street children sniffing a bottle of homemade glue made from plastic fish wrappings - it is a mind-numbing drug for them that makes them feel their hunger less.
Needless to say, the government of Tanzania has loudly condemned the film, and understandably so - all of the people and governments surrounding Lake Victoria rely on one cash crop, Nile perch, to sustain them, so a documentary like this one, which tears down what they've struggled to build, and describes a community and way of life in the worst sort of way, is angering and frustrating. It's a horrible situation.
In conclusion, I think the film is worth seeing, but one should also view it with a critical eye. It's not that I doubt it's factual accuracy, but I'm uncomfortable with the way the film portrays Africans and their lives.
August 3, 2005
Feeding Europe, Starving at Home
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: August 3, 2005
"Darwin's Nightmare," Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary, is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane, with its crew of burly Russians and Ukrainians, will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa?
The answers vary. The factory managers say the planes' cavernous holds are empty when they land. One of the Russians, made uncomfortable by the question, mutters something vague about "equipment." Some of his colleagues, and several ordinary Mwanzans, are more forthright: the planes, while they occasionally bring humanitarian food and medical aid, more often bring the weapons that fuel the continent's endless and destructive wars.
In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that "Darwin's Nightmare" presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Some of them will eat fried fish heads, which are processed in vast open-air pits infested with maggots and scavenging birds. Along the shores of the lake, homeless children fight over scraps of food and get high from the fumes of melting plastic-foam containers used to pack the fish. In the encampments where the fishermen live, AIDS is rampant and the afflicted walk back to their villages to die.
The Nile perch itself haunts the film's infernal landscape like a monstrous metaphor. An alien species introduced into Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960's, it has devoured every other kind of fish in the lake, even feeding on its own young as it grows to almost grotesque dimensions, and destroying an ancient and diverse ecosystem. To some, its prevalence is a boon, since the perch provides an exportable resource that has brought development money from the World Bank and the European Union. The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars; the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses; the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute. He is paid $1 a day and found the job after his predecessor was murdered.
Filming with a skeleton crew - basically himself and another camera operator - Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time. Rather than use voice-over or talking-head expert interviews, he allows the dimensions of the story to emerge through one-on-one conversation and acutely observed visual detail.
But "Darwin's Nightmare" is also a work of art. Given the gravity of Mr. Sauper's subject, and the rigorous pessimism of his inquiry, it may seem a bit silly to compliment him for his eye. There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians.
The beauty, though, is not really beside the point; it is an integral part of the movie's ethical vision, which in its tenderness and its angry sense of apocalypse seems to owe less to modern ideologies than to the prophetic rage of William Blake, who glimpsed heaven and hell at an earlier phase of capitalist development. Mr. Sauper's movie is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously. But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/movies/03darw.html?scp=3&sq=darwin%27s%20nightmare&st=cse&pagewanted=print
More reading:
Zanzibar's Missing Fish
Darwin’s Nightmare: to the Tanzanian government the nightmare is the film, not the Nile perch (see on page 2 of .pdf)