Apocalypse Congo: haunting images from Africa’s heart of darkness

An artist has created haunting images of misery from the place that inspired Apocalypse Now.

Higher Ground from the exhibition Richard Mosse: The Enclave.

There are many places in the world that are worth visiting — places with a wonderful history, fascinating monuments, a vibrant living culture, friendly people, and good food and wine. On the other hand, there are places like parts of sub-Saharan Africa where you never want to go unless you happen to be involved in mining, arms dealing or the humanitarian struggle against endemic poverty and disease.

These last scourges have been exacerbated by the incompetence and corruption of many of the local governments, whose kleptocratic excesses are usually in direct proportion to the desperate poverty of their unhappy citizens. Meanwhile, already impoverished countries are racked with constant fighting between war lords, criminal gangs, militias, revolutionaries and most recently Islamic extremists who have set a standard of savagery only recently equalled by Islamic State in the Middle East.

The so-called Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the worst of these hellholes. Its history began badly in colonial times, when it was for a time the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium (1885-1908), until the cruelty and injustice of its administrators was exposed and forced the Belgian government to take the territory over as a direct colony (1908-60). My father visited during the last decade of colonial rule and recalled stout Belgians in suits perspiring over the heavy cuisine they served in the heat.

Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness (1899) was set in the period when the royal fiefdom was known as the Congo Free State; the country has a history of misnomers. Conrad had direct experience of the country and people, as well as of the colonial maladministration, having, like his protagonist Marlow, sailed a steamer up the Congo River in 1890.

Perhaps because of its combination of social and political acuity with an ultimately bleak vision of the absurd, Heart of Darkness proved a singularly resonant allegory for the 20th century and inspired in particular Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), in which the story was translated to Vietnam.

Well over a generation later and back in the Congo, Conrad’s story is part of the inspiration for Richard Mosse’s The Enclave, a film work originally made for the Venice Biennale in 2013 and now acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. A well-known passage in the book is directly recalled at one point when a series of bombs go off as the camera pans across impassive mountains shrouded in mist, but Conrad’s spirit is present in many other scenes as well, particularly wherever human agency and even human wickedness appear dwarfed by the indifference of nature.

Mosse’s film is set in the midst of the latest phase of the horror of the Congo, the endless fighting between government troops, local militias and rebels. The recent history of the region, with wars between ethnic groups, military mutinies and the inevitable involvement of neighbouring states jostling for power and influence, is too complicated to summarise easily and too senseless to be worth the attempt. Suffice it to say there are no good guys, and the death count since 1998 amounts to an almost unbelievable 5.4 million people.

Kurtz’s last words in Conrad’s book — another oracle for the 20th century — are well-known: “The horror! The horror!” They also could stand as the epigraph to Mosse’s work, although he is well aware of the impossibility of conveying anything like the enormity of the real situation. The work does succeed, however, in conveying a memorable impression of social and political breakdown, perhaps all the more effectively for avoiding explicit and sensationalist violence.

Most immediately striking is the surreal and disturbing colouring of the film, dominated by lurid pinks and violets. This is the consequence of shooting on infra-red 16mm film, later transferred to high-definition video; the choice was motivated in the first instance by the military associations of infra-red film, used for night vision and to detect camouflaged objects.

But as well as the range of meanings evoked metonymically, the red palette of the film has a direct metaphoric expressiveness in its own right: it feels overwhelmingly like a nightmare world, as though it we were in a post-apocalyptic science fiction film.

Indeed, it would have been difficult to achieve the same effect of unrelenting menace if all the pink trees and grass had been their proper green. Many of the natural settings are inherently beautiful, and there are occasional glimpses of the grandeur of nature against which this story of human squalor and misery is played out; but the veil of red cast over everything makes it impossible to forget that human beings have alienated themselves from any communion with this natural beauty.

Another factor that helps to convey the experience of tension and confusion is the presentation of the film on six separate screens, not symmetrically placed all around us, as we might expect, but hung almost at random and at oblique angles to one another in the space. We are presented with different images on the various screens, while some are blank and occasionally the film splutters to a stop as through the spool had run out. As for what we see on the screens, images run on a loop of 39 minutes and 25 seconds, without a clear beginning or end or any unified narrative thread. We see soldiers and paramilitaries in various uniforms, many of them very young and soon to be dead, murdered by other young men almost identical to themselves except belonging to some tribe, ethnic group, political or religious group or gang.

The soldiers are walking through paths in the grass or guarding roads in the middle of nowhere — another Conradian image of futility. Very young men hold very big guns and look around, alert but as though in a daze with little sense of the utter irrationality or the personal danger of their situation. At one point a group of soldiers gathers on a steel bridge over a river and takes up positions with guns pointed downstream, even though the violently flowing water makes it very hard to imagine that they are waiting for an enemy boat to make its way up towards them.

There is a bizarre vignette in which an older man, one who must have survived many brushes with death and thus has a more realistic apprehension of the risks, is seen performing some kind of voodoo ritual with a spear and other bits and pieces, sprinkling water with a bunch of grass, and a crucial moment — perhaps for the benefit of the camera — making the gesture of cutting a throat.

Death is ubiquitous in a place where more than 300,000 have been killed every year on the statistics already mentioned. Bodies are seen lying on the road where they have just been shot, or in villages and elsewhere. Passers-by look at them with desultory curiosity, sometimes lifting up the tarp that has been thrown over them to look at the faces.

People seem utterly desensitised, less moved than we would be by animals killed on the side of the road. There seems to be little empathy, sorrow or mourning, and indeed it is hard as spectators even to feel that these scenes are pitiful. The overwhelming impression, before this level of dehumanised violence, is simply that it is contemptible and vile. How are we meant to feel sympathy for killers when their turn comes to be killed?

The desensitisation extends to children; after an attack on a village in which we feel we are about to witness some gruesome murder or mutilation — but of course this is not shown — a little girl is seen nonchalantly walking around dead bodies and even acting up for the camera.

There is a scene of some kind of entertainment in a community hall. A band is on stage, but we don’t hear whatever it is they are playing because the soundtrack continues to be an oppressive mechanical drone with a tinnitus-like ringing. Then there is an acrobatic act, in which several young men leap through a flaming hoop or execute backflips.

Finally a self-conscious young woman who presumably thinks of herself as a model comes up on stage, although for what reason remains unclear. Perhaps just being a model was her contribution to proceedings, over which a sense of threat hangs, partly because of some rather sinister men who sit on the stage, partly because of the soundtrack whose harsh texture of noise implies we have not left the war zone.

There is footage of a refugee camp, a miserable collection of huts made of sticks gathered from an almost treeless landscape and roofed with tarpaulins, which gives an idea of the appalling living conditions of those displaced by war. But the only scene that really engages our sympathy is when a group of people gather around a rickety wooden hut, lift it off its foundations and try to carry it away and up a small hill. The wretched structure rattles and shakes, boards coming loose, and the purpose of the effort remains unclear.

Do they want to use it as a schoolroom or perhaps as a church? The episode is matched, on other screens, by a burial, so perhaps it is the latter, but there are few signs of religious practice or of any kind of cultural life. We assume that most of these people are illiterate and their level of awareness of what is going on, of what is happening to them and why, must be very limited.

Under these circumstances, the effort to move the house seems more symbolic than anything else, representing the only positive collective action we witness. It recalls Gericault’s choice, in the Raft of the Medusa, to paint the moment at which the survivors come together in their efforts to attract the distant rescue ship: after the utter breakdown of civilised life that has taken place, a tentative renewal of the social bond between human beings in the common quest for survival.

Ultimately, though, the film reminds us that survival is not assured. We seem to glimpse a sign with a gorilla — perhaps alerting us to the presence and protected status of animals surely endangered by constant war. And there is a memorable moment when an elephant crosses the road in the distance.

But there are a couple of passages in which the camera stands back from the human violence and contemplates the extraordinary beauty of the lake and mountains. The pro­cesses of nature and of organic life persist; they are completely indifferent to our fates, and will regenerate and continue even if humans destroy themselves in their own wickedness and folly.

Richard Mosse: The Enclave

National Gallery of Victoria. Until February 16.