Writer-director Jonathan Demme first visited Haiti in 1986 and reportedly fell in love with the nation. He felt intoxicated by the country's art, music, and its people - in whom he witnessed great passion and fervor, and a yearning for political freedom. The close identification that Demme experienced with the Haitians informed two superb documentaries: Haiti Dreams of Democracy (1988), on the national struggle for liberation as exhibited through song, and The Agronomist (2004) - a beautifully wrought and compelling ...
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Writer-director Jonathan Demme first visited Haiti in 1986 and reportedly fell in love with the nation. He felt intoxicated by the country's art, music, and its people - in whom he witnessed great passion and fervor, and a yearning for political freedom. The close identification that Demme experienced with the Haitians informed two superb documentaries: Haiti Dreams of Democracy (1988), on the national struggle for liberation as exhibited through song, and The Agronomist (2004) - a beautifully wrought and compelling biographical portait of Radio Haiti journalist Jean Léopold Dominique (1930-2000).For The Agronomist, Demme filmed countless interviews with Jean and his wife Michelle from 1991 through 2000. Production spanned many phases in the lives of the Dominiques that included harassment and death threats by the Duvalier regime, forced exile in New York, and a return to Haiti under the leadership of Aristide. Ultimately, circumstances brought the couple face-to-face with Aristide's dispiriting capacity for corruption and sellout. And not long after a tense and unfruitful radio interview that Dominique conducted with the former president, the broadcaster met an assassin's bullet in the parking lot of Radio Haiti.In the film, Demme shows us how Jean essentially provided a voice for the Haitian people in their native Creole, despite mounting federal opposition. We learn that Dominique functioned as a beacon of truth, who regularly countered the fallacies churned out by the fascistic Haitian government and its American allies. Jean's point was a fundamental one: like the muckraking journalist I.F. "Izzy" Stone, he constantly reminded his listeners that all governments are mendacious, and that the media - in his case, the radio microphone - should act as a weapon. Radio played that role for him, and also functioned as his art form. When he cut a perpetual swath through the brainwash of the Duvalier regime, he essentially exercised Deb Eisenberg's maxim: "art is the opposite of propaganda - it ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received information in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience." Demme must have sensed, at an early stage, that Jean Dominique would be a mesmerizing character to place at the center of a documentary, and his instincts were dead on target. The documentarian shows us how Jean used his entire persona - not simply his broadcasts - as one giant revolutionary act. His life was a 70-year performance piece, intended to rouse the Haitian working classes to action. Fittingly, then, he comes across as intense, histrionic and passionate during interviews. There is a magnificent, telling moment early in the film where Jean describes how the Haitian military turned its guns on the station, in 1991. As Jean revels in the irony that he broadcast the sound of the gunshots to thousands of listeners and thereby countered propaganda that the troops were attempting to enforce with their rifles, he flashes an impish smile at his own cleverness and throws his hands up in the air playfully. In this and other similar moments, Demme shows us how Dominique thrived on the theatricality of provocation, to such an extent that he would likely have found it difficult to live without drama. While Jean's adult daughter J.J. tells us that in his private life (off-air) he was emotionally inexpressive, the broadcasts elicited an opposite quality: he sprang to life on the air, energized and electrified by the microphone. We quickly deduce that Dominique was born to serve as an on-air catalyst, a live wire, in this beleaguered time and place. Michelle at one point likens her husband to Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, and that simile feels apt.Demme's portrait of Dominique echoes other truth-speakers who were cruelly silenced: Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi. There is a fascination, a wonder, inherent in the notion that extraordinary men occasionally rise up to help turn the tide of history, and..
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Add this copy of The Agronomist to cart. $6.00, new condition, Sold by frogforest rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Lakebay, WA, UNITED STATES, published 2005 by New Line Home Video.
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