Alan Greenberg was paying his respects at the Miami wake of friend Bob Marley when a woman appeared at the bier and placed a turquoise guitar inside the coffin. A stranger to Greenberg, the woman explained that she had been visited by the spirit of the late reggae superstar, who asked her to tell Greenberg that a film should be made of Marley's life. Although Greenberg was known within the film industry as a writer and special unit photographer on such studio productions as Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Richard Fleischer's Mandingo (1975), he had never directed a feature. (Greenberg's 1982 screenplay, Love in Vain, remains one of the most-optioned unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood.) Nonetheless, as Bob Marley's body was being transported to his native Jamaica for a state funeral, Greenberg and Werner Herzog's director of photography Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, assembled a five-man film crew and headed for Trenchtown, the violent Kingston slum where Marley grew up in the years following the death of his absent father.
Shot on 16mm in May and June of 1981, Land of Look Behind takes its name from a no (white) man's land of impenetrable jungle in the south of Jamaica's Trelawney Parish. Dubbed "Cockpit Country," and pockmarked with treacherous sinkholes and steep drops, the location has little to do with the music of Bob Marley, per se, but everything to do with the reality (then and now) of poverty and hopelessness on the Caribbean island that most of the free world recognizes as a lush tourist drop. Photographed in a free-floating and at times free associative manner, Land of Look Behind will frustrate those hungry for biographical data on Bob Marley (born Robert Nesta Marley on February 6, 1945, to a middle-aged white plantation foreman and his 19-year-old black bride) or geographical factoids about Jamaica. Only a few of his songs are heard and Marley's funeral, the film's ostensible raison d'etre, takes a back seat to the peripheral mourning and a grimly photogenic island tour.
Given this caveat, Land of Look Behind remains compelling cinema as it eschews hagiography and sucker punch editorializing to let Marley's survivors and countrymen tell their stories and, by extension, his. Greenberg and his crew accomplish a travelogue of a mental and spiritual landscape, of the shared space of the outlawed Rastafarian faith and the hardscrabble life of its marijuana-stoked practitioners. There's even a touch of mondo to the particulars of Marley's chaotic sendoff and the image of island children high on ganja, as well as in the mesmeric sidebar performances of Lui Lepki (one of many reggae performers who took their stage names from Hollywood and American crime icons) and poets Mutabaruka (aka Allan Hope) and Jammy Galloway. Greenberg and his camera crew also steal a brief look at the infamous Gun Court stockade, a psychologist-designed (for maximum impact) gulag where prisoners-of-state shout their names to passersby from air holes barely wider than letter slots.
"There are areas of Kingston where a white man's life can be measured in seconds," Alan Greenberg comments in a loose but richly informative audio commentary shared with friend and colleague Werner Herzog and moderated by Subversive Cinema head honcho Norm Hill. Greenberg discusses the trials endured during shooting, including government intimidation, pickpockets, the hostility of the indigenous people, being kidnapped four days into the shoot by a Trenchtown gang, confiscation of his film by the minister of police and having his budget embezzled by his producer/ business partner. Greenberg provides startling footnotes for several participants, solemnly pointing out those who later died in acts of violence. Additional supplements include a pair of featurettes that duplicate some of the material heard in the audio commentary. Taped side-by-side, "Exploring Land of Look Behind" (24m 212) and "Working with Herzog" (18m, 1s) feature Greenberg and Herzog (separately) telling stories of how they came to this project and of how they met. There are also thumbnail biographies for Greenberg, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Bob Marley, Mutabaruka and reggae artist Gregory Isaacs.
Shot guerilla style in 16mm and incompetently processed without Greenberg's participation, Land of Look Behind looks remarkably fine a quarter century later with a great deal of the credit going to Subversive Cinema, who footed the bill for a thorough digital cleanup. Letterboxed at 1.78:1, the Hi-Def, anamorphically-enhanced image is grainy but colors are surpassingly vibrant. The mono soundtrack is acceptable, perhaps even exceptional given that this is essentially a field recording. English subtitles translate (sometimes with only fair fidelity) the Rastafarian patois. A 20-page booklet boasts production notes by Greenberg, illustrated with vintage photographs (one of Marley's funeral card). The real bonus here is a CD soundtrack (45m 36s) of reggae songs, audio snippets and cues from K. Leimer's mesmerizing original score. Indie filmmaker Jim Jarmush provides appreciate box copy.
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by Richard Harland Smith
