Forever (2006) (review)

In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” the great German writer considered the problem of transmitting experience in a post-WWI world that seemed to defy individual powers of description due to monumental technological development and catastrophic destruction, both unprecedented in human history. Although Benjamin saw storytelling’s future prospects as rather dim, the challenge of exchanging real human knowledge and experience has yet to be abandoned, and Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 film Forever is an admirable attempt at overcoming communicative obstacles. This documentary is set primarily in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a place famous for the incredible number of artists and musicians buried there. Honigmann interviews a spectrum of the cemetery’s visitors, from widows visiting their husbands’ graves to tourists making a pilgrimage to the Doors’ Jim Morrison’s final resting place. Each of these interviewees provides some insight into the way that individuals come to terms with death, often with the aid of art.

In many ways, Walter Benjamin’s essay and—perhaps—Benjamin’s own life are unstated points of reference in Forever. Honigmann’s other documentaries have dealt with themes of exile and the power of art in making sense of identity far from one’s geographical point of origin, notably in 1998’s The Underground Orchestra and 2004’s Give Me Your Hand. These films deal with émigré musicians in Paris and Cuban exiles in New Jersey keeping their Caribbean culture alive through rumba, respectively. Honigmann, born in Peru to Polish Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, has also explored the post-war lives of survivors of conflicts in the Balkans and the Congo in 1999’s Crazy and 2001’s Good Husband, Dear Son. Even though nothing so catastrophic as war is encountered directly in Forever—even if some of the interviewed subjects, particular the immigrants to France, allude to political upheavals—Honigmann is clearly on some familiar thematic ground with this film.

But for all the conceptual interest that Forever invokes, like the German Jewish exile Benjamin’s essays on Paris, art, violence, memory, and the power of storytelling to convey human experience, Heddy Honigmann’s results are decidedly mixed. The film seems at times interminable, largely due to overlong shots of people doing whatever it is that they do, from the voluntary cleaners of famous artists’ tombs and headstones to the Asian pianist playing Chopin because he was her father’s favorite. Presumably, these long shots of activity are supposed to provide insight into the interview portion of their subjects’ screen time, but some of the camera work is annoyingly clever, with pointless zooms and micro-pans of people’s faces in extreme close-up. Structurally, too, the film seems a little aimless, containing extraordinarily compelling interviews with the cemetery’s visitors followed by yet another series of inserts of tombstone markings and very personal graffiti, or statuary scarred by acid rain. It is also not clear exactly how the visitors to Père Lachaise who come to see the graves of Marcel Proust or Maria Callas coexist with those who come for deceased family or friends. The closest Forever gets to making this relationship apparent is a very brief joke from a woman whose husband’s grave borders Jim Morrison’s, and an interview with the daughter of a bootmaker who considered her deceased father an artist who would be at home alongside the cemetery’s more famous residents. These sequences form a very small portion of the interviews, and none of the other family/friend visitors make mention of art or artists at all. Although the dvd version is divided into chapters, after two viewings I was still unable to discern any overarching organizational principle to the material. This is not to suggest that a film tackling this subject should necessarily follow a narrative arc, but the fact that certain subjects (a gravestone cleaner, a tour guide, the pianist etc.) reappear at random leads me to believe that the film could use a stronger hand in the editing room. All of this...