The Renaissance Society

Of interest to the critic:

The Renaissance Society, a gallery at the University of Chicago (in the interest of full disclosure, I work there) opened its new exhibition on Sunday. Entitled "Gravesend" after a town in Kent, England that is also the starting point of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the visually wondrous 17 minute film by British artist Steve McQueen documents the process of turning raw coltan, a metallic ore mined in the Congo, Australia, Brazil, etc, into a component of capacitors in electronic devices. The mineral is in high demand thanks to the ever-growing market for cell phones and computers. It has fueled the civil war in Congo, which has claimed the lives of 3.8 million.

A subject like this conjures up in my mind the horrific images of Darwin's Nightmare, the documentary about Nile Perch that was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. But what immediately strikes you about the film is that it contains no humanizing elements, no commentary. It is just a series of images and short scenes, with a narrative of sorts following the coltan from the mines where it is extracted by pick-axe from rock faces to space-age refineries where machines eerily do their strange work without any human presence. There are beautiful shots of the jungle, of the geometric shapes in the refineries, of steel blades breaking rocks apart, of the play of light on water. There is a long shot of a sunset over an industrial landscape, and an animated sequence following the contours of the Congo River.

All very beautiful, yeah. But doesn't this subject require a moral stance? Doesn't Conrad, though in every sense a novelist's novelist, also allow his moral indignation to seep onto the pages of "Heart of Darkness"? I don't mean McQueen has to flash Marxist slogans across the screen, only that he depict for the human cost; that he show suffering or at least humanize the workers. The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought it possible that I simply missed some of the moral implications of McQueen's film.

For example, he made the deliberate decision of not showing the faces of any of the workers, leaving them indistinguishable, mere tools of an economy. He then juxtaposes the images of the workers with footage of real machines in refineries. Herein is the barbarism of the coltan trade: workers lose their individuality and become no more than machines. Without showing overt suffering of any kind, McQueen points out the essential cost of any brutal industrial process. The juxtaposition of what looks like a grave being dug out (or it may not be a grave) in the jungle with the setting sun over a factory also suggests the human toll of the process, while this last image's allusion to the first lines in Conrad's novel brings into relief the similarities between the 1890s exploitation of the Congo and modern corporate ventures.

On the other hand, the allusion to Conrad could have a different meaning. It's true that McQueen makes overt homages to the Heart of Darkness, but it does not follow that he is criticizing empire or neo-colonialism as such. He could be saying that like Conrad, he is using an historical example of immorality as a starting point, but not the focus, of his work of art. After all, Conrad's book does not primarily document the injustice of colonialism by focusing on the victims, as Sinclair's The Jungle did in its treatment of stockyard workers, but uses colonialism as an avenue to explore evil, passing quickly and perhaps heedlessly from the historical to the universal. McQueen could similarly be moving quickly beyond the social and political realities to the aesthetic value of the coltan trade.

McQueen, I think, struggles with how to make a film about something as morally loaded as the coltan trade without turning it into a documentary or a polemic. He wants to produce pure art, pure film, but his subjects require a moral stance. Can an artist extract a small bit of a subject (its visual beauty), like a miner working in the shafts, and not worry about the rest? What is art's place in a world where even nature is politicized? Are the demands of art and the demands of conscience in conflict? I guess Conrad had to think about these questions, too. McQueen has created a remarkable film, but it sits a little uneasily with me. Its images are too seductive. Brutality shouldn't be this beautiful. But that probably isn't McQueen's fault.