In a Foreign Country is a 25 minute film by Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes. The film is loosely based on Presentation of the Face, the 1968 book by Portuguese poet Herberto Hélder. The film begins with a shot of the original document by PIDE, the secret police in Portugal under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, recommending the banning of the book on the grounds of obscenity. (The book remained unavailable until 2020.) This is followed by a map showing every country in the world labelled “foreign country.” Hélder, intimately familiar with the workings of the Salazar regime, would have written the book knowing that it would be banned, and so the suppression of the book forms part of the context of the book and of the film. A person forced to live in exile, as Hélder did for many years, is always in a foreign country, but even for those who stay at home under dictatorship, their own country will seem to be “foreign.”
The mostly silent film consists of a series of discrete images and actions. A house stands alone on a desolate plain in the falling snow. A woman whispers in a man’s ear. He holds her feet in the air. The occasional sounds, of a train or howling wind, complement the images poetically, rather than functioning literally. All of the footage in the film, shot on 16mm, is in grainy negative images, giving a ghostly, supernatural look to the film: black clumps of snow fall on a white building, glowing white hair lies on darker skin. One can also see the negative images as a metaphor for fascist Portugal: a world where everything has been altered to become the opposite of what it seems to be.
Some of the sequences capture the erotic passages of the book, such as one where we see the man floating above the woman, and then see his face, with a demonically possessed expression (made stranger by the whiteness of his pupils in the negative image), rhythmically pulsing down towards us. A sequence of extreme closeups of scars and marks on skin is intercut with closeups of cracks and bullet holes in a wall, a history of violence and suffering. In this story told through images, ideas and feelings alike are starkly physical. When words become illegal, one must express oneself with the body. In a rare moment of spoken dialog, an unseen voice asks the man if he is hungry, tired, cold, afraid? He answers “yes.” If these two lonely, isolated people act strangely, it is because they are trying to cope with extraordinary circumstances.
The couple lies naked in bed, a radio beside them, and we hear the sound of static, drifting between stations, trying to catch voices from outside of their prison/country. The two performers (Adriana Aboim, Gustavo Vicente) do not “act” their characters: they express ideas and feelings as do the figures in sculpture or painting, through positions and uninflected actions, whether sitting on a mattress or cutting a loaf of bread. Their neutral faces give the film a feeling of poetic abstraction, encouraging the viewer to read the sequences as poetic images rather than as events in a story. At the same time, it amplifies the sense of isolation, of repression, which seems to hold everything in their world in a deep freeze. Their tendency to stare intently at each other, no matter what they are doing, implies that they are building an alternative, interior world with one another, as a bulwark against the hostility which surrounds them.
Their nudity, through most of the film, makes them seem vulnerable and open to one another, without being overtly sexual. At the same time, their silent preoccupation with one another implies that their sexual connection is an anchor, keeping them sane under difficult circumstances.
Without directly telling a story, the images usher us into the world of this couple, isolated in a house, surrounded by a cold, inhospitable world where it is always snowing. (The image suggests how an artist might feel, living in exile, or under the closed, terrorized conditions of fascism.) At one point the woman leaves the house, and (in the negative images) her white hair becomes covered with black snowflakes. She writes the word “isolated” on a wall, articulating the overwhelming feeling of the film.
These ritualized actions and compositions are edited in a slow, contemplative rhythm, giving the viewer the time to savor each moment, like lines in a poem, and relate them to what has come before. This world of highly abstracted, ritualized action, which despite its neutral tone reveals an urgent human drama, is akin to the world of Yvonne Rainer’s early films, such as Film About a Woman Who…, although the filmmakers informed me that they only became familiar with Rainer’s work long after making this film.
Towards the end of the film we see a series of photographs of cities being burned on a hot plate. The sequence recalls Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film Nostalgia. Each city, it seems, is destroyed in turn, or at least becomes inaccessible as a place of refuge. The destruction of the past is permanent, and even when dictatorship is overcome and some form of civil society is restored, some things remain permanently broken. Hélder continued to live and write for decades after Salazar was gone, but he continued a self-imposed isolation, rejecting interviews and poetry prizes.
In a Foreign Country is not a film version of Hélder’s book, but something far more potent: a film embodiment of the spirit of the book. Akerman and Seabra Lopes have immersed themselves in the book and, with great intuition and empathy, they have constructed a visual world that emanates from the book’s essence. The result is a poem in its own right, a delicately constructed balance of filmed moments with its own beauty, desolation, and fierce spirit of resistance and a will to survive. In a world where previous notions of a political “left” and “right” have become irrelevant, and all parties and governments are globally converging towards authoritarianism, it is films such as this one that point towards the artists’ path of resistance: the isolation that preserves internal freedom, regardless of external assaults. It is a path full of suffering, but it is also a mode of survival, of making it through dire circumstances.
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