Snake Dance is a story of two men in the New Mexico desert. One was a cultural theorist and art historian who went mad during the aftermath of the First World War. The other was a physicist… and he was the father of the atomic bomb. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) can be seen as twisted reflections of one another: brilliant, cultured polymaths. One believed fervently in the healing powers of ritual, the ‘snake dance’ of the New Mexican Indians. The other, whether wittingly or not, unleashed the forces of destruction.
Text Geoffrey Macnab | Portrait Bart Dewaele
Belgian documentary maker Manu Riche first met English writer Patrick Marnham when he was making The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret (2003), a documentary about the pipe-smoking, sex-obsessed Belgian crime novelist, Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. Marnham’s biography of Simenon was the inspiration for Riche’s film, scripted by Steve Hawes. Marnham himself appeared on camera in the doc.
After this initial collaboration, Riche and Marnham were eager to work together. Riche was keen at the time to make a film about Congo. Marnham was busy trying to write a book about Oppenheimer, a project he eventually shelved after he had a disagreement with his US publisher and discovered that three other books on the same subject were in the work. In Snake Dance, we see him making contact by phone with Oppenheimer’s reclusive son Peter, who seems fascinated by the project but is too wary to want to appear on camera himself.
Indian rituals
Links between Congo and the atomic bomb soon became apparent. The troubled African State was the source for the uranium that was crucial for the bomb’s construction. Meanwhile, Riche discovered that Warburg had visited New Mexico in 1895, long before Oppenheimer’s arrival. He had studied the Hopi Indian snake dance and had become fascinated by its healing power.
‘Warburg slowly became to dominate our film, didn’t he!’ Marnham suggests to Riche. ‘His ideas were so interesting.’
‘The film is about a real point of view about something we as human beings are missing… that stream of thoughts that was forgotten and almost bombed away in 1945,’ Riche agrees.
‘Snake Dance is also an essay about documentary making. It’s not solely about the subject. It is also asking how can we talk about something that happened yesterday in the present tense.’ I am always worried about an audience that is too comfortable!’ –Manu Riche
The Indian rituals were the inspiration for Warburg’s celebrated Kreuzlingen lecture in 1923 in which he argued the significance of mythical and symbolical thinking – and demonstrated his own sanity in the process. At the time, he was still incarcerated in a German/Swiss asylum.
Riche took the decision early on not to use archive footage. ‘I didn’t want to make a historical film,’ he states. ‘The archive is an easy way out for the audience.’ This was not a story that could be put tidily in the past and treated as if it belonged to another era. The effects of the bomb are still felt today everywhere from New Mexico to Congo to Japan.
While researching the film, Marnham decided to write a book on the same subject. ‘It’s a parallel project. It’s not the book of the film,’ he explains. ‘They (the book and the film) are two people’s regards on the same material. They’re linked – like separated Siamese twins!’
Beethoven and Chopin
Riche and Marnham ventured to present-day Congo where they discovered western powers still jostling for the country’s uranium and other natural resources. They met illegal miners trying to extract cobalt from underneath a girls’ school.
‘The Congo is a complex story in the history of Belgium,’ Riche reflects. ‘I wanted to go to Congo because I wanted to see why Belgium went there in the first place.’ He and Marnham first visited three years ago. At that stage, chaos reigned, even in the capital Kinshasa. When they returned last April, they found improvements but the violence and poverty were still endemic.
Marnham points to the continuity of exploitation of the country by western powers stretching back to the time of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ in the late 1890s. ‘The strange thing is that you can read that book at any time and every time you do, there is a new insight into what is happening today. Conrad described the greed that was about to fall on the Congo and the determination to strip everything out of it and take it away for our benefit… it is absolutely up to date in that respect. There is a complete lack of mutual interest between those who govern, develop or profit from the Congo and those who live there.’
Alongside the often disturbing Congolese footage, Snake Dance features classical music and stunning landscapes of the New Mexico desert. One paradox Riche explores is that Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists relished their work together, even if they were ‘working on something like hell.’ They were based in a remote, beautiful location. The intellectual stimulation thrilled them… and yet, they were leaving destruction in their wake. ‘They were listening to Beethoven and Chopin up there and yet they knew they were building a bomb.’
As their research continued, the project developed a momentum of its own. The majority of the scientists were opposed to using the bomb on a living target but the army generals and politicians were determined to test it.
‘The film is about a real point of view about something we as human beings are missing… that stream of thoughts that was forgotten and almost bombed away in 1945' – Manu Riche
deliberate stark quality
Earlier in his career, Riche worked on Striptease, the weekly RTBF television show that used verité-style techniques to tell the stories of ordinary people. Humorous, satirical and with a subversive edge, the show established Riche’s reputation. Snake Dance may be in a different register but shares some of the same observational style. ‘Snake Dance is also an essay about documentary making. It’s not solely about the subject. It is also asking how can we talk about something that happened yesterday in the present tense,’ Riche reflects. ‘I am always worried about an audience that is too comfortable!’
Marnham features in the film as a narrator. ‘I didn’t want to be the intrepid explorer going around with the invisible camera crew. I’ve always disliked that kind of performance,’ the English writer says. The idea instead was to combine Riche’s eyes with Marnham’s voice. ‘It was a style that suited us both very well,’ Riche says of the English writer’s interior monologue.
During post-production, Marnham’s elegantly written voice-over would often transform the way Riche thought about the editing. In turn, Marnham would re-think the commentary in response to Riche’s montage. Snake Dance has been through seven or eight different edits. The film has a deliberately stark quality.
By grim coincidence, the Tsunami and subsequent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactor occurred around the time that Snake Dance was shooting in Japan. The film is able to draw directs links between what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 and last year’s nuclear catastrophe.
polemical undertow
The filmmakers are also planning a ‘lecture/performance’ by actor Jerry Killick (Monkey Sandwich), who will play Aby Warburg giving his historic lecture about the Hopi Indians. Marnham’s book will be published in early 2012.
‘What we are saying in the film is questioning the usual theories about history and the bomb,’ Riche suggests. Snake Dance points out one key underreported fact: namely that the Japanese were trying to negotiate a truce months before the Americans dropped the bomb. It may be essayistic in its structure but it also has a strong polemical undertow.
And what of the snake dance itself? How did it help heal Aby Warburg?
‘The snake dance is a ritual,’ Marnham explains. ‘Warburg was a classical scholar, very interested in the connections between classical Greece and modern Red Indians. He recognized many of the same impulses in the Indian activity as were recorded in Greek sculpture and literature. He regarded ritual as an essential step on man’s path toward intelligent reasoning.’
In the face of drought and famine, the dance helped the Indians to address their fears. ‘By dominating the symbol of lightning, they could dominate the lightning itself.’
Warburg believed that human intelligence developed from ritual and art. Ritual was the cornerstone of reason…and it’s precisely what Oppenheimer and his colleagues overlooked when they were building their weapon of ultimate destruction. (i)