Synopsis of Machete Gillette…Mama by Larry Gottheim
(1989)
A film by Larry Gottheim 16mm Color, Sound 40 minutes 1989
The title is the title of a popular song of the Dominican Republic, based on a Haitian song "Machette Gillette"-- meaning a razor-sharp machete. In the popular songs it refers
metaphorically to the male-female edge, for these are love songs. But it retains other meanings pertaining to the work on the land, particularly the sugar industry with its origins in slavery and its continuing importance in the difficult economic life of the two countries which share the divided island. In the Dominican Republic the cutting of the cane is still performed by Haitian workers whose lives are hardly different from their slave ancestors, and the words in Spanish elicit associations
pertaining to race, ritual, history. The imagery of the film develops these associations, but the metaphors involving edges and boundaries extend into areas which are both personal and universal. The distinctive energy of the film comes from its unique intertwining of personal and cinematic issues with social and historical ones.
The film is in four sections, corresponding to four visits to the Dominican Republic during 1988. The material from the final visit is put first, in the opening section of the film, which, in terms of the narrative, reveals the resolution of the problems which come forward in the final section. This temporal displacement suggests a dynamic cyclic form which reflects the temporal and spacial relocation which is an essential factor in the historic and spiritual life of the people seen in the film. In fact displacement and substitution are everywhere present, for example in the narrative itself (based on actual experience) in which I substitute myself for a Dominican friend in connection with an accident in which a Haitian is killed, as well as in its narration, where my words are read by a Dominican voice; transformation of the self is an essential part of the various ceremonies presented, one in each section.
Much material is introduced which has rich documentary interest, including aspects of life in the Bateys where the Haitian sugar cutters must live, or other previously unimaged aspects of Dominican life such as the community of workers who earn their living recycling waste in the garbage dump of Santo Domingo, as well as various Haitian and Dominican ceremonies. The film is deliberately not documentary in form or character, but chooses to live at the conjunction of the real, the narrative, the formally experimental. This is not just a matter of negative gestures--the avoidance of conventional interviews, translations,
explanations, background music-- but a series of positive cinematic acts which reach for a purer more authentic relationship both with the "subjects" depicted in the film and the audience which looks and listens. This is nowhere more apparant than in the active disjunctive style which is based on the intensity of actual seeing and interacting, penetrated by significant intervals of darkness as the dense soundtrack is punctuated and enlivened by intervals of silence.
The form and style of the film partly grow out of an awareness of the problems involved in the representation of "other cultures" in our time, but the film stays clear of an easy address to the marketplace of current theory, opting instead for the vitality of sensual truth and the deepest mysteries that grow between the self and the other.
