|Olga Tchepikova-Treon|
The Tribe plays at the Trylon Cinema as part of BLEAK WEEK on Tuesday, June 2. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Spoiler Warning: The sensitive content note below, and this piece overall , contain major spoilers
Sensitive Content Note: I will be talking about key plot points from The Tribe, specifically its ending and abortion segment.
As far as I’m concerned, every week at the cinema should be Bleak Week. Well, not every week, but let’s say maybe 40 out of 52 weeks of the year could easily be Bleak Week, and it would be wonderful, cathartic, exhilarating, moving, and maybe even sublime.
I like Bleak Week, and bleak movies in general, for mostly selfish reasons, I guess. Bleak films have been able to affirm that I am, in fact, not quite as dead inside as I sometimes like to think I am; not as cynical and charred by a sarcastic outlook on the world as I come off conversationally sometimes; not as devoid of feeling and care as I wish I was in moments of peril, after the recent months and years we had here in Minneapolis, and the world—just to get a fucking break.
All that said, I wouldn’t say that I hyper-actively seek out bleak movies—that would feel like cheating somehow. But I am delighted when a movie I choose, especially when choosing it without much investigation, takes the turn. Midnight Express did that a few months ago at the Trylon; Sirāt did it a few weeks ago at BAM, Brooklyn. But it’s also delightful when bleak movies congregate in a dedicated time and place. Last year’s Trylon Bleak Week highlight for me was Threads, for instance. Threads marks the minimum threshold for how bleak a movie should be to be eligible for Bleak Week, in my opinion.
Bleakness is a strange delight. The jolt of devastation confronts you with your own humanity and its emotional discontents, which I think is ultimately a good thing. And that’s exactly why (almost) every week should be Bleak Week; because (almost) every week (currently) already is bleak week.
Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe is a strong candidate in this year’s bleak Trylon lineup, but it’s possible that many people haven’t heard of this movie. It doesn’t have the same cultural pull as Come and See, yet it’s worth watching just as much, if not more.
I didn’t catch The Tribe in the theater when it was coming out, for no particular reason. But its posters plastered around the city of Cologne, Germany, where I had recently returned after a year in the US, had made a memorable impression. The film was on my mind passively, but not insignificantly, for a while until the ever-progressing stream of new releases moved it into the back of my thoughts. I ended up watching The Tribe on a laptop screen, during downtime at an Airbnb in Tokyo, Japan, in the summer of 2016. We were battling jetlag, I think, and I lobbied for that film choice more actively than I usually tend to do. I didn’t choose The Tribe as a bleak film, or Ukrainian film, or deaf-focused film, as far as I recall. I’m not even sure I was aware of all these aspects when we pulled it up on the streaming service. I think I just remembered that I forgot that I wanted to see it, and so we watched.
The Tribe takes its bleak turn pretty much right away and spirals from there. A young man moves into a boarding school for deaf teenagers, joins a criminal “tribe,” falls in love, is betrayed, and kills many of his former compatriots for revenge. There’s really nothing outstanding about the story’s intents and purposes. It is pretty standard teenage drama fare, where every character is horrible in some way, yet also thoroughly humanized. Euphoria, for example, is a lot meaner than The Tribe, even though they share similar levels of teenagers enveloped in bouts of explicit nudity/sexuality and violence. Maybe Euphoria feels less bleak (yet equally, or more ugly) because it constantly, almost annoyingly, goes for the “vibes,” as my fellow Perisphere writer Ryan Sanderson would say: It wallows in slow-motion shots, atmospheric lighting, lomography-esque color coding, and avant-garde eye makeup. The Tribe will give you none of that over-stylization, and that, I think, opens it up to be a “better” bleak screen narrative. I probably would not feel too compelled to go watch reruns of Euphoria if they ever came to a big screen,1 but I would, and will, this year, be in attendance to watch The Tribe at the Trylon. In many ways, I will do so against my better judgment.
The Tribe’s formal premise of withholding linguistic comprehension of the dialogue to viewers who don’t understand Ukrainian Sign Language (USL) was a major turnoff for both domestic and international Deaf communities,2 who felt that this strategy was dehumanizing the deaf characters and created a damaging image of the deaf community as “savages.” Hearing (re)viewers, however, often pointed to that absence as a humanizing feature—in a “cinema as a universal language” kind of way. Many western journalists decried the film’s dire depiction of Eastern Europe or proclaimed it was a caricature; others thought it a metaphor or comment on the corruption that was prevalent in many sovereign states that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Some reviews weren’t very thoughtful about how their own word choices in writing about the film perpetuate dehumanization. I recall one reviewer wrote something about how looking at the signing characters is like watching animals in a zoo—not a great analogy to draw by twenty-first century standards, as “human zoos” were a popular public education vehicle in the not too distant past across the so-called “civilized” West. I struggle to find a general direction or conclusive trends among the international reviews I have read of that movie. This polarization, however, probably speaks to the film’s strength.
In any case, watching The Tribe for the first time on a laptop screen did not mitigate its thoroughly devastating character. Shit is happening in The Tribe. There is a lot of cruelty, exploitation, violence, rape, death, and an absolutely grueling segment that shows a clandestine abortion through an extended long take that feels like it is never going to end while you’re in it. That scene is right up there with Gaspar Noé’s nine-minute tunnel rape scene in Irréversible. When I was writing about The Tribe for my dissertation, and the subsequent book chapter that soon will appear in a collection of academic writing on disability and the media, I consciously, and maybe cowardly, wished to avoid re-watching that particular scene. Yet, it was necessary to see it again—for the sake of my argument, but also for the sake of keeping myself honest, and not be selective, about the harsh realities, however fictional, that the film attempts to mediate.
To avoid misconceptions, it might be important to point out that current regulations for abortion in East European states emerge from a cultural and historical backdrop that is quite different from the US—labor history-wise, women’s rights-wise, politicization of healthcare-wise. Aside from its prohibition under Stalin, abortion was mostly legal and accessible in many different iterations during the Soviet period, and many post-Soviet states kept it that way. If we were to assume that The Tribe takes place in the approximate present-day Ukraine of the film’s time of release, medically supervised abortion would likely be legally accessible to Anya, protagonist Serhiy’s love interest—both of whom I haven’t named so far because we actually never officially learn their names. Yet, Anya opts for a clandestine procedure. The film does not give clear reasoning for this (at least to those of us who aren’t fluent in USL), so speculating about why Anya seeks out an unsafe and frankly torturous path makes this scene all the more unbearable. Does this render the abortion a “device” of shock and transgression within the film? Maybe. But then again, there’s so much other ugliness in the film that it hardly stands out.
To round out observations about that scene and the film more broadly, it is important to prepare you for the direct sound, or rather, direct silence of the movie. This is not a “gimmick” that is justified by her character’s deafness. In the broader context of the film’s screen display of a D/deaf community, it may be useful to consider that sign language involves a good amount of hand gestures and facial expressions that generate sounds. Likewise, it isn’t uncommon for signers to use voice in some capacity, during signing and otherwise. Against the backdrop of the film’s sparse audioscape, every sound that occurs feels magnified, almost blown out of proportion, and therefore, soul-piercing. Anya’s vocalizing during the procedure, for instance, is absolutely haunting. The film’s silence will probably ring even louder at theatrical screenings with strong attendance.
I don’t know for sure, but it seems that one of the common denominators of bleak films is ending on some kind of open void (or open wound?). The Tribe does this quite beautifully, in my opinion, and in a fairly minimalist yet sophisticated manner. Serhiy, who just bashed his fellow tribe mates’ heads in with dorm furniture, descends down the staircase of the boarding school until he’s off frame because the camera is not coming with him. Settling on the staircase illuminated by upper Kelvin count (ie cold-hued) buzzing tube lights and walled in by cracking and blistering paint, we are left with an epitomous image of decaying Soviet-era institutional architecture that no one bothered to brush up since it was built. Really, the interiors and exteriors throughout the entire film carry the same signs of neglect—a “found” aesthetic that borders on ruin porn, except it’s somehow harder to romanticize it this time around. This decomposition, in some ways, has become a timeless, and almost uniform aesthetic of East European cinematic interiors; recent films like Two Prosecutors lean into this extensively in their set design as well. And it’s not like this is a fantasy. I have childhood memories of buildings I have been inside of across Eastern Europe that look and feel exactly that way. Of course, memory ultimately not a reliable source, nor is it a representative sample. Still, it is remarkable how familiar and recognizable these aesthetics are to those who spent time somewhere in the Eastern bloc.
Across many of the 100+ participating theaters this year, Bleak Week obviously assembles the crème de la crème of challenging films. Audiences are going to flock to many familiar titles like Come and See and various Béla Tarr films. Eastern Europe clearly remains a reliable source for bleak cinema in the global film community’s cultural imagination. The Tribe is part of that cultural legacy now—in a good way.
- I don’t mean for this to be a diss on Euphoria—I watch it and do appreciate it for its own candy-colored Instagram filter iteration of bleakness. ↩︎
- In disability studies discourse, is common to capitalize Deaf when referring to a cultural community, and deaf when referring to the physical condition of hearing capacity. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum