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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
How do we define a life that remained silent and lived out their life in an environment and in circumstances we have never known?
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
The documentary Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart) by Simon Bang is an exploration into that very question featuring Simon's maternal grandfather, Knud Goth, and the great love of Goth's life, the cargo ship - and one cargo ship in particular - with which he traversed the world seas from when he was a minor to the day he retired.
Goth was the patriarch incarnate. Leaving his family for years at a time or summoning them to stay aboard with him, the bridge of the ship was his outlook to the world. The ship was his responsibility as well as his powerhouse. And it was his alone.
It was a life of two world wars, having his ship wrecked by mines and submarines, an Allied bombardment while at dock, Castro taking over Cuba, and an Anarchist act of terror in San Francisco. All of which he narrowly escaped physically unharmed.
At one point Goth was shipping iron ore from Sweden to the Nazi war machine - following the instructions of his shipping company and in accordance the official policy of the occupied Denmark. While doing so he took German Jews fleeing the horrors with him on his return journey to Sweden. The extremes of life within the very same journey. Goth never spoke of assisting refugees. Aiding the war machine, however, remained a sting with him that his actions would be deemed morally reprehensible. No accolades came his way after the war.
Within his silence was still the pain of the silence too from the world around him.
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
Simon Bang has meticulously pieced every remnant together that was left from his grandfather. A trunk with a set of keys to a ship long gone, a log book and papers on sail routes, newspaper cuttings, letters from a German Jew whose life he saved and his wife at home begging him to be at least a mental presence in her and their children's lives and interviews with his two surviving children and former crew members on his beloved ship.
Simon is visually laying fact by fact before us through the surviving papers and items from which drama upon drama unfold themselves. Almost all of them unknown till now in that Goth never talked of them. The terror bombing? The air raid, which he narrowly escaped? It is a mosaic taking shape before us from the sources Simon has dug out.
Simon is an artist of profession and he created his first exhibition at about the age his grandfather had been when he first went to sea. Simon has recently returned to painting after having been a storyboarder for many decades. The pen has been his tool all his life, just as he knows every element worth knowing of how to tell a drama through scenes and sequences. Still, at no point - and it is one of the most fundamental of premises for his documentary - does he makes guesses or even hints at what his grandfather may have felt.
Instead he anchors - sorry for the pun! - his documentary with two key features. Firstly he has made his own drawing desk the center of his film. This is his professionalism, the bridge of his own ship. In one key scene his charcoal breaks which takes on the role of metal splinters spiraling everywhere in the scene that follows. His desk is first and last the dramatic story point around which the windows, a set of doors and the ceiling too become screens for the sea, wind and the machines of war.
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
Secondly Simon lets the drama of his grandfather come to life through animation of dramatic reenactments of that which had no visuals after the fact. However, his grandfather is never drawn. The little boy we meet at the opening of the film running through postcards of the time of the town where Goth was born to the mature man at sea has Simon's own likeness.
It is a contract with his beholders that he accentuates at the opening of each scene by turning his head towards us so that we know this is Simon and never Goth. Goth's silence is respected. There is no abuse of his person. The one who is present and vulnerable before us is Simon himself.
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
Goth survived the role that he carved for himself in life. The world around him outgrew him. His ship was old-fashioned, new and other ways of shipping cargo had been implemented, and not least was the crew to be quartered with him. He was no longer the main character aboard.
Nor was there any life for him at home. He had lost his wife and if is a painful scene worth of Edvard Munch of the shadow that never leaves us humans. Now it is falling on her in her last repose. His eyes too are lying in shadow from his service cap. The shadow caught up with him in all aspects of his life.
Still the documentary stays unsentimental in seeing the patriarch unravel. There is no exoneration, no excuses, nor is there any condemnation. Yet we understand his pain. We have been taking part in the adventures of his life and it is deeply moving seeing his journey come to an end.
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
The Captain's Heart is a beautiful, playful and elegantly meticulous documentary worth seeing even scene by scene for its play with original footage of postcards and stumps of movies of the time, onto which the drama of one life is mirrored through animation. A life at once so extraordinary and a piece of world history within one person while a song too on the extraordinariness of every human life. We are all a piece of world history.
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| Screen dump from Kaptajnens Hjerte (i.e. The Captain's Heart). © Simon Bang. |
The screen dumps from Kaptajnens Hjerte are courtesy of Simon Bang and must not be reproduced without his permission.
