The Halfmoon Files

For a few years now, the Goethe Institut has been awarding a sponsored prize at the Duisburg Film Week, a festival in Germany for ‘homegrown’ documentaries. Last week, the Max Muller Bhavan held a three-day program that collated recent winners of the prize. The result? A fascinating if hit and miss collage of current German documentary making in which one film stood head and shoulders above the rest.

The Halfmoon Files opens with a conversation between the film’s director, Philip Scheffner, and a representative of the Indian Consulate in Germany. Scheffner is asking for permission to film in India – he’s trying to trace the life of Mall Singh, an Indian Sikh who was detained in a German Prisoner of War camp during the First World War. The consulate representative doesn’t yet know this, but he does want to find out: “So what is your film about?” he asks, looking slightly bewildered. Then his eyes brighten. “Temples?”

The insinuation is clear: India is pigeonholed and straightjacketed as a land of religious wonder. Why else other than to film temples would a foreigner seek permission to come here? But Scheffner’s film is far from just another dead-weight ball in the re-colonizing canon. The only temple he is interested in is a library of voice recordings to be found in his native land. This is not a film about religious wonder. It is, as Scheffner dryly intones, “a ghost story”.

Mall Singh is the principle ghost in this story, but his spectre only leaves the faintest of traces – a recording, from 1916, of Singh saying the following words in Punjabi: “There once was a man / This man came into the European war. / Germany captured this man. / He wishes to return to India. / If God has mercy, he will make peace soon. / This man will go away from here.” The recording was conducted as part of a project to record the vernacular of all the inmates in The Halfmoon POW Camp, which makes it interesting enough in itself (the project recorded over 7,000 different voices, laying claim at the time to being the biggest sound recording library in the world). But what really piques Scheffner’s interest is Singh’s third-person account of his position: “Perhaps the war had distanced him from himself?” the director asks tentatively. Mall Singh is ghostly in more ways than one.

The Halfmoon Files is one of those rare documentaries that shows as much care in thought as in action. As Scheffner tries to find out about Mall Singh, he becomes quietly yet crushingly aware of the information gaps that surround him. He can only access Mall Singh through the recording; he can discover nothing of his life in India. What’s more, the era of history The Halfmoon Files looks at cannot, by its very nature, be rationally understood (at one point in the film Scheffner becomes fixated on the process behind the recording, showing how the camp operators stuck to a regimented process that stripped the voice from the subject and turned it into a soulless mechanical recording). This is a film about ways of knowing, then, and Scheffner asks just how we should react to the postmodern vacuum of history mechanical war has produced.

The Halfmoon Files doesn’t have a definitive answer to this question (Mall Singh remains untraceable; the filming permission never does come through). Instead, through the use of textured visuals and sound recordings – both of which rarely correspond to the voiceover– it creates a space in which the viewer can ruminate on their own accord. Scheffner may struggle for oxygen as he tries to find a way of truly knowing his subject, but he’s able to take his viewer to the moon and back in the search for a standpoint – for something concrete. Beautiful and enigmatic, this is a journey I could sit through time and again.

Article reproduced courtesy of The Statesman. Originally published 14/10/09.