“But we should only feel anxiety if our attentions have been so brutalized by convention that we have forgotten that a formally rigorous film will teach us how to watch it, that it may want to prime our attention, to direct it differently than we expect.”
“Like Sergey’s chillingly deliberate headsmashing, this is also one of the moments that make The Tribe a “difficult” movie to watch or might lead us to confuse it with a document of human awfulness. But it makes no final sense that pain — especially female pain — should not be seen or heard, especially not when that pain is exposed in a setting whose formal logic protects it from gratuitousness but does not dull its emotional or physiological effects.”
“In the world of The Tribe, the European Union feuds with Russia which repressed Ukraine which contains cities of killing poverty in which there are schools for the deaf whose teachers abuse their access to the lives of adolescents who have nothing and who will, in their turn, pass violence, sexism and horrifyingly good heads for business down to students younger and weaker than themselves. These structures are not stable but they are insoluble. Initiation at any level is initiation into all levels, and is irreversible: once Sergey joins the tribe, his responses are dictated by the tribe’s vocabulary, its forms of retribution, reward (always strictly material), and punishment. And that would remain true forever, in life as in the movies — unless, secreted among the members of any society, were artists and thinkers, documentarians, intellectuals, and eccentrics: people who make art and think about it.”
“Which is to say that the more we meet The Tribe on its own terms, the more we are reminded that Sergey’s tribe lacks something. Unlike real people, they make no art. They beat the shit out of each other in ritualized group combat, but they don’t know patterned, non-competitive, non-utilitarian play. They make forms, but those forms are instrumentalized; they are always already blueprints for weapons. They grab after things they can sell, or which intoxicate them, or which they can use to accumulate power. Sergey’s killing spree, which he achieves with an intuition so fine it amounts to a method, is the closest metaphor we are given for the making of the film itself. Nonetheless the difference between murder and art, between the impulse to destroy and the impulse to make, could not be clearer. A killing spree leaves nothing behind it, not even its perpetrator. Art used to murder is not art; it is more like a way for artists to commit unthinking self-murder. The camera’s eye catches Sergey’s one last time. He killed once, and no one saw it, and now he, too, is dead.”
“By contrast, the impulse to construct useless, enduring forms — especially when the content they enclose is hideous, a series of inhuman destructions like that killing spree — is a utopian impulse, the involvement of living minds and bodies in a collaborative process meant to outlive the murderous conditions it documents. And it acquires sudden, breathtaking salience if one considers that in this case it arose from a nation bled dry, deprived of color, pleasure, the free movement of culture and ideas. In this context a formally rigorously film, an aestheticism from the ashes is high proof of something almost holy.”