Viennale 2024 | A cinematic plea for Sunday

Viennale – A cinematic plea for Sunday

Yes, Sunday. The warm welcome to the festival, among the last large film festivals of the year, the impeccable selection of the most interesting cinephilic movies of the year, hence the retrospective look at the recent films and the possibility to share that with colleagues and friends, and the exceptional participation of the Viennese audience... All of this makes of the Viennale the Sunday of European film festivals, the most festive moment of the festival year. With this clear impression in my mind, I make of Sunday a thread of the new film discoveries at the festival (here you find more discussions about the films screened at the Viennale).

Was the colour of the logo of the Viennale 2024 been inspired by Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s Bluish? Their film has certainly been a great discovery for me (read my review of the film), and here it works as the Austrian kick-off for this Sunday celebration of cinema. Cinema itself is a Sunday item, exceptional and marginal – and with Bluish I would also say existential and queer. With Bressonian minimalism and Akermanian intensity, the two protagonists – Errol and Sasha – whose weak personalities go hand in hand with their strong humanity, resist even the definition of their social role in resisting, either willingly or spontaneously, to fit into the times and spaces of conformist rules. Their loafing around becomes a sensible, sensitive and sensual exploration of both things and people, to which they bring a sort of truth.

I find a resonance of this queer wisdom in Isabelle Huppert’s odd positioning within Hong Sang-soo’s film and story, A Traveler’s Needs, insofar as she brings a disruptive Sunday breeze to the lives of the Korean people she meets. Again, a gentle-but-direct way to discard conformism through a line of questioning that genuinely pertains to and expresses this ability of Sundays to convey a critical sense of urgency, thanks to their hinting at an ultimate vacancy. Said ultimate vacancy takes the shape of an infinite holy-day in Ben Rivers’ Bogancloch, where its protagonist embodies the perfect fullness of the present, in this way making of each day a holy journey (read Alan Mattli’s review).

If Bogancloch is a film that proudly remains in place, without even trying to go anywhere else, Nicolas Pereda’s Lazaro de noche expands in so many directions that we cannot help but get lost, thereby reaching this no-where/now-here that is the deep secret of any Sunday. Growing from a love triangle destined to draw a circular movement, the separation between voices and images makes render the film a text labyrinth accompanied by images that seem to be in constant delay. The second part of the film dives into the past of the three protagonists through a clumsy network of flashbacks, whose deceptive explanatory intentions finally make the sarcastic and humorous thread of the film even stronger. A final dreamy part turns around a variation of Aladdin’s story in highly pictorial images, where Lazaro and his mother live indefinitely in a desolate house of plenty: an absurdist turn of the film (recalling César Aira’s novels)  that is still able to express the hardship of desiring or the difficulty of having clear desires – another feature of Sunday with its poetic combination of obscurity and joy.

This poetic combination joy connotates Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon’s documentary images of Some Place in Your Mouth, a brilliant short film focussing on motorbikes’ rodeos in Palermo. Apparently loaded with danger or the imminence of violence, the exuberant Sunday vibe of the Sicilian nights leaves room for the discovery of a solidary society, of which the empathic camera is able to record its tenderness. Both rough and tender are the words of one of Magdalena Zurawski’s poem, sensually accompanying the film and giving to it a kind of close reading.

Sundays carry moments where certitudes break, the way every accomplishment conceals finitude. Jonas Trueba’s Volveréis – another exceptional discovery at this Viennale (read Yun-Hua Chen’s review) – is completely built upon the inversion of one of the happiest feasts, like the wedding. Ale and Alex have decided to separate, and come up with an odd idea: why not to celebrate the separation with a proper feast, with friends, music and a separation cake? The most interesting aspect of the film is less the story and more the explicit and assumed redundancy through which the story and the film launch and relaunch the idea itself. We cannot escape feeling it as an indirect strategy for the separating couple to remain together in “performing” the separation. The redundancy of the film – which is also full of delightful details indeed, mostly in the description of the couple’s friends’ reactions to the announcement of their idea, making the film also a subtle anthropological study – is then not a fault but its virtue, the virtue of being able to make us feel the performative contradiction of separating together. Circularity is no less than the central element of never-ending Sundays.

The ultimate character of Sunday opposes the problem solving attitudes of the working days. Our societies are saturated by this mindset, one that distracts people from interrogating themselves on the true scopes of their life. The Sunday interrogation therefore has a necessary retrospective function regarding the meaning and value of the other days of the week; on work, on problems, on the necessities and struggles of life. A paradigmatic example of this retrospective force of Sunday interrogations is Wang Bing’s ultimate film in his trilogy, Youth. After Youth (Spring) (read my review) and Youth (Hard Times) (read Yun-Hua Chen’s review), in Youth (Homecoming) he accompanies the young seasonal workers of Zhili textile manufactures in their coming back home after the backbreaking months of underpaid work far from their homes. This becomes a moment of truth, where each inch of deception and frustration will grow bigger and bigger – for the workers and us, the viewers – after the seven and a half hours of immersive films in the manufacturing. What kind of Monday is imaginable after such a deceptive Sunday?

Sundays definitely have a political weight, not despite of but thanks to their non-commitment attitude. They are moments of reconsideration, evaluation, reflection, moments of distance that are able to grant us a new consciousness. This is exactly what Johan Grimonprez’ Soundtrack to a coup d’état does in drawing a pitilessly lucid picture of what we could call “the Sunday of Africa”, the season of the independency of African nations starting from the end of the Fifties of the last century. A highly informative documentary, Grimonprez’ film not only uses music in order to have us dive into this specific epoch through amazing editing work that has History breathing and vibrating, but also focuses on a specific misunderstanding concerning the American jazz musicians exploited by the American government, in order to water down the powerful revolutionary movement in Africa that was seeking a genuine independency from future Western and Soviet influences. We discover the commitment of musicians in a battle that consciously involved their music, and not always consciously involved the function attributed to their music. We discover the underestimated contributions of women like Andrée Blouin and Abbey Lincoln – to whom we can add Nina Simone, Melba Liston, Miriam Makeba, Marie Daulne “Zap Mama”, etc.

Another formidable woman caught in the midst of political turmoil is Rusudan Glurjidze, the director of The Antique (read Yun-Hua Chen's review). In her film, Medea, a Georgian émigré who runs a furniture restoration business, buys an opulent apartment in Saint Petersburg with the stipulation that the elderly former owner remains in residence until his passing. Set against the backdrop of 2006, when Vladimir Putin's government was arresting, mistreating, and deporting thousands of Georgians, the film captures a world where people vanish into thin air, and a large wooden wardrobe becomes an unlikely refuge. Initially scheduled to premiere in Venice, The Antique’s screenings were abruptly cancelled following an emergency court order over a copyright dispute. Glurjidze revealed that the Russian Ministry of Culture had demanded the removal of several scenes; upon her refusal, they attempted to obstruct filming, confiscate material at the border, and ultimately block the film’s release – the film’s journey has become an uncanny reflection of its own narrative.

This women’s thread leads me to the last film I would like to mention in my cinematic plea for Sunday. Let’s take a relaxing criminal series, a typical entertainment of Sunday evenings: the German one Ein Fall für zwei, for example. In his Beautiful Dead Women, Jan Soldat realises a compilation short film that digs into the unconsciousness of our Sunday relaxations in showing how, for 30 years, the image of the dead woman in the criminal series has never changed and remains blocked – like the predominance of male directors of the series – on young bodies, regularly “seized” in frozen positions that “offer” their sexual appeal to our gaze, sometime dismembered, always sexualised. Sundays are also moments of analysis, of getting political, of creating and preparing for better Mondays.