Spectres is a film that focuses on the researches of Sir Jacques Brasinne de la Buissière on the decolonialization process of the Belgian Congo, in particular on the conditions of the execution of the Congolese leader Patrick Lumumba in 1961. The description of facts and events gives way to a somber narrative, in which the rigidness of formats such as documentary and fiction crumble apart. Using Bach’s intense Johannes Passion as a soundtrack, Spectres is a lively portrait of a man facing his own past and beliefs.

Considering its circumstances and stakes, Patrice Lumumba’s assassination on January 17th 1961 represents a stumbling block all the more striking in colonial history – the most direct foundation of our contemporary archeology – in that it remains essentially non-elucidated. A handful of films, few in definitive, those of Raoul Peck for example, both fiction and documentary have spoken out about the tortuous and criminal crushing of this burgeoning independence. They are already classics, quite instructive and convincing. With Spectres, Sven Augustijnen in no way pretends to repeat or even begin to come close to them. His position is elsewhere. For him, it is a matter of questioning the effect this affair still has on Belgium, today, particularly on himself and some Belgian actors. His gesture isn’t so much about attempting to once again shed light, but rather to delve further into darkness, even if this implies losing himself completely. In these respects, the title is explicit. Neither an inquest, despite the fact the film may appear so at times, albeit disjointed. Nor a trial a posteriori: no evidence is actually presented, no guilty person clearly placed on the accused dock.

Letting oneself be guided, is indeed Spectres’ key motive. As scandalous or naïve as it may seem. Likewise, this isn’t new in Sven Augustijnen’s films who made Le Guide du Parc in 2001. Here one discovers Brussels’ Parc Royal, in the wake of a truly long-winded expert. But this very local scientific scholar was facing the camera, directly addressing the director. In Spectres, on the other hand, it’s more appropriate to say the camera is lagging. Admittedly, once again behind a connoisseur, the Knight Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière, in the sense that, previously being himself heavily involved alongside Belgian authorities, elements of the file and the chronology of events, like details concerning their protagonists, are more than familiar to him. But this time the guide isn’t so camera-minded, except on rare occasions (when, not without pride, he opens up a cupboard full of his archives), rather he drags it, nearly forcing it along in a succession of visits, conversations, ceremonies, almost expeditions, all chiefly concerning him. We can easily agree this attitude of passivity, this quasi-servility of the camera, near feverish submission of these dogs opening the film, could surprise, even shock. For finally, it is the all-holy dogma of documentary “viewpoint” which finds itself dangerously heckled here. And indeed, Sven Augustijnen refuses to intervene, he refuses to know in place of witnesses, he denies himself the right to be, even one little step ahead of words exchanged and gestures produced. As a result, neither irony, nor overhang: no “mastery.” Faced with the specters’ force, he won’t substitute any of his own, hypothetical force of “director” or “producer” he finds himself precisely stripped of.

The result then? A big whatever? Confusion? In truth Spectres generously welcomes chaos. That of a camera held, clearly unaware, a dog sniffing after so many clues, overwhelmed. Between full-length portrait of an aristocratic family, glasses in hand, and their domain’s park planted with the nation’s flag, how to depict them (without cheating), if not, of course, by bringing them together albeit slightly dazed, in the same shot? Such scenes are the standard when cut during filming or editing, producing postures that anticipate much too much measured knowledge, severing, something Augustijnen refuses, preferring to let spectral amplitude happen in long takes, swelling to the point of eventually permeating the whole shot, to clearly, colonize once again the totality of space. And for example through terrifying because endless pictures, (how do we obtain sequences without end, if not by this interminable, this hellish infinity, already resonating in the shot’s first measure?), the encounter with Tshombé’s eldest daughter at her father’s tomb in the Etterbeek cemetery in Belgium, then, later, another encounter, icy with presumptuousness, of stolen familiarity, with Lumumba’s widow and his children in their home in the Congo. Plus there is a long familial thread, very explicitly knotted to patiently unwind in the film (the wives’ place, notably), perhaps linking back to the paternalistic posture at the core of King Baudouin the 1st’s famous discourse on June 30th 1960.

To make the story short, Spectres proposes a wholly original documentary dramaturgy (i.e., in this case and as always, a legal dramaturgy). Let’s try to recapitulate. On one side, a well-informed, involved guide, that is to say, both credible and questionable, guilty and blamed,haunted, ceaselessly in movement: unquiet. Ideal guide, given the fact he has definite knowledge in hand, but whose enjoyment is new to him; he’s hoping to complete it, even mask it. He doesn’t just move, blasé, along a fastidious and marked path, instead he trots because each point on the map remains there for him to explore, verify and pass through again. About the other, consenting victim, if you will, of this unaccustomed trepidation in the documentary system, the camera. It is obviously neither emancipated from the guide nor his accomplice, manifestly too dependant to permit such a connivance. To say it again another way, Sven Augustijnen’s camera (he himself operating it) in no way superimposes itself upon its guide, divested of autonomy, it will never even find itself in a position to join in. Just following its movements is enough to convince oneself: in regards, it’s constant camera shake, dictated by effects of suction and attraction. A constraint shaped by approximations, incapable of finding a space other than the guide’s friendly authoritarian gesticulations, but sovereign acquiescence nowhere to be found.

Therefore, about a question asked in an interview on the omnipresence of subjective camera, Augustijnen replies: “I see the film as a performative work, meaning it’s a matter of setting up situations articulating themselves like choreographies in which I am one of the characters who moves.” Likewise, we know that this word choreography is not an easy metaphor coming from him: he made the film alongside Alain Platel’s (Iets op Bach, A Little something set to Bach, 1998) company Les Ballets C. de la B.. But what type of dance does he refer to here, one joining up dancers so completely they are implicated in like movement, one stripping them of removal, one preventing them from loosing fondness for each other? Tradition is known therein, going back a long way, it’s the Dance of Death.Spectres is a dance of death when each subjugated protagonist waltzes with specters.

By the same token, and this is extremely important, Augustijnen never infringes on the specter’s territory, never will he put himself in their place, not even to speak or make judgments in their stead, since he, like all the other characters in his film, is their partner, their captive: their beholden.

Such a gesture allows identification of two crucial points. The first being that, as the title unequivocally emphasizes, there are definitely several specters: not only more than one but heterogeneous as well. Their common dread doesn’t invalidate their differences, and doubtless the specters goading the Knight on his quest are not those who incited Augustijnen to initiate his film – if only, unlike the Knight, and this difference is major, he could boast of having clairvoyance. In fact, this difference is precisely the film’s main issue, something creating a disturbance, undecidable shift, prohibiting arrogance or inadequacy of “viewpoint”. For it isn’t a matter of ambiguity (ambiguity is always questionable, of never being wholly ambiguous in fact), but taking dissymmetry further in its momentum, in its motives. The guide starts out with knowledge, a cause, diving into the unknown of its effects and trying, not without struggle to still them. Augustijnen begins with an inflicted effect, a suffering of unknown cause, to climb back towards it. Nonetheless, both guide and guided find themselves intersecting today. Spectres points to this crossroads, this disordered ballet, because violent and fierce willingness, for one and the other protagonists, to untie this knot as quickly as possible, despite the disparity of their situation regarding it.

This is hushed, but sensitive: if the filmmaker has chosen to so cheerfully fall into the trap set, it wasn’t to revel in succumbing – what a preposterous idea otherwise, but rather because he was betting, with blindforce (and blindness is the other name of this chronicle style, pathetic in a sense, of nose to the ground dictating his way in the film), that something, of which he wouldn’t even be the author, would float to the surface: that the spectral effect would cease to surge forth, massive, compact, indivisible thus invisible, even so, little by little, perhaps, it would come along and present itself as differentiated, manifest, tangible, discretely dissolved as crushing effect falling back on the ground of its causes. Such is one of the jobs of film, attempting to distinguish, without necessarily (being capable of) commenting at the same time.

Second point: rare occurrence, free rein given to the specter among specters, that of martyrs, that of Patrice Lumumba. Which free rein? The one sought for him, obviously, the one that has been methodically, savagely withdrawn. And this repeated ending when Brassinne shouts out, lost in the night on the African savanna illuminated by his car lights, sufficiently indicating the literally panic-stricken fantastic nature of his quest. It is indeed a cadaver, even dismembered, magnetizing him, it is indeed a martyr of History whose menacing wandering he must attempt to exorcize. But precisely concerning, like a character from Conrad, the Knight: allotting a tomb, finally, ultimate official resting place like Tshombé’s, for his own nightmares.

As for Augustijnen’s film, and beginning with its first slice, a whole other urgency dictates. For it’s the place of the placeless, and leaving it as such from now on, thus on one hand, camera’s refusal on its end to come up with one, intact, including in the name of homage, fidelity, etc. Without place then, but not, on another hand, without voice. And this paradoxical place, un-situated, unassigned (we’ll see no image of Lumumba, other than his portrait on the cover of Brassine’s books or framed on the wall) and yet resounding, noisy, voice still reaching us, won’t only be emphasized by the recorded discourse of the declaration of independence dated June 1960. That would mean running the risk of merely exhuming an “archive specter”, belonging, despite it all, to the conquerors of the Knight and his murdering colleagues. And at his home, sitting on his sofa once again listening to this famous muffled and distant harangue, the fierce vigor of his answer to the king is heard. Augustijnen didn’t choose to give this vacant place, and so immense echo chamber, to the music, but rather, more modestly, more exactly, let the music reveal it. That is why Jean-Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion, interpreted in La Petite Bande’s magnificent version conducted by Sigiswald Kuijken surfaces intermittently in Spectres. But, as one couldn’t help remarking since its outburst is so heartrending, it’s never “film music”.

On the contrary, Bach’s partition imposes itself all alone. It comes to us superimposed, adding to the general chaos; it is threat of an untimely voice weighing down everything delivered by the Knight’s hand. Obviously all the more troubling is that this music has nothing to do with Lumumba, outside imagining him too hastily, in allegorical mode (the narrative of a passion). Worse, for Sven Augustijnen it evokes encrypted elements of exchanges between secret services of the time. And so we must look for the source of its strength elsewhere, and where else otherwise, precisely, than in this shift? For finally, this oratorio first pierces at the end of a visit to the Aspremont Lynden’s, a family which all indications point to a priori as legitimate depository for this sacred music, akin in this sense to notes heard in the Belgian cathedral during the royal commemoration. Whereas this music is in no way satisfied with being heard as “musical moment”, even in the “meditative” genre, or prisoner (for example) of a tradition that a cast or a continent would appropriate. On the contrary, it concretely crushes what has been said, suddenly dismissed by a decision of inaudible mixing. Even more outrageous, it topples all the sentences pronounced, nullifying them with an extensive cry which nonetheless dies down repeated in chorus: “Lord, our Master”. It pierces our eardrums, brutal way of reminding them of another listening, other scansions, other tones.

Here’s an oratorio from 1724 Brecht gave as an example of what he called a “musical gesture”, that Flemish Baroque interpretation lets resound here in all its theatrical exuberance, all its restrained vehemence on the edge, barely, of the most devastating kind of tumult, here then this music refusing to belong to the film. Challenging, in short, the “documentary project” heard as profitable accumulation of disparate elements. In fact it very noticeably digs out a gap. Where nothing evoked in the film will manage to fit in. Not even its allegorical vocation (for example: Lumumba’s cry, or the narrative of his passion), if not, secondarily, eventually, and in a mode of most flagrant inadequacy. To say this music is outside the film signifies that it adopts no function of reconciliation, neither between present and past, nor between horror and art, therefore, nor even the film with itself. To the contrary it is an added breach, forsaken, exhibited and excessive.

Here again unheard of: if blindness seemed a necessary demand, by default, we tried to point it out, in order to see and record the guide’s visits, “something” nevertheless, in the film rebels against this native weakness, against this approved fatalism. Another specter rises up against a specter – specter of specter. Against closed eyes (and hearing, deaf in its manner, helping it to obey the Master’s directives) opens up another listening, but which won’t know how to deliver, obviously delivering nothing in terms of information, but nothing to redeem either; in a sense, it’s mute music. Pure rebellion, but also, let’s insist –, pure theatrical insurrection. If Bach’s oratorio slips away from the film, it thus takes off by itself, detached from its constrained attachment, because arbitrarily displaying itself, “cheeky”, like a desperate gesture, useless, excessive: declamatory. Staggering confession, after one, already impressive, of constitutive weakness: one that strength held back and suddenly activated here, be nothing but pure – gesture.

Against the vicious and knotted circle of the death dance and its cannonballs made of melted bronze statues, stands the song of a tradition that this song betrays straight away, to resuscitate, not the dead, but the painful streak of disaccord, the sensitive frontier of a stifled call.

*Translation by Holly Dye

Credits

Produced by Auguste Orts, co-produced by Projections, Cobra Films and Jan Mot