Film of the Week #10: The Damned

Despite the Civil War setting, Roberto Minervini’s latest film is closer in spirit to his prior explorations of modern American subcultures than you might expect.

While watching the latest film from Roberto Minervini, a filmmaker who is sometimes referred to as a non-fiction filmmaker, I reflected on “realism,” a term which inspires great animosity in both filmmakers and cinephiles alike. The Damned would appear to be Minervini’s first “fiction” film, but while watching the film, I thought about how there are elements of the film that felt more “realistic” than the supposed non-fiction films he has already made. The previous films of Minervini’s that I’ve seen (Stop the Pounding Heart and The Other Side) are ostensibly documentaries that examine American subcultures (a Texas goat-farm in the former; two rural milieus in Louisiana in the latter: one that centers on two amphetamine addicts and one that centers on an anti-government militia). Initially, these films might seem to be purely in the documentary mold – it is readily apparent that the human subjects are not professional actors and that the settings the films depict are authentic. Nevertheless, the mere presence of the camera as a supposedly neutral observer is bound to influence the behavior of the subjects (as is the case with all documentaries). But more significantly, each of the two earlier Minervini films feature dramatized elements and some semblance of a narrative arc. After rewatching The Other Side, I noticed that Minervini had a writing credit, which you might not think would be a possibility in a “pure” documentary.

My copious usage of quotation marks in the previous paragraph gives you some indication that in the films of Roberto Minervini, concepts like “realism,” “fiction,” “writing” and “documentary” are even slippier than they might be in your average film. Minervini’s previous films might be more accurately referred to as documentary/fiction hybrid films as it becomes apparent that the filmmaker is less a “fly on the wall” and more an active shaper of what you are seeing. That is not to say the films are “artificial” (another slippery concept when it comes to cinema…), as they clearly draw from a well-spring of real-world detail about the lives of the human subjects. But Minervini’s style encourages the viewer to actively participate in the process of interrogating both what we are seeing and how that might be affected by the frame through which we are seeing it. To my mind, all films have this dialectic — as a viewer I feel the need to be immersed in the world of the film, while also taking a step back to note the formal choices of the filmmaker. When I’m watching the film, I already tend to have a one foot in, one foot out stance — Minervini’s approach to film just makes me hyper-aware of this tension in every shot.

I knew going into watching Minervini’s latest film that it would be his first in a fictional mold, but it soon became clear that Minervini’s style of filmmaking did not stray as much as one might think from that of his supposed non-fiction films. The Damned is a period piece set during the Civil War in 1862. A company of Union soldiers patrols the Western frontier for a purpose that is not particularly clear. The leaders of the company give some indications of the strategy they are pursuing, but Minervini does not underline how it fits into the larger mission of the Union’s war effort. What Minervini gives the viewer instead consists of scenes of the soldiers marching through the frontier, preparing and eating meals, setting up their camps, embarking in recreational activities including baseball and cards and moving a wagon up a hill on uneven terrain. When violence springs up, it comes by surprise and the point of view is limited to the Union soldiers rather than providing a more omniscient perspective on the battle.

During an early scene featuring a soldier explaining how a gun works in painstaking detail, I thought to myself that barring the different uniform and the older style of weapon, I could have been watching a scene involving the militia in The Other Side. Minervini gives many of the scenes like this a procedural interest, which heightens the sense that we are seeing a side of the war that your standard generic war films would not necessarily provide. Does this mean that those scenes are closer to the reality of Civil War life in 1862? No, not necessarily. But I don’t think Minervini is solely going for period-accurate verisimilitude. The scenes that are presented in a matter of fact way, without a wider conceptual emphasis, thus giving the impression of realism. However, the source of value for those scenes lies not in the sense they are recreating the lives of Civil War soldiers as they happened, but rather in the presentation people performing actions without the distorting filters of concept, myth, symbolism and drama. I’m not making a polemical statement against films that center upon those elements. Rather, what I’m trying to do is explain Minervini’s style of filmmaking, one that attempts to strip away the trappings of films of a similar subject matter that lead our intellect and our emotions to simplified states.

I’ve noticed a tendency among certain filmmakers to wave off the idea of realism in film as a foolish notion that falsely asserts that film can even come close to duplicating reality. The common reproach of those putting forth this argument is that nobody can understand reality in its full essence and nobody can know what realistic behavior is because of the limits of our perception and experience. Somebody might read this review of me talking about realism and say “Who does this guy think he is to say that a film is not realistic when he’s just a cinephile who hasn’t experienced much of life?” First of all, ouch, that hurts my feelings. Second of all, I want to argue that I don’t see realism as a primary goal of a filmmaker, but rather a reference point through which a filmmaker can produce effects that are more complex than effects that appeal to emotion in a more direct and unmediated manner. When Minervini presents quotidian actions of soldiers in The Damned, he is not presenting the incontestable truth of the time period he is recreating, but rather the truth of what the camera is capturing at any given moment. As a result of Minervini’s formal approach, the emotion of the film comes to us more indirectly rather than being imposed upon the viewer through a conceptual fabrication.

The person who implied I didn’t have a life in the previous paragraph might take issue with my idea that Minervini’s approach is more wedded to truth than some other Civil War movie with a larger budget for research. This person might point to the dialogue in The Damned and say that it makes no effort to replicate the patterns of speech of that time period. To this I would say, yes I agree, the parlance of Minervini’s dialogue (if one can even call it that, all the lines are improvised) feels fairly modern. But as opposed to in certain films set in that general era where the dialogue seems calculated to convey the impression of historical specificity while also shoehorning in as much research as possible, in The Damned, Minervini has a more modest ambition to represent moments shared between actors. The actors may not in fact be saying what Americans may have said in 1862, but then again no film can possibly represent that absent the use of some primary source documents from the era. And even then, the veracity of those sources is subject to the biases of the author… My point is that I approve of Minervini’s efforts to do away with a more florid, history-conscious form of dialogue that may or may not be considered more authentic to the period.

While I greatly admire the aim of The Damned to take a more human-scaled approach to The Civil War rather than representing it in mythic/world-historic terms, I question some of the structural choices of the film. While a collection of documentary-like small moments provide a basis for a strong film, at a certain point an emotional through-line must emerge and to my mind it does in the form of conversations surrounding a young man who appears to have a speech impediment (none of the characters in the films have names). In his conversations with his older comrades, he discusses the value he places on his faith in God. While the older comrades are encouraging towards the young man, they tend to express a disillusionment about belief and the state of the world in general. In one conversation near the end of the film, an older soldier talks to the young man about the process of becoming a man and then later treats him for frostbite. While we might view this scene purely as a sincere expression of genuine emotion between men, it is followed by a scene that shows the aftermath of a violent encounter in which the corpses of the two aforementioned characters are presented. After some moving scenes involving the characters negotiating how they view faith, this feels like a somewhat ostentatious and on-the-nose demonstration of war’s brutality. No matter how convincing the persuasion of the film’s documentation is, there comes a point where the filmmaker must negotiate how to manage the lynchpin of the film’s wider narrative, and I think Minervini stumbles here with a fairly straight-forward counterpoint to the swell of emotion that accompanies conversations of the young soldier’s faith.

The film deftly presents the logistical details of the trip, and while the longer dialogue scenes are sensitively handled, I can’t help but feel as if we start to see the limitations of the film due to its tentative steps into character work. While the film generally has moment-by-moment integrity in how it documents action, I sometimes got the impression that Minervini was playing fast and loose with the context surrounding his characterization. One soldier explains in an early scene that the only reason he volunteered in the war is that he needed work, while later in the film he says that he volunteered because he didn’t think it was fair that others were fighting on his behalf. Is the character changing his story due to his consideration for the person he is talking to? Minervini does not give us the narrative framework to help us figure out if this is a new development in the viewpoint of the character, a lie, or a contradiction. Early in the film, the young man with the speech impediment says “God gave us a country. What’s the point if I’m not going to fight for it?” only later to say he doesn’t know what he is fighting for. Has some event caused this change in belief? Or was it just the discomfort caused by frostbite? My sense is that Minervini likes to present these dialogue scenes as a counterpoint to the documentation of the dangerous and forbidding environment. In doing so, he sometimes runs the risk of having those dialogue scenes feel inorganic because they are caught under the sway of whatever larger philosophical point he is trying to make about how war is presented in film.

I applaud the boldness of Minervini’s experiment in how to make a lived-in period film even as I take umbrage with some of the results. The film devotes consistent attention to low-key moments that defy easy categorization. In presenting a steady stream of ostensibly randomized incidents, Minervini creates an impressionistic rendering of war that never puts itself forward as a fully authentic recreation. Where the film falls short is in giving emphasis to the views of these characters without creating a narrative structure to make these scenes feel like something more than conceptual signposts. The film’s longer dialogue scenes are engaging when considered in isolation, but they rarely serve a compelling structural purpose. The scenes either don’t complicate our understanding of the characters or contrast with what we have seen without adequate context for that shift. But even with these structural deficiencies in mind, the film’s assortment of procedural and environmental details makes for a riveting viewing experience.