As a Jewish kid in Nazi
Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale
(I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer had left), had to lie in
order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to
get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He
wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized
that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what
he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay,
he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always
working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation
of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he
added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before
they’re not.
In the film, Sally, who is
dying, says that everyone dies, so “I have no fear of death.” Harriet, Bill’s
wife, is relieved when her husband’s cancer recommences out of remission. “The
longer this gets dragged out,” she complains to his doctor. Stunningly, she says,
“I prayed that the chemotherapy wouldn’t work.” The physician reminds her that Bill’s
feelings should be taken into account. “He has the basic right to make some of
these decisions.” After the film, Roemer informed the audience at Yale that Bill’s
wife had been abandoned by her mother. After Bill’s death, she married a man
who had left his wife and had five kids. Harriet had had a bad life. Her
attitude toward Bill’s prospect of dying was indeed very real—human, one might
way, all too human. The question is perhaps whether she is culpable in the film
for wishing that her husband would finish the job and just die. I contend that
she is, regardless of her past, for as depicted in the film, she is his wife and
so she should be supporting him as he faces the ultimate demise. There is a
revealing scene in which the two of them are sitting together in silence. Is
she waiting for him to die?
Also documented in the film is
Rev. Byrant, an old Black man who is dying of cancer. “The only thing I can do
is put my trust in God, and try to live as long as possible,” he says. In
preaching a sermon at his church, he says, “Jesus tells the man, your daughter
is sleeping.” She is dead. Later, he remarks, “Jesus died for me on the Cross;
he will take me.” Such faith is laudable. With people like Harriet in the
world, the Rev. Byrant can hardly be blamed for having such an other-worldly
faith.
Whether in the midst of a troubled marriage or in hopes of being taken by Jesus, these stories in Michael Roemer’s documentary attest to people being honest regarding how they are approaching the prospect of death, whether that of a close relation or oneself. The medium of film has been said to ultimately be on the human condition. Even science fiction has something to say about us as we really are. For the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and the residents of Gaza during the Israeli genocide, the essentials of life were undoubtedly felt as very real. Living itself was doubtlessly made transparent in itself. Film can do this too. Even in portraying the brutal honesty of the Nazis and Israelis with regard to people they deemed as sub-human, the medium of film can help the rest of us to be more aware of the fullness of human nature, beyond our knowledge of ourselves and our immediate context.
