Raoul Peck's poetic reality

American Visions, June-July, 1996 by Joanne Harris

The little girl sitting near the fire Throws ashes at her mothers ass Throws ashes at her mothers ass

Chanted by Sarah, the defiant 8-year-old protagonist of Raoul Peck's new film, Man by the Shore (1996), these lines from a vodou society prayer underscore the (dis)order imposed on Haiti during the reign of, "Papa Doc" Duvalier and the tontons macoutes in the 1960s. Sarah is struggling to make sense of events that have disoriented her life, events that have scared her and torn her family apart. Her father, a discredited army officer, and her mother have fled their rural hometown, entrusting Sarah and her two sisters to their grandmother.

As she narrates the story 30 years later, Sarah shares with us her memories of birthday parties and bicycle rides on one hand and police beatings and invasions of privacy on the other, Several times in the film, the young girl exhibits her frustration with events by refusing to remain boxed into the image of the child as pure and never rude. "Throws ashes at her mother's ass," she says again, this time in her grandmother's presence.

"Man by the Shore is about violence; it's about humanness, how we treat each other and how we resist cruelty," says Peck, the film's writer-director, who now doubles as Haiti's new Minister of Culture. "Using 'classical' credible and real characters as a starting point, I employed stylistic elements in the film to introduce a level of interpretation which is slightly 'out of sync' or even abstract. It's this dismantling of reality which allows us to identify ourselves via the figure of Sarah."

In this, his third feature-length film, Peck tackles a history that has been told and retold in so many different dimensions and from so many perspectives that it has tended to disappear somewhere in the exposition. Haiti-the "Black France," the "African Antilles," a country of politics and vodou-lends itself to such confusion. But in Man by the Shore, Peck doesn't so much pick apart the distorted images of his country; he offers his own vision by piecing together arresting fragments of life.

"Man by the Shore came from friends who told me stories, things that I've read in the papers and my own experience in Haiti. At some point, I started writing this one story of a young guy, and that story evolved into the story of Sarah because one of the people close to me told me her own story. So I can say that almost everything in this film is real somehow.

"When this film was to be shot, after the election of President Aristide, it was really a time of great hope in Haiti. It was a time when we thought: 'Well, it's over. We will never have that kind of dictatorship anymore.' We were wrong. And the film that was supposed to be a historical piece about a dark period in our society became actuality again."

Even though oppression is a part of Haiti's everyday reality, Peck knows full well that it is a universal phenomenon. "'Macoutism' isn't any different from any other form of dictatorship or apartheid," he says. "Because you have done two or three or four films coming from the same territory, you tend to get a stamp on your forehead saying Haitian filmmaker.' But if you really know my work, you can see very quickly that it's not just about Haiti. It's wider than that. It's also about you-no matter where you are. The character of Sarah becomes very close to you, whoever you are."

Peck's nonnaturalist approach - his assemblage of poetry, legend and narrative as well as varying moods and techniques to tell a story-underscore his commitment to what he calls "the poetic aspect of reality." It also allows him to universalize his themes. Peck himself is something of a universal man. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, he left for Zaire with his family at age 8 because his father, who had been arrested twice, had a contract to teach there. Peck finished high school in France, studied industrial engineering in Germany and visited the United States. He then returned to Germany for film school. This was the start of a career that has won him wide recognition-particularly for Haitian Corner (1988) and Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1991) - and acceptance in the competition at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1993.

Despite his new bureaucratic duties, Peck's concerns continue to be driven by the art of film. "For me, the greatest challenge as an artist and a filmmaker is to get the emotions of people, and not emotion in a typical Hollywood way of making you cry or making you laugh. No. What I mean is making you laugh and think and making you cry and think, which is a very difficult challenge nowadays."