6/15/2019 The concentrationary universe in the films of Lav Diaz (paper) – The Art(s) of Slow Cinema

8th March 2019 Nadin Mai

The concentrationary universe in the films

of Lav Diaz (paper)
RPG Conference, University of Stirling, 4 September 2014

Introduction
At the end of 1943, Primo Levi, a trained chemist from Italy, was
arrested, and a few months later sent to Auschwitz concentration
camp. At the end of the war, he left the camp as a survivor, but also as a
living corpse. His treatise “If this is a man” became well-known and is
a rst-hand account of atrocities committed under Nazi rule. Levi
writes about his day-to-day life in Auschwitz and about the many
deaths he encountered. He also writes about the torment that prisoners
were put through. “If this is a Man” describes the concentration camp
as a place of slow death. In one part, Levi writes,

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be

like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired,
standing on our feet, with a tap which drips
while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for
something which will certainly be terrible, and
nothing happens and nothing continues to
happen. What can one think about? One cannot
think any more, it is like being dead already.
(28)

This is only one example of the regular torments in the camps. If not
selected for the gas chamber, the prisoners waited for death through
starvation, disease, hard manual labour and/or torture. The very focus
on su ering and the delay of death shows strong similarities between
life in a concentration camp and the life of characters portrayed in the
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lms of Lav Diaz.    In this paper, I will attempt to illuminate this
‘concentrationary universe’, in which Diaz creates conditions of fear,
angst, torment and paranoia for the character as well as for the viewer.
In doing so, I will draw from sociological writings on life in the
concentration camps and a new eld of research in the Humanities,
which has its origins at the University of Leeds under the direction of
Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman. I will also include parts of the
interview I conducted recently with Diaz at the Locarno Film Festival,
where I asked him speci cally about the treatment of su ering in his
lms.

Slow Su ering
To begin with, the term ‘concentrationary’ is taken from the French
‘concentrationnaire’, which in itself stems from the title of the 1946
book ‘L’univers concentrationnaire’ by David Rousset, a former
political prisoner of Buchenwald concentration camp. It has also been
used extensively by Primo Levi in his last book ‘The Drowned and the
Saved’, or rather by the translator Raymond Rosenthal, as far back as
the 1980s.

Pollock and Silverman attempt a characterisation of the

concentrationary by juxtaposing the speci c uses of concentration and
extermination camps during the Second World War. They write,

The extermination camp subjects its victims to

immediate death, often within the hours of   
 arrival at the extermination point. Its space is
void of life, attended only by a small work   
 detail and its SS guards. In the concentration
camp, however, death is not the main object;
terror and the enactment of the terrifying idea
that humans qua human beings can become
super uous are its purpose and its legacy. (2014,
11)

In principle, concentration and extermination camps di ered from one

another in their uses of time. It was a di erence of speed
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In his book ‘The Order of Terror’, German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky

(1997) describes it this way:

The death factory was an apparatus that

functioned smoothly, virtually trouble-free,
working at high capacity and speed. A death
train arrived at the ramp in the morning; by the
afternoon, the bodies had been burned, and the
clothing brought to the storerooms (259).

In the concentration camps, on the other hand, prisoners often died

slowly, as a result of a continuous in iction of hardships. Paul Neurath
(2005), survivor of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps,
contends, “The camp usually kills its victims in less spectacular ways.
It is comparable not so much to a ferocious murderer who runs amok,
as to a dreadful machine that slowly, but without mercy, grinds its
victims to bits” (47-48).

As I am hoping to demonstrate in this paper, a major characteristic of

Diaz’s lms is the focus on su ering. His lms represent characters
who are or have been target of oppressive governmental forces, and
turn into living corpses as a result of it. What stands out in his lms
Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), and
Florentina Hubaldo CTE (2012) is that the characters are caught in a
web of persistent fear and terror. Death, while at times desired on the
side of the persecuted, is prevented, or rather not granted.

Rather, according to Pollock and Silverman, the aim of the

concentration camp, and in extension of the concentrationary
universe, is “to submit inmates to a prolonged process of psychological
disintegration, reduction to bare life and, hence, to becoming a living
corpse” (Pollock, Silverman 2014, 11).

This focus on psychological processes in the characters is supported by

the aesthetics Diaz employed for these lms, rst and foremost by the
particular length of his lms. The in-depth depiction of fear, angst,
and paranoia over the course of, at times, nine hours is an aesthetic of
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Diaz’s concentrationary universe. It is further supported by the use of

extreme long-takes. As Sam Littman (2014) contends with regard to
contemporary Romanian cinema, “the long take len[ds] itself perfectly
to expressing psychological realism.” There is thus a link between
slowness and the concentrationary, which I want to explore in more
detail now.

Analysing the concentration camp system as a site of terror, Wolfgang

Sofsky (1997) points to the presence of an “endless duration that was
constantly interrupted by sudden attacks and incursions. In this world
of terror, a single day was longer than a week” (24). This very cycle of
endless duration and sudden attacks is most prominent in Diaz’s six-
hour lm Florentina Hubaldo, which portrays a young woman being
subjected to repeated rapes. The lm follows her mental degradation as
a result of CTE, a degenerative disease of the brain, whose onset stems
from brutal treatment at the hands of her father.

Just as
concentration camp or even Soviet Gulag prisoners were deemed to be
more useful as long as they could work, so Florentina, too, is denied
death foe economical reasons. Her body is a mere product her father
sells in order to earn a living. Her treatment thus attempts to strike a
balance between a su cient degree of subordination without gravely
compromising her ability to “work”. Diaz disrupts this endless
su ering of Florentina with attacks on the viewer’s senses, mainly by
shock moments delivered through high-volume noise or absolute
silence. Juxtaposing almost endless scenes of Florentina’s su ering
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with sudden attacks delivered through sound, Diaz’s six-hour lm is a
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close representation of the concentrationary universe in which

Florentina eventually, after six hours, dies as a result of a continuous
in iction of miseries.

Sofsky’s above-mentioned remark about the change of time-

consciousness in the camp inmates is similar to the shattered time-
consciousness one encounters in Diaz’s lms. The very length of his
lms exempli es the endless duration of terror and marks the
characters’ entrapment in a world of fear and uncertainty about death.
Time begins to stretch, a characteristic very similar to that of a
traumatic event, which survivors often describe as a slow-motion
e ect. In the words of Diaz:

At some point, death will come. It’s like a

premeditated thing. … hell is coming, and it’s
always like that. It’s like a concentration camp.
You’re compartmentalised; this is the new
group, we need to orient them on how to work
on these things, then, next compartment, we
will not feed them, and the next compartment is
the gas chamber where we kill them. So it’s a
part of compartmentalisation. There is slow
death.

He adds that the concentrationary “applies so much to the character of

the Filipino psyche … It’s exactly the word for this kind of su ering.”

Sofsky argues that this slow pursuit of gradual destruction of the

human being “allowed death time” (1997, 25). This argument can be
extended to the treatment of characters in Diaz’s lms. Neither
Florentina in Florentina Hubaldo, nor Hamin in Encantos, or even
Renato in Melancholia see a sudden death. Their death, which is not
always visualised on screen, comes rather as a result of repeated
in ictions of attacks, both violent and non-violent. Death always
comes slowly, which aggravates the characters’ su ering to an
unbearable degree.
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What I would like to highlight in this context is Sofsky’s use of “death

time”. Even though it looks unlikely that Sofsky meant to create an
entirely new term here, I would like to read it as such as it makes for an
intriguing factor in the analysis of slow lms. Slow Cinema has been
repeatedly discussed in terms of temps mort, or dead time, as a
governing factor of the aesthetics of slowness. In very simple terms,
dead time in lm means that nothing is happening in a scene, often
quite literally at the end of a scene, when characters have exited the
frame and the camera remains focused on an empty setting. I would
argue that more than any other slow- lm director, Diaz uses “death
time” more than “dead time” in his lms. In doing so, he puts
emphasis on the use and e ects of terror on individuals as well as on
entire societies.

The use of “death time” is most evident in Diaz’s eight-hour lm

Melancholia, a lm about three characters, who have self-devised a
coping mechanism to get over the loss of their loved ones; activists who
disappeared. They immerse into di erent roles in society, “so that we
could regain our feelings. So that we could survive. So that one day, we
could live again” as Alberta, one of the main characters, describes it.
The lm ends with a ninety minutes long ashback of Renato, an
activist, and two other resistance ghters trapped on an island, after
the military surrounded it. In those ninety minutes, little happens on-
screen. In fact, all we see is three men sitting and waiting for their
death. Or else, we don’t see anything as Diaz resorts to night-time
shots without arti cial lighting.

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Renato,
one of the activists, writes letters to his wife, giving an insight into the
conditions of the resistance ghters. He reveals that they are aware of
death coming, but Diaz refrains from granting them the relief one of
the ghters is demanding, as we will see shortly. Instead, Diaz follows
the military’s play on psychological warfare and creates an unnerving
situation for both character and viewer, through oppressive silence,
lack of action, night-time shots, and endless periods of waiting. I want
to show you a brief extract of the lm, which demonstrates Diaz’s
approach, and which also shows the e ects of the persistent terror on
the ghters.

(extract)

What we could see in this extract is the mental degradation of one of

the ghters, whose resistance has been crushed by psychological
warfare. The certain death, yet uncertain point of death causes a slow
degradation of the character’s mental state, in similar ways we can see
in Florentina. The man loses his sanity, which is not only apparent in
his erratic and incomprehensible movements and behaviour
throughout the second half of this part of the lm. Especially at night,
his visual and aural perception is distorted by severe paranoia. Here
again, as indicated in previous brief re ections on Florentina, Diaz
creates a concentrationary existence for the characters.
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He generates a so-called “torment of duration” (Ibid., 81), which

Wolfgang Sofsky emphasised in his discussion of “camp time” that was
very speci c to the concentration camps. Time was manipulated; it was
slowed down by endless roll calls every morning and evening, or
experientially accelerated by sudden attacks and beatings. Diaz’ trilogy
of post-trauma contains this very combination of what I would term
“time terror” for the characters as well as for the viewer; seemingly
endless long takes in which little happens are juxtaposed with sudden
scenes that invoke shock.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to refer to Matthew John (2014), who
contends that “the horror of the concentration camp system lies not
with the abrupt and immediate extermination of human life, but rather
with the slow and agonizing decay of the body and mind” (83,
emphasis added). This is precisely the feeling you get as a viewer if you
have the stamina to sit through a Lav Diaz lm.

I would also like to add that the concentrationary is a site of trauma.

Just like trauma, “terror [and in extension the concentrationary]
destroys the ow of time” (Sofsky 1997, 78). Trauma thus locks the
survivor-victim into a continuous, cyclical past. And this is where the
concentrationary meets my previous research into the representation
of trauma, forming a new powerful framework, based on Diaz’s own
experience under Martial Law in the Philippines in the 1970s. He was
beaten, locked up in a school house with 150 other families without
permission to leave, with the military deciding how much food the
people receive per day. People were guarded like prisoners, and shot
when they left the school yards because of “communist activities”.
Diaz called it “our own version of the concentration camps”. He
witnessed atrocities committed against men, women, and children and
has lost several friends to torture and extra-judicial killings.

While Pollock and Silverman’s study into the concentrationary is very

much limited to art that makes explicit references to Nazi
concentration camps, I intent to broaden the area. I am not only led by
the aesthetics of Diaz’s cinema, but also by David Rousset’s warning
that “it would be duplicity … to pretend that it is impossible for other
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nations to try a similar experiment [as Nazi Germany did] because it

would be contrary to their nature. … under a new guise, similar e ects
[of the concentrationary universe] may appear tomorrow” (1951, 112).

As I have hopefully demonstrated today, my thesis will, in parts, add to

this new research into the aesthetics of the concentrationary, but
suggests a di erent approach to it by focusing on the experience and
the time-consciousness in concentration camps and in the lms
directed by Lav Diaz.

If you want to use any of the material above, please get it touch and cite
it appropriately. Thank you!

Edit (22 September 2014): Lav Diaz pointed out that he was not tortured
under Martial Law, as described in my paper. I’m not sure why this
mistake has occurred. I suppose I start to mix up literature. Thank you,
Lav, for clarifying this!

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