General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie Review

"One last trip down the rabbit hole before it's paved over..."

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater April 10, 2012

Imagine Werner Herzog and Sans Soleil's Chris Marker teeming up for an experimental documentary about the Deep South, with Terrence Malick-style voiceovers and creative input from avant-garde legend Stan Brakhage; that's the general—okay, kidding, highly specific—vibe that first-time filmmaker Robert Persons tries semi-successfully to channel in General Orders No. 9, a visual poem of sorts and a mournful polemic against the urbanization of his native Georgia. Persons spent eleven years compiling footage for the film, which draws its title from General Robert E. Lee's farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia at the end of the Civil War, bidding his soldiers to return to their homes. The film itself is a reluctant farewell—to a rural landscape and mode of life that's rapidly disappearing—and it asks us to consider our possible futures if we continue on our current social and technological trajectory. Where are we going? Where should we live? How should we live? No concrete answers are offered in the ponderous, Neo-Luddite narration—written by the director and spoken with gravelly Southern elocution by William Davidson—but Persons is content to simply meditate on the questions.

"The centerpost of the world, the pillar of heaven."

And meditate he does. The film even comes with its own oft-repeated mantra: "Deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road." Persons begins with a kind of cartographical history lesson, with animated line drawings showing how a vast and wild, unknown and unmapped expanse of land between the Mississippi and Savannah rivers became subdivided over time—the South split into states, the states broken into counties, the counties made up of tiny towns, the towns comprised of grid-like streets. As Persons zooms in on ever-smaller lines and boundaries of human construction, it's a bit like viewing a Mandelbrot set. Unlike an infinitely scalable fractal, though, there's a definite end to this "pattern of lands, roads, and people." At the nexus of it all, atop a courthouse in a town square in the dead-middle of Georgia, is a symbolic weathervane, the "centerpost of the world, the pillar of heaven." The great immovable point.

Is the weathervane a moral compass? Does it show us which way the cultural winds blow? Persons leaves much open to interpretation, but what's clear is that he sees the rural hub of the small town, with it's "sense of order," as an organizational ideal, the perfect sized place for humans to live and work, commune and flourish. This is opposed to the city—in this case, Atlanta—which Persons calls a "false center," where there are no "signs of communion." He shows us angry smokestacks and vacant parking garages, an empty movie theater lobby and angular, impersonal skylines. It's all a bit heavy-handed and obvious and indefensible—if Persons hasn't found any signs of communion in the big city, he either hasn't spent enough time there or he isn't looking hard enough.

The film is better when it confines itself to pining for a South-that-once-was. The tone struck here made me think of the Japanese phrase mono no aware, which, loosely translated, means "wistfulness at the transience of things." Persons is enamored with the Southern Gothic mythos of American regionalism in decline, and he seeks out the beauty in impermanence, with long shots of semi-abandoned objects and places that hint at a rich history—mausoleums and monuments, sagging cabins filled with moldy books, a fish out of water, gasping on a riverbank. Lone trees stand in empty, fog-enshrouded fields. A water tower hovers over a cemetery. In one scene, Persons' camera gazes into the woods while the narrator intones, "There was a war here, a hundred years before this generation was born." The film is awash in hushed reverence for the South, a "holy district...a protected zone, where catfish are in bloom and where Uncle Remus came of age."

The Terrence Malick comparisons are unavoidable, but Persons perhaps owes more to the literary—not cinematic—traditions of the South. His fetishization of maps and geography smacks of William Faulkner, and the rhetorical, almost biblical cadence of the narration is straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. In this passage, which is representative of the kind of stately, poetic language adopted throughout, Persons' narrator describes the tug of the past on the South: "In our exile, in our disorientation, it appears to us. It appears as a ghostly longing, a feeling tied in the throat. It appears with or without our consent in the deep heart's core. After the storm, it appears to us. It appears as the Virgin appeared to the Aztec. It appears even though our surroundings have become something detestable. It appears as a world entire, as a wheel upon the earth, even after what will happen and what will come. This place has not yet perished because in April you can still feel it—that something is pushing against the surface of things."

