Ouvertures (The Living and the Dead Ensemble, 2019) (Patreon)

The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose play Monsieur Toussaint forms the core of this film, wrote of the "right to opacity." In his theoretical work Poetics of Relation, Glissant explained that a subaltern aesthetics needed to claim for itself a space of incomprehensibility, untranslatability, or radical unfamiliarity to the outsider. This strategy could be not only subversive, but a means for subaltern subjects to communicate with one another without the prying eyes of the colonizer. For his or her part, the colonizing subject would experience the presumably unfamiliar experience of exclusion, as an aesthetic and philosophical problem. 

This is one way that I personally engaged with Ouvertures, a complicated and unruly film that explores the legacy of Haitian history, the colonial legacy, and the fragmented transmission of cultural meaning from one generation to the next. This film doesn't give an inch. It throws the viewer into the deep end, as we begin with a long, nearly silent mountain trek, the meaning of which only becomes apparent much later in the film. 

Later, we see the members of the Ensemble grappling with the text of Glissant's play, both materially -- translating passages from French to Creole -- and ideologically, as a couple of the performers articulate their frustration that the official history of the Haitian Revolution ignores the contributions of women. We observe rehearsals, blocking, direction, and then suddenly, the performance, but only about two minutes of it.

As this all should make quite clear, Ouvertures is overwhelmingly concerned with process, not product. And this continues throughout its unexpected conclusion, when it seems that the production of Glissant's play has conjured up ghosts from Haiti's past, and even resulted in two members of the Ensemble being possessed by Vodou spirits. The group decides they must take a remedy -- all of them -- to resolve this matter, which itself reveals divisions in the group. Some members align themselves more with Western medicine; others favor individualism over collective identity.

What is impressive about Ouvertures is the extent to which I, as a viewer, learned so much from what I did not understand, not only about the particulars of Haitian history, but about how to watch the film in the first place. Viewers more well-versed in the film's historical references and folkloric discourses will of course have many more access points than I did, which is precisely the point. The title, a pun on Louverture's name, also points to the Ensemble's aesthetic. Ouvertures is a continuing set of introductions -- the film keeps reinventing itself -- and it is also an opening, an offer.