"(...) se nota en cómo investigué sobre los personajes, porque a medida que iba leyendo sobre ellos empezaba a conocer cómo eran sus personalidades y eso me ayudó a escribir el guión y a encontrar el tono para cada uno de ellos. Hitler era hipocondríaco, sentía mucha lástima y compasión por sí mismo, y me pareció que mostrar que podía sentir lástima por sí mismo era muy interesante; Stalin era un alcohólico; Mao era un adicto al sexo; Franco era un gran hipócrita, y le vemos cazando, navegando en un yate y diciendo que no tenía tiempo mientras la gente sufría; Mussolini era muy narcisista. Por tanto, creo que mi formación psicológica me ayudó a modular el guión."
- Jay RossenblattThough disturbing in its content, Human Remains is frequently graceful and poetic. Rosenblatt's meditation on the minute gestures and glances of the dictators makes for compelling viewing. In slow-motion sequences, Rosenblatt shows Stalin examining the sweat he has wiped from his brow or Mussolini turning to gaze directly into the camera. The latter image is the strongest of all. At different points in the film, each of the men turns to the camera and locks gazes with the audience, if only for a moment. This, combined with the intimate narratives invokes a highly personal engagement between the viewer and the film. We are invited to examine their bodies and faces, their movements, smiles and habitual actions in a way that is devotional if not fetishistic. Rosenblatt, through all this, assumes the viewers knowledge of recent history. For, of course, he is not examining these men with the eye of the seduced camera. Rather, he uses intimacy as a way to rupture the emotional gap that a world-weary audience might project onto this subject matter. His approach reminds us that we can't linger this close to evil without daring to look it in the eye and ask ourselves, deeply, what it is that we see.
In this way, Human Remains creates a new strategy for the discussion of 20th century dictators. Arendt introduced the notion that investigating those responsible for horrendous crimes against humanity led to "a lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" (2). At the beginning of a new century we have taken for granted that this evil occurs. What Rosenblatt reminds us, in a most uncomfortable manner, is that these men are not monsters, and therefore are not able to be distanced from everyday human interaction. They are men, full of foibles, failings and absurd obsessions who are also capable of committing the most monstrous of crimes and implementing the most inhumane of regimes.Human Remains challenges us to ask how could a man who seemed inordinately preoccupied with his bowels and dietary habits also initiate the systematic murders of millions. Or how could another man, unable to muster the energy to get out of his bed, or to clean himself, eradicate the culture and society of the world's largest populace.
Rosenblatt's extraordinary insights are often as psychologically revealing or comic as they are mundane. Hitler and Mao had only one testicle. Franco was an aspiring filmmaker. Mao never bathed ("My genitals were washed inside the bodies of my women") and brushed his teeth with green tea ("a tiger never brushes his teeth"). Yet it is the broader context, examining men we know to have violently changed the face of the world, that makes the simple details so chilling. In an interview, referring to the parallels between a previous career as a mental health counsellor and his work as a filmmaker, Rosenblatt suggested that his approaches are always "to confront people on a subliminal level with things which they would prefer avoid". (3) In this journey into the dark hearts of humankind, two recurring images are used by Rosenblatt to link each sequence: a dark, dimly perceived image of a gravedigger overturning soil in a graveyard, and the repetitive clatter of a train riding along the rails. It is these images that prepare us to journey forth and dig deep into an archive of historical visual artefacts, some familiar, some not so, which will overturn corpses and remains that do not rest in peace in our collective memory.
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/10/human.html
"Tenía problemas de gases"
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