Civil Action
By Lawrence Garcia
New York Film Festival 2024:
The Damned
Dir. Roberto Minervini, Italy/U.S./Belgium, Grasshopper Film
The Damned, Roberto Minervini’s sixth feature film, has already been described as the Italian-born, U.S.-based director’s first foray into fiction. An opening title card situates us in the winter of 1862, during the American Civil War, and by placing us in an era where a film camera could not possibly have been, the film introduces a speculative dimension that’s clearly absent from Minervini’s previous film What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018), a documentary that unfolds in the present-day Black communities of New Orleans and Mississippi. But if the “fiction” label fails to capture The Damned’s unique charge, it’s because of how the sensuous immediacy of its presentation brushes up against the genre expectations of a period war drama. Rather than see the film as a tentative foray into fiction, it may be more useful to consider The Damned as a film that explores how one might have gone about making a documentary during the Civil War.
Minervini’s choice of subject and setting is significant in this regard. Rather than focus on notable events or persons—a famous battle such as Antietam, or a figure like Ulysses S. Grant—he has instead chosen to follow a small Union Army unit patrolling a mostly unpopulated region of the western frontier. And though there are faint whisperings about eventually linking up with other Union soldiers, whatever purpose the unit is meant to serve within the larger conflict remains obscure. Even as he returns to a significant moment of American history, then, Minervini chooses to depict persons whose actions were inconsequential, and which likely had no appreciable effect on the outcome of the war. As in his earlier Low Tide (2012) and Stop the Pounding Heart (2013), the subjects’ mere presence takes precedence over an organizing narrative: scenes are structured not around dramatic developments but around a thickness of texture and behavioral detail that does not advance any story. We see soldiers playing cards and makeshift games of baseball; we see a father praying with his two teenage sons; we see a seasoned soldier teaching a newer recruit how to load and aim a revolver, an interaction distinguished by its process-oriented detail. It is indicative of the film’s overall approach that the soldiers are individuated less by their personalities or capacities for action than by their bodily features, their lilts of voice, and the way they simply exist and move through space.
The result of this approach is a stark de-dramatization of word and gesture that does not just stand out within the tradition of the war film but also places The Damned in the lineage of Italian neorealism. In 1948, André Bazin wrote that the basic unit of narrative in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) is not the shot but the fact: “a fragment of raw reality, multifarious and ambiguous, whose ‘meaning’ becomes apparent only after the fact, through other events connected up in our minds.” Similarly in The Damned, we are confronted with images whose facticity takes precedence, and whose “meaning” is often only discernible in retrospect. Representative in this regard is a scene where an older soldier goes on at length about what it means to be a man, and as he speaks, we hold on a close-up of the young recruit he’s talking to, whose facial reaction is difficult to read. In the next shot the young man is being treated for frostbite in his toes, and only then do we realize that his prior expression likely had more to do with the wintry cold than with anything else.
It should be acknowledged that visually speaking, The Damned departs significantly from its neorealist precursors. Minervini and cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral favor a magisterial visual style closer to Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux (2012), featuring compositions with an extreme shallow focus and a slight blur around the edges: no one is likely to compare this film to “quasi-literary journalism,” as Bazin did with the postwar Italian films he was writing about. The Damned extends the neorealist tradition, then, not by replicating a historically specific visual aesthetic, but by refusing to prejudge the historical significance of the events he presents, and thereby questioning what even counts as an event. The film includes a deadly battle scene in which the unit unexpectedly clashes with a Confederate group, a sequence that in another movie would lead to a decisive turn for better or worse. Here, though, its import remains decidedly ambiguous, and the emphasis accordingly shifts away from the battle’s strategic outcome to the experience of being present at such a moment—to, for instance, the indignity of using a fellow soldier’s dead body as a de facto shield, or the sheer exhaustion that would lead one to curl up in a ditch and close one’s eyes mid-battle.
By refusing a pre-given distinction between major and minor events, The Damned avoids imposing a retrospective understanding of the Civil War on its subjects. Too often in period films, characters are made to ventriloquize a contemporary view, speaking and acting as if endowed with knowledge that was unavailable at the time. Here, we see the Union soldiers struggling to grasp their own place in the war, attempting (and even failing) to square their actions with their religion, their duty to family, their basic needs. What’s dramatized is less a specific war narrative than the distinct difficulty of seeing how one’s present moment fits into the drift of historical time. Within Minervini’s body of work, the comparison to be made here is to The Other Side (2015), which follows the lives of a couple of amphetamine addicts and far-right paramilitary groups in northeastern Louisiana. For while that film’s title signals both a political and spatial binary, the film presents a thickness of concrete detail that exceeds any such narrativization. In The Damned, likewise, we confront the multifarious, ambiguous facticity of images that makes narrative possible in the first place.
Perhaps the main downside of Minervini’s approach is that, with no goal-oriented trajectory to structure it, The Damned ends arbitrarily, abruptly halting in its tracks. Nonetheless, like the film’s extreme shallow focus, its abrupt conclusion serves as a useful rejoinder to the idea of history as a timeline to be filled in, or as an image to which a filmmaker would simply add more detail or resolution. However one ultimately decides to classify it, The Damned presents the viewer with events and persons that no standard historical chronicle of the Civil War could accommodate, and in doing so demonstrates the way images take on meaning and the ambiguities screened out in the process—something that any filmmaker, fiction or non, must always contend with.