Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi, 2020) (Patreon)

One of the most critically lauded documentary filmmakers of the moment, Gianfranco Rosi seems to define his films by geographical location rather than population or community. Granted, if you choose to limit your purview to a specific locale, you are likely to end up with a cross-section of a particular community as well. But Rosi's method is curiously dialectical. It adopts a formalist organizational principle, which in theory should produce films that avoid the traps of liberal humanism. But a lot of the time, the films circle back around to humanist sentiment anyway.

Notturno is the fourth of Rosi's films I've seen. Sacro GRA considered the residents who lived inside a major Roman ring road, and Fire at Sea compared the plight of African and Syrian refugees arriving on the island of Lampedusa with the lives of the island's Italian citizens. (The earlier film, El Sicario, Room 164, is a bit of an outlier, given that it is an extended interview with one man, a killer for a Mexican drug cartel.) Following the rule but expanding it conceptually, Notturno is filmed along the borders of various countries that are or have been fighting against domination by Daesh.

This is probably Rosi's most accomplished film, for a number of reasons. For one thing, he has taken the concept of the border and used it as a thoroughgoing aesthetic dominant. While we see lots of people in liminal or otherwise in-between spaces -- barracks, waiting to go somewhere else, for example, or stationed behind guns and searching the horizon for a distant enemy. But more than this, a great deal of Notturno, as the title suggests, is shot in twilight or later. Rosi utilizes small windows or other portals to cut through the enveloping darkness and allow us to see the edges of people's faces and bodies. With its frequent use of unidirectional, painterly light, Notturno shows a definite influence of Pedro Costa, which is gratifying to see in a fully-fledged documentary context.

But as you might expect, Notturno is not an exercise in aestheticism. As with Rosi's previous films, the structure is a way to meet certain people and hear portions of their stories. Eventually, a mosaic forms that demonstrates a grinding sameness to the plight of these victims of war, even as they retain the specificity of their individual histories. This is what separates Rosi from other nonfiction filmmakers whose work his superficially resembles. For me, the most pertinent affinity is with Austria's Nikolaus Geyrhalter. But where Geyrhalter is much more concerned with global systems and structures, Rosi employs those elements in order to temper the horror that Notturno clearly wishes to elicit. 

The sequence in Notturno that stands out, both as most memorable and as formally at odds with the rest of the film, is an extended passage in which a teacher / counselor is meeting with Yazidi children in a classroom. Now safely away from the horrors of Daesh, they are nevertheless struggling to process what they have experienced. They speak haltingly about having been beaten, tortured, of watching ISIS soldiers beheading adults and cutting off their limbs right in from of them. And we see the crayon and marker drawings the children have produced of these atrocities by way of art therapy, hanging on the wall like they were Thanksgiving turkey tracings.

This portion of the film is bracingly straightforward; you could imagine it appearing on 20/20 or 60 Minutes with very little alteration. But what is noteworthy about its position in the whole of Notturno is that it serves as an implicit answer to a statement made earlier in the film, one we have heard made hundreds of times before. A survivor claims that for every dead martyr killed by Daesh, there will rise a thousand new future fighters. In this classroom, we are witnessing, in part, the future of the Arab world, and an attempt against all odds to grapple with the rage of these children, to replace it with mourning and, eventually, forgiveness.