Land of Look Behind
When I was thirteen, my dad took me to the Film Forum, just outside the West Vilage in NYC. My cousin Alan’s first film was being shown there, a film called Land of Look Behind, a documentary about Jamaica just after Bob Marley’s death. At the time I did not know Bob Marley’s music and I knew nothing about Rastafarians or Jamaica.
All I really knew was that when I was five Alan lived with us in our house in Teaneck, NJ. He and my dad used to take photographs together and process them in my dad’s darkroom. We converted our attic into a bedroom for him. Alan photographed me there. He somehow limited the available light to a shaft coming in from a single window.
He left us to go to Europe, where he studied with Roman Polanski, worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, and began his lifelong association and sometime partnership with Werner Herzog.
On the screen were astounding images of poverty in Jamaica, Bob Marley’s funeral, Rastafarian reveries, live reggae performances, prisons and military police, incredible landscapes, marijuana smoking, and English made strange by unfamiliar accents that often seemed hypnotic. It was a ninety minute cinematic poem, a dream that has stayed with me for almost twenty-five years.
A few years ago, I found a VHS copy of the film at my parents house and brought it back here to Boston, excited to finally see Alan’s film again. But I don’t own a TV or VCR and somehow I never managed to arrange to watch the film at a friend’s house as I’d planned.
It is therefore that much more exciting to have Alan inform me that Land of Look Behind has been digitally remastered and will be released on DVD next month, complete with special features—commentary by Werner Herzog and Alan, a digital photo album with never-before published images, and a soundtrack CD. You can pre-order Land of Look Behind now.
New York Times film critic Robert Palmer was also at one of those Film Forum screenings of Alan’s film in December, 1982. Palmer wrote:
Land of Look Behind began as an exploration of Bob Marley’s contributions to Jamaican pop music and Jamaican life. But somewhere along the way it became something different, a kind of meditation on the island’s music and religion, its traditions and its pride, the feel of its inhabitants’ everyday activities and some of their hopes for the future. Land of Look Behind won’t satisfy viewers who like having things spelled out for them, whether by a voice-over or a mundane, predictable plot. It has neither, and that is both its minor weakness and its distinguishing strength.
More recently, Jim Jarmusch has said:
Formally the film flows easily, seemingly growing from the climate, the music, the speech patterns, and the gentle landscape itself. Footage of Marley’s coffin being driven in the back of a pickup along the dusty roadways lined with throngs of devastated admirers does serve as a visual centerpiece. But the heart of the film inhabits its details. For me, specific images seem to recur in my memory (I’ve seen the film several times): the way that, in the opening sequence, a backwoods countryman carefully locates and presents a small indigenous tree toad to the camera; a shot of Gregory Isaacs from behind as he exits a ground floor office and walks into Kingston’s hard sunlight; and the haunting closing sequence involving a young Rasta in the hills undulating to Marley’s voice and rhythms floating from a tape player, as though the music contains the secret code to a deep spiritual mystery. And in fact, it does.
The trailer is up on YouTube.
A few clips from the film are also on YouTube. Check out this segment with Gergory Isaacs.
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