Rien que l’Europe tout entière, son histoire — jusqu’à ses sources mythologiques —, son présent, sa variété, ses défis : voilà le sujet de l’essai filmique de Felix Tissi. Élément de restriction de la focale : Europe, la déesse grecque, parle en voix off avec Dieu de sa situation, ses plaisirs, ses malaises, elle se plaint de son absence, ou de sa présence trop multiforme. Une belle idée, sur le papier ; mais nous avons l’impression que le thème religieux de l’Europe est plus une occasion saisie qu’un véritable sujet d’approfondissement. Aussi parce que plusieurs chapitres se suivent dans la structure de Gottlos Abendland, touchant d’autres thèmes comme la migration, l’exploitation des ressources, la bureaucratie, les grandes différences de coutumes, etc. Une liste réfléchie, certainement bien choisie, mais qui pour chaque chapitre ne réussit qu’à effleurer le début d’un approfondissement, exactement comme pour la relation « occasionnelle » d’Europe à Dieu. Gottlos Abendland est un film plein d’occasions, comme un livre réduit à sa table de matière et à sa préface. Oui, « occasion » et « occident » partagent la même racine, mais puisque le trait caractéristique de l’Europe est certainement sa complexité, Felix Tissi lui fait-il justice avec son approche panoramique ?

« Panorama », voilà une autre invention européenne, qui après l’encyclopédisme a su se développer jusqu’à ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui « globalisation ». Mais l’obsession si européenne pour le global, pour le catalogue, pour l’inventaire, une fois résumée dans le temps d’un long-métrage, s’apparente plus au délire qu’à l’analyse ou à l’originalité. Par contre, du côté des images — dont un panorama ne peut se passer —, le voyage filmique que nous faisons avec Gottlos Abendland est riche et impressionnant. Pierre Reicher à la caméra sera le dépositaire de mes principales louanges pour une œuvre qui aurait pu dire, exprimer davantage en accordant la centralité aux images plutôt qu’aux mots de la voix off. On aurait peut-être perdu le fil quelquefois, en l’absence d’informations, et on se serait peut-être posé plus de questions que l’on aurait reçu de réponses — et n’est-ce pas là justement une des essences de l’Europe ? La piste sonore signée par Fred Frith est également assez suggestive : elle semble rester toujours sur une tonalité de mystère, ce qui finalement sert à contrebalancer le registre déclaratif et démonstratif du contenu verbal du film.

Gottlos Abendland nous promène un peu partout sans vouloir défendre une véritable thèse, préférant une approche critique très généraliste. Le chemin filmique vaudra le parcours, peut-être plus pour ce que chacun de nous peut cogiter par soi-même, particulièrement en réaction à la piste visuelle. En ce qui concerne le « gottlos » du titre (un adverbe ?) il restera un choix peu crédible, bien que notre Europe demeure dans les faits encore bien sécularisée — et j’ajouterai : Dieu merci !

Gottlos Abendland | Film | Felix Tissi | CH 2019 | 71'

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Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres 

und als der prinz mit dem kutscher tanzte, waren sie so schön, daß der ganze hof in ohnmacht fiel: this is the fairy tale title of Ronald M. Schernikau’s novel (1982), a celebration of freedom in the legendary Eighties in West Berlin. This novel is the main inspiration of Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s So Pretty, whose story reflects the legacy of the text, which is also the object of translation in the film. The text openly refers to a filmic plot, and So Pretty refers to the text, stages the text, and in a way absorbs the text: it is certainly not a question of philology but of performative embodiment, which is doubled by the making-of of this performance itself.

In the intertwining of text, film and performance, it is not easy to follow the line of a story that is made of daily life gestures and calm discussions, but I think that the slippery understanding of the plot of So Pretty is part of its intentions, as it echoes the hybridity and polyvalence of the main characters’ roles. Tonia, Franz, Paul, Erika, and Helmuth are nothing but mobile poles of tension in an apparently undramatic chain of minor events, be they domestic, performative (the reading of the translation of the text) or public (a demonstration in the streets of New York). Their sexual and gender identity remain open or, even better, open to change. They exemplify the opposite of the multiplication of definitions and categories for the LGTBIQ identities. What seems to me to be an interesting predicament of So Pretty is the idea that the relationship makes the gender (and the identity), and it is not the gender that makes clear the range of possibilities of relationships. In this way, one should interpret the notion of “trans” in terms of (constant) fluidity and change.

Now, in Dunn Rovinelli’s world – and partly in Schernikau’s one too – this liquid style of life goes together with a certain coolness. Coolness in the undramatic dramaturgy and in the aesthetic of the film. Through wonderful framings – so pretty… – and slow movements of the camera that imply many hors-champs, our gaze is kept at a distance and in a contemplative mood towards the characters. It is as if we would need a certain amount of static in order to see the fluid and smooth aspects of their world. Does queerness really need coolness? The question remains open, and our experience in So Pretty is both open and special.

So Pretty | Film | Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli | USA-FR 2019 | 83’ | Luststreifen Film Festival Basel 2019

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A renowned, white, male Austrian music composer contracts with an American, black, female performer to dispose of her time and body as a possession. All the marks of Western colonialism and macho patriarchalism seem to be summed up in a story that has been revealed in the press. But the intentions of Beatrice Behn and René Gebhardt’s documentary have rather been to accompany and extend Georg Friedrich Haas’ outing of his kinky identity, of which Mollena Williams is sort of an icon in the States, as she is mostly known as a stand-up comic and BDSM educator. That a love relationship can take the form of domination-submission, with a certain degree of consensual violence, is certainly a stumbling block for the politically correct and open-minded common opinion on racial and gender issues. Is violence, even if consented to, still a reproachable deed? Can we accept the free assumption of reactionary patterns that have made and still cause to suffer plenty of people?

The Artist and the Pervert has the intelligence of answering these delicate questions through the direct example of a couple of artists that let the camera visit their intimacy. There is never voyeurism in this filmic operation, insofar as their will to express, communicate, and explain is always perceptible and the answer is unavoidably multifaceted and complex – as is always the case when our gaze becomes less superficial and more personal – and will involve the difficult biographies of the two artists, whose past traumas find both solution and sublimation in this only apparently unbalanced relationship.

Then, Behn & Gebhardt’s film experiences a sort of shift. What seems the hesitant architecture of the film reveals itself to be the form of an evolution. The focus swings from the erotic habits of Georg and Mollena’s relationship to their activities as artists and, more in particular, to their first collaboration. In this respect, both figures assume fully independent personalities: the play between them as artists will definitely seem to be more balanced than their play as lovers. Moreover, Mollena’s straightforward clarity on political issues will profile her as a dominant debater. Now we see how the choice for a domination/submission relationship is possible as long as it is done from a fair position of reciprocity that implies nothing but respect. In a way, for the interesting questioning of violence that cracks the certainties of the open-minded and politically correct milieu, this shift results in a watering down of poignancy, but the humanist thread that animates The Artist and the Pervert will get its final crescendo in the form of a love story.

The Artist and the Pervert | Film | Beatrice Behn, René Gebhardt | DE 2018 | 96’ | Luststreifen Film Festival Basel 2019

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Scheme Birds is a difficult contemplation on reality. Grey, isolated lives that duplicate inter-generational hardship are stacked within one of the government housing towers (or “schemes”) that dot an even greyer landscape with brutalist absurdity. Motherwell, Scotland, is a former steel producer for the Empire. “Steelopolis” now lies in socio-economic ruin due to Thatcher’s strategy to make Britain great again, at the expense of its neighbouring kingdoms.

Our teenage protagonist Gemma is born in the year that the steelworks are blown up. The camera intimately buries its lens into the daily life of this young woman and her community as they invariably fall victim to the system: «If you stay here, you either get locked up or knocked up». With no work and little opportunity, the children fight. Cultural pugilism starts at an early age: toddlers pummel soft furnishings as a celebrated milestone; Gemma trains with her fists in the local boxing gym run by her grandfather; scraps between other teenagers go viral on social media, spilling onto the streets and landing them in jail or hospital. The illusion of respect from incarceration and violent brawling culminates in both tragedy and transformation, but through exchanges of hardened love and hope for tiny lives we are directed by filmmakers Ellen Fiske (UK) and Ellinor Hallin (Sweden) towards Gemma’s strength and bravery when mobilising her and her son’s freedom from this template of existence.  

The filmmakers treat actuality with self-effaced sensitivity. Motherwell’s story is told mostly through Gemma’s narration over montage and filmed action. Small lapses of time demonstrate the duration of the filmmakers’ interest in her world as we watch a feisty girl, happy to live her whole life in the scheme, peel away from juvenility into a caring mother and friend. Time in its synchronic slicing and diachronic unfolding are visually engaged through slow-motion grabs of intense emotions set against the vocal thump of Scottish artist and author Loki the Rapper. Scenes that dwell inordinately on everyday actions express the grip of “mundane being” over any transcending purpose. 

One cannot overlook the simple yet apposite metaphoric relation between the teens and the homing pigeons - the pride of their community. Seen as pestilent “rats with wings” in most affluent cities of the world, we track their haphazard murmuration, swirling around the towers; the potential to break free from the flock can occur at any moment. While most return to what they know, some «fly the nest».

Fiske and Hallin’s collaboration brings concrete social truths to light with story-telling and cinematic finesse that fictional working-class realist cinema simulates in representation, but ultimately removes us from.

Scheme Birds | Film | Ellen Fiske, Ellinor Hallin | SWE-UK 2019 | 87’ | Zurich Film Festival 2019

Best Documentary Feature at Tribeca Film Festival 2019

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Doris, a young woman of the Wayuu people in the Guajira desert, is going to exhume her cousin in order to give her a second burial. This is the ritual that Lapü describes. This ethnographic approach will never abandon the narrative line of Juan Pablo Polanco and César Alejandro Jaimes’ first feature, and the result would be an exclusively informative documentary if the filmmakers hadn’t made some interesting choices for the camera and the sound. Constantly playing with darkness, the focus of the camera is Doris’ memories, her imaginings, expectations and dreams. The intangibility of this individual matter seems to shape the photography of the film, in dialogue, sometimes contrasting, with the outdoor bright images of the Wayuu community. Doris’ inner world is never actually separated from the common spirituality that she embodies and there is a perfect continuity between the dead and the living.

The delusions of darkness and a cinematic language made of allusions take their full meaning through the absolute centrality of the sound layer, which certainly constitutes Lapü’s structure and soul. Yesid Vasquez for the sound and Antonio Ponce for the sound design – together with the foley team – deserve more than a mention for this film. Some sequences with the completely dark screen invite the viewer to close their eyes, sometimes, to create another continuity, between the film and our own memories, imaginings, expectations and dreams. In this both fictional and real world, far from the Colombian desert and from the ethnological gaze, