Owned version: The 2005 DVD released by New Line Home Entertainment.
Acquired: May 20th, 2017, from used-media store CeX. I got excited when they put one in a mall near me, and I bought a bunch of stuff. Meant to go back from time to time but never could, owing to my work schedule. Now they're out of business in America. Dammit.
Seen before?: No - I've slept on most of Demme's documentary work. Because I am a fool.
Sat on this one too long - didn't mean to take a hiatus, but that's what happened. So instead of a proper review, here's some barely-digested thoughts culled from my notes:
- If nothing else, this is a fabulous documentary because its subject is endlessly fascinating and Jonathan Demme, ever interested in the lives and thoughts of others, keeps himself inconspicuous and allows the subject to tell his story in the manner he sees fit. Jean Dominique is a firecracker, a passionate advocate for his home country of Haiti who also happens to be a raconteur of rare quality. Because he's interesting, the film is interesting.
- When speaking on But, I Am Beautiful, the documentary film he helped make that spurred a mini-Haitian New Wave, Dominique proclaims, "The grammar of the film is a political act." This could also be said about Demme's tacit ceding of the floor to Dominique for the duration of The Agronomist - allowing Dominique to lay out the arguments regarding Haiti's history and the political quagmire therein without authorial intrusion is a political act, implying Demme's agreement with Dominique, as well as a deferential one (why try to stake a position when this guy's got it staked pretty well?).
- In the above light, it's kind of tempting to see this as a flipside to Swimming to Cambodia - both are eccentric and energetic performance pieces (explicitly with the Gray film, implicitly here - the interlude involving Dominique's letters to his daughter that reveal a shy, retiring side he never shows in public suggest that he is, in essence, always performing and the radio microphone/camera allow the remove he needs to enact that performance) about Western exploitation of Third World nations. Swimming is an outsider's perspective on that idea, a man from a protected class reaching certain painful epiphanies about what had to happen for him to be afforded that protection, where this is from the inside, a man from one of those nations explaining the costs incurred. Both also see Demme hanging back and letting the subjects dictate the flow, asserting directorial control sparingly for maximum impact (the spectacular God's-eye-view cut in Swimming, the climactic still shots of blue sky here).
- The title is apropos in a certain way; while Jean Dominique rose to fame as a radio broadcaster and political activist, his college degree was in agronomy and he did indeed find work in Haiti as one for a short period of time. Identifying him as "the agronomist," after his own self-identification ("I am not a journalist... I became a journalist!"), ties him to the land he fought for in a physical way that his more-famed occupation would not, his root impulse being that to nurture and foster the growth of His Land; furthermore, when Dominique quips that, as a hired gun, he was "an agronomist without land," that brings in the important political distinction between working land and having land, of being exploited versus being the exploiter.
- When speaking on his youth, Dominique claims his love affair with Haiti stemmed in part from sojourns with his father to "the outside country," i.e. the rural villages where the poor and working classes reside. He fosters his relationship to his home by seeing the whole of the country, setting him in stark contrast to e.g. the Duvaliers, who only see (or pay attention to) the parts/persons they deem to have value. His father developed this love of country in order to instill a sort of nationalistic impulse within his son ("You are not French, you are not British, you are not American... you are Haitian!") - begging the question of what it means to be a nationalist in a territory with a long history of being denied nationhood. Also: interesting, living in a country where nationalism and militarism are joined at the hip, to see a fostering of nationalism meant to counter any impulses towards militarism.
- Not the film's main thrust, but the role of the US in the Haitian situation is certainly not allowed to pass without comment - the election of Reagan spurring Dominique to proclaim, "Human rights no more!" followed by the discussion of "the phone call option." The complicity there is deep and ugly, and the point gets made without it turning into hectoring.
- "the sound that you only hear when the record is stuck": boy, that's a hell of a metaphor
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