I’ve noticed that when people remember Lawrence of Arabia, they don’t talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience and have never quite been able to put it into words. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film—like Bridge on the River Kwai, which Lean made just before it, or Doctor Zhivago, which he made just after—it actually has more in common with such essentially visual epics as Kubrick’s 2001 or Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.
Although it won the Academy Award as the year’s best picture in 1962, Lawrence of Arabia might have been lost if it hadn’t been for the film restorers Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. They discovered the original negative in Columbia’s vaults, inside crushed and rusting film cans, and also about thirty-five minutes of footage that distributors had trimmed from Lean’s final cut. They put it together again, sometimes by one crumbling frame at a time (Harris sent me one of the smashed cans as a demonstration of Hollywood’s carelessness with its heritage).
To see it in a movie theater is to appreciate the subtlety of F. A. (Freddie) Young’s desert cinematography—achieved despite blinding heat and the blowing sand, which worked its way into every camera. Lawrence of Arabia was one of the last films to actually be photographed in 70mm (as opposed to being blown up to 70 from a 35mm negative). There was a hunger within filmmakers like Lean (and Kubrick, Coppola, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, and Stone) to break through the boundaries, to dare a big idea and have the effrontery to impose it on timid studio executives. The word “epic” in recent years has become synonymous with “big-budget B picture.” What you realize watching Lawrence of Arabia is that the word “epic” refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God didn’t cost as much as the catering in Pearl Harbor, but it is an epic, and Pearl Harbor is not.
As for Lawrence, after its glorious re-release in 70mm in 1989, it has returned again to video, where it crouches inside its box like a tall man in a low room. You can view it on video and get an idea of its story and a hint of its majesty, but to get the feeling of Lean’s masterpiece you need to somehow, somewhere, see it in 70mm on a big screen. This experience is on the short list of things that must be done during the lifetime of every lover of film.
Moolaadé
NO MPAA RATING, 124 m., 2007
Fatoumata Coulibaly (Collé Gallo Ardo Sy), Maimouna Hélène Diarra (Hadjatou), Salimata Traoré (Amasatou). Directed by Ousmane Sembene and produced by Sembene and Thierry Lenouvel. Screenplay by Sembene.
Moolaadé is the kind of film that can be made only by a director whose heart is in harmony with his mind. It is a film of politics and anger, and also a film of beauty, humor, and a deep affection for human nature. Usually films about controversial issues are tilted too far toward rage or tear-jerking. Ousmane Sembene, who made this film when he was eighty-one, must have lived enough, suffered enough, and laughed enough to find the wisdom of age. I remember him sitting in the little lobby of the Hotel Splendid in Cannes, puffing contentedly on a Sherlock Holmes pipe that was rather a contrast with his bright, flowing Senegalese garb.
His film is about, and against, the custom of female circumcision, practiced in many Muslim lands (although Islamic law forbids it). Does that make you think you don’t want to see it? Think again. Sembene embodies his subject so deeply with his characters, and especially with his heroine, Collé, that it becomes a story about will, defiance, and ancient custom.
It is never actually too specific about what would be done to the four girls who flee to Collé for moolaadé, or protection. Sembene trusts us to know. He doesn’t exploit blood-drenched horror scenes, and his approach is actually more effective because he limits himself to off-screen cries, or a brief glimpse of the knife used by the village’s doyenne des exciseuses, the woman in charge of circumcisions. The knife is very small, wickedly hooked, hardly seen, and more frightening than a broadsword. Yet we learn that women support the removal of the clitoris because no man will marry a bride who has not been “cut.” The actress Fatoumata Coulibaly, who plays Collé, has said that she herself was circumcised; the result, as with most victims, was an absence of sexual pleasure, and often pain during sex.
Why would a man insist on this mutilation? Perhaps out of deep insecurity and a distrust, even fear, of women. But Moolaadé makes no such sweeping charges, and observes how the women themselves enforce and carry out the practice—because, of course, they want their daughters to find husbands. Collé has refused to let her own daughter be cut, but now the girl is engaged to a man returning home from France. Will Europe have freed him of ancient barbarities, or will he demand a bride who has been cut? Since the village hopes for wealth from the returning man, there is social pressure on Collé. And just at that moment, the girls on the brink of adolescence run weeping to Collé and beg for shelter in the compound she shares with her husband and his other wives.
The Women Do Have Power
Collé evokes moolaadé. She ties a string of yarn across the doorstep of her house, and the law says that as long as the girls stay inside, no one can enter after them. Her husband is enraged. He loses status in the village council because he cannot control his woman, but his number-one wife supports number two, and he is stalemated. One of the themes coiling beneath the surface of the film is that the women in this society have great power, if they are bold enough to exercise it.
Another theme is suspicion of the West, of modernization, of the outside in general. One of the ways groups create their identities is by enforcing costume rules that conceal individuality and impose a monolithic look. Uniforms are a way of saying that those who wear them are interchangeable. One who is obviously an outsider is le mercenaire, the itinerant peddler who visits the village to sell pots and pans, postage stamps, T-shirts, and toys, and to pick up and deliver mail. He has a lively eye for pretty women, suggests secret rendezvous, and in general ignores the code that a woman belongs to a man.
Among the most important items in his stock are batteries, needed for portable radios and flashlights in this district without electricity. The radio stations are in the cities, and broadcast words and music reflecting dangerous freedoms. When the frustrated all-male village council meets to ponder the challenge of Collé and moolaadé, it doesn’t occur to them, of course, that women might have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to be circumcised. They blame the outside. The radios. They order a sweep of the village to confiscate all the radios, which are deposited in a big pile, some of them still turned on. This pile becomes a central image of the film, and inevitably evokes bonfires of hated books, or videos, or rock ’n’ roll, or people.