So, no, this isn't your standard History Channel-style documentary. It's more of a hymn to agrarian existence. A call to consider what remains "when each generation finds itself in unfamiliar surroundings...when what is lost by the father is lost by the son." There are those, undoubtedly, who will consider the film's philosophical pomp to be a too-heavy meal of deep-fried antebellum nostalgia followed by a bitter pitcher of anti-urban bullshit. Fair enough. General Orders No. 9 does lay it on thick at times, especially near the end, when we get digitally rotoscoped footage of cars clogging up a freeway and CGI shots of endless stark-white hallways--a poorly executed vision of a depersonalized, purely utilitarian future. By the time the narrator suggests that "the only response" to unstoppable modernity is "to go to the ruins and sit in them," less patient city-dwelling viewers might find themselves thinking get to it then. Have fun out in the woods foraging for legumes. I haven't even mentioned how the film glorifies the South's past while skirting uncomfortably around the issue of slavery, which is never addressed in a meaningful way.

Those in a more contemplative mood, however, might find that the film does echo a dull, Miniver Cheevy-type ache that many twenty and thirty- somethings feel for the times before they were born, when life seemed much purer and nobler. (E.G., urbanites with lumberjack beards and paperback copies of The Call of the Wild in the back pockets of their skinny jeans.) It doesn't take a Southern prophet like Persons to see that there's a currently a love/hate relationship with modern culture, which often affords us comfort and speed and ease at the expense of authenticity and community and discipline. "What should the new map look like?" he asks, and though that's a good question, the closest Persons comes to an answer —"Let us have a place of our own. A simple place in the light of day. An ordinary place untouched"—doesn't give us much to go on. Barring a world- altering cataclysm like the one in The Road—Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel—I don't see us willingly turning back the wheel of progress.

General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Persons shot General Orders No. 9 over eleven years, and most of those years preceded the availability of affordable high definition cameras for no-budget filmmakers. With the exception of a few showpiece shots, then—and just about all of the CGI/infographic stuff—most of the film is effectively in standard definition, although it's presented in 1080p. The cinematography is often wonderful, but the picture quality unfortunately suffers with blurry textures, a lack of overall clarity, grungy color reproduction, and certain unavoidable side-effects of shooting on SD video, including frequent aliasing, occasional macroblocking, and other source-related issues. Even the material that is in high definition is rarely sharp sharp. Still, the film probably looks as good here as it's ever going to look, and there are at least no major compression or encode-related distractions. The difference between the Blu-ray and the DVD is definitely not as drastic here as it is in other titles, but if you're looking for the best way to experience the film, this disc is the way to go.

General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The disc's menu presents only one option for viewers—the choice of a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, or an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo mix. Whichever you choose, you're in for a quiet experience. For all intents and purposes, there are really only two aspects to the soundtrack, William Davidson's hushed, Terrence Malick-style narration, and a mostly ambient score by Chris Hoke. Both sound clear and clean and are uncompromised by crackles, hisses, pops, or muffling. My only complaint is that there are no subtitle options for those who might need or want them.

General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

I would've loved an interview with the director, at least, but unfortunately there are no bonus features to be found here.

General Orders Nº 9 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Here's the litmus test: Go to YouTube and watch the trailer for General Orders No. 9. If you're put-off completely by the bucolic imagery and philoso-poetic narration—or if you just don't think you could take seventy-odd minutes of it—the molasses-paced documentary-cum-video art installation probably isn't for you. But if you're suitably intrigued, if you instantly feel that "ghostly longing" for a South-that-once-was, the experimental film will probably be worth your time. Note that much of the footage was shot in standard definition, so the Blu-ray format holds only modest benefits to the material over DVD, including a lossless audio track. Recommended for map-lovers, ephemeraphiles, and anyone who owns an ax or antlers for decorative purposes.