Two Documentaries from Michael Roemer: On Cortile Cascino and Faces of Israel

I had never heard of the Berlin-born and Harvard-trained director Michael Roemer until earlier this year, when I watched a restoration of Dying (1976) at Film Forum. The film, shot over the course of two years and eventually broadcast on PBS’ local Boston affiliate, follows three terminally ill individuals and their families in their final months—ineffable pain and beauty ensue. Of course, I’m merely scratching the surface of a film that deserves its own long-form essay, an essay I one day intend to write and dedicate to my deceased brother (himself a victim of brain cancer). For now, I’ll say this: seldom has such a sincere and empathetic statement on death been inscribed onto celluloid. Roemer himself died earlier this year, in May, at the age of 97. This month, Anthology Film Archives, Jonas Mekas’ gift to New York City, ran a program titled “Michael Roemer, Farewell,” featuring all eight of the director’s films. Naturally, I rewatched Dying, because there’s nothing more liberating than weeping at the cinema. I even convinced an old friend of mine of the film’s importance, both personal and historic, and her tears confirmed this. After rewatching Dying, I thought to myself, if Roemer can make me feel so much, then it is only right that I familiarize myself with the rest of his oeuvre. And if this is a man who can bestow such an empathetic cinematic-eye on the dead and dying, I wanted to see what else Roemer the documentarian was capable of. So, instead of going to see some of his major narrative works, such as Nothing But a Man (1964) or Pilgrim, Farewell (1980), I attended a double-header featuring two of his short documentaries, Cortile Cascino (1962) and Faces of Israel (1966).

Cortile Cascino finds Roemer and collaborator Robert Young documenting daily life in a slum in Palermo, one seemingly abandoned by God, the state, and time itself. The film begins with the sights and sounds of a steam engine making its way past large residential buildings under construction, signs of Europe’s post-war economic boom, from which the eponymous slum is only a tunnel away. In Cortile Cascino, undressed toddlers play in the mud; men, both young and old, all of them unemployed, play cards to pass the time. Life and death come early. The narration is odd, given by an American man, whose classic distant and disciplined late-50s/early-60s narrator’s voice relays the words of 23-year-old Angela Capra, who lives in Cortile Cascino. Her Madonna-like face holds the pain and frustration of someone decades older than her and she is almost always seen holding a child, either hers or a friend’s. This isn’t uncommon in Cortile Cascino. Young’s cinematography focuses on hands and faces, with the hands always busy with some kind of work, and the faces never satisfied; there is an eternal hunger, both physical and spiritual to these faces. As Angela, by way of our American interlocutor, says with the acuity of the existentialists of her time, “Men always find something to pass the time, but they are empty and sad…inside they feel as though they are nothing.” There is an ancient pain here that cannot be named, will not be named, in a slum controlled by the mafia where political parties and organizations only show up to leave crumbs for the people to fight over.

You would think, after reading the above, that Roemer and Young’s film is an exploitative one. However, Cortile Cascino, like Dying, is an empathetic film that lets its subjects speak for themselves, all while the camera, again, aims to be as unintrusive as possible. If Dying made it possible to sit in a hospital with a saintly woman dying of a brain cancer—one she shatteringly describes as growing like moss—Cortile Cascino made it possible to attend a young Palermitano couple’s wedding, and to walk alongside them, as they traverse the dirt road from the church to their home, enjoying the day and eschewing any thought of the difficulties that lay ahead. The emotional apex of Cortile Cascino is when Angela’s young daughter succumbs to a fever. The doctor tells the young mother that the medicine didn’t work because she was malnourished, a line that confirms the slum as operationally Third World. Angela’s response to her daughter’s death is piercing: “She’s better off near God.” Roemer and Young’s camera then gently follows the small coffin as it is driven away from Cortile Cascino to a cemetery—the only way out of here is through death. Shortly thereafter, we’re back on the steam engine, headed back towards modernity, as children we never met, and that we’ll never see again, wave goodbye.

As the title card of Faces of Israel fades in, I scoff. I think I hear someone do the same, but it's more likely that they were clearing their throat.

I specifically went to Anthology for the second-half of this double-feature. If Anthology decided to include Faces of Israel in this program, at a time when we’re watching the entire Gaza Strip become the land of the living dead, and as the Israeli government muses over whether it is going to annex the whole of the Strip, I would imagine this towering cinematic institution would’ve at least done a critical introduction of the film. Instead, we get right into it, with the opening scene of the film featuring an emaciated victim of the Holocaust, as if Roemer is saying, “All that comes henceforth stems from this emaciation.” Seeing as how the next scene is Israeli fighter jets flying over a military parade, just one of several scenes featuring the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), I wonder if Roemer’s usage of Holocaust imagery is an attempt to rationalize the violent society he is documenting. Of course, the more sinister reading is that the establishment of the state of Israel signifies a line of demarcation in Judaism, gone is the old, weak Jew, for now it is the era of the strong Jew, the one who will build Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall.”

Faces of Israel was shot while Roemer was in Israel, doing research for a film on the philosopher Martin Buber. Buber, a renowned existentialist thinker, was also a Zionist. For what it’s worth, and I really can’t fathom a world in which this means anything, he was a Zionist who promoted “dialogue” between Israelis and Palestinians, the colonized and the colonizer, a possibility the grand Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani pierced through when he rejected the idea of a conversation “between the sword and the neck.” Buber’s fallacy is his proposition of Zionism as moral and just, as an ideology one can be in conversation with. It simply isn’t, for the Zionist exists towards two ends: Death and theft. Ergo, Roemer’s film, even if not exclusively about Buber, proposes, through the image, that Israel, this young and vibrant nation, is worthy of dialogue. It isn’t.

Roemer’s film does not even attempt to reflect Buber’s liberal Zionism by displaying one land and two peoples. Instead, Palestinians are presented as an afterthought, as though their entire way of life wasn’t destroyed so as to make way for the parades, prayers, and partying of the settler population. Halfway through the film, it is as though Roemer’s camera remembers that there is an existing indigenous population, as he cuts to Palestinians tilling their land (what little land they retained in the aftermath of the ever-unfolding Nakba) and a small, yet joyful wedding ceremony. The cut away from the Palestinians is jarring, seemingly done out of some unspoken obligation, and now we see IOF paratroopers training. Mind you, the Six Day War, what Palestinians refer to as the Naksa, or setback looms in the not-too-distant future. Within a year, Israel will have occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Roemer’s camera knows this, as he doesn’t want us to get further acquainted with a Palestinian population that is set to face even more depravity at the hands of their occupiers. This isn’t the empathetic Roemer of Cortile Cascino and Dying—this is a coward, a liar, an obfuscator and a propagandist who at times presents the violence underpinning Israeli life as harmlessly quotidian. Because of the emaciated corpse from the opening scene, young attractive Israeli women laugh with one another as they assemble and disassemble automatic weapons. Because of the emaciated corpse, we see the arrival of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish refugees, without seeing the process through which they’ll acquire homes in a land with a people. Because of the emaciated corpse, Roemer and his camera ignore what is right before them: a society whose logical end is the emaciated corpse of a Palestinian. It would appear as though Roemer left his empathetic eye in Italy—what a shame.