Alex Monteith's arresting documentary of the scars of Northern Island considers the visual imprints of place against the human recollection of past. JACOB POWELL reviews Chapter & Verse.


THE WORLD premiere of Chapter & Verse, the first feature-length work of Artist-Filmmaker Alex Monteith, opened in fine fashion. It included live mood setting atmospherics by the City of Sails Pipe Band who marched in, arrayed in full ceremonial regalia, and whose dying notes ushered in the first shots of the film.

This documentary filmed around Northern Ireland focuses on high profile trouble spots like border town Castlederg, Co. Tyrone, and Bogside in Derry. Monteith interviews well-known political figures from both sides of the conflict as well as unknown locals. The majority of footage, though, is of landscapes, places, roads and buildings that bore witness to much of the conflict and death resulting from the unionist republican struggle in the latter half of the 20th Century.

As with Monteith's prior work Chapter & Verse is visually arresting, but it's hard to say exactly why. I remember seeing a photo she once exhibited of a circa 1970s stool with a sparkly orange vinyl covering situated on the front lawn of her house. Hardly an awe inspiring image. But somehow Monteith manages to frame the mystery hidden in objects and locations, to draw out the beauty, which resides in the inanimate and which can be seen in the relationship between an object and its setting.

The lighting in this film is sublime. Monteith worked purposefully to capture each street, each building at a moment that made it come alive.

Chapter & Verse is overflowing with this kind of beauty. The narrative comes primarily from the images of places and not from the interviews as we might expect. This departure from traditional narrative will be hard to absorb for many, who have been accustomed to being led by the hand through an idea or historical setting. In Chapter & Verse, people are given equal priority to the places they inhabit or speak about.

This is also a film full of contrasts. What we hear contrasts with what we see. Aural tension is built over hauntingly muted visuals, then is suddenly pared back and greater fluctuation is created in the shot selection. I agree with Bill Gosden's comment regarding Monteith's "unerring editorial sense".

Imperfect human memory is thrown into relief by the mechanical memory of the camera and of official records. We are moved from confused personal anecdotes to a long verbatim listing of victims' names and dates. Listening to this uncomfortably relentless barrage of names over the top of images, at once beautiful and melancholy, is incredibly sobering.

The director doesn't push you to take a side, Protestant unionist or Catholic republican; rather she presents images of specific spaces that have shared in the complexity of our human struggle. She explores themes of exclusion and selectivity by revisiting the same sites over and over. We are forced to examine the confusion inherent in these well documented backdrops. In one shot the Shankill estate looks like a bombsite and a few minutes (months) later it is a tidy, impoverished, and perhaps mundane housing estate. The images show a cyclic pattern of a land soaking up the conflict that it's inhabitants can't seem to shake. The interviewees paint the same picture of tired frustration. The conflict is ineffective, perhaps even pointless but nobody seems to know how to find an ending to this long embittered history.

Chapter & Verse is not an easy watch. You may struggle if you prefer your documentaries to provide you with a 'guided tour' through a subject. For the brave, this documentary provides an opportunity for fresh, challenging dialogue into a well documented historical/political struggle. To see New Zealanders pushing the bounds of film, producing material of this quality is encouraging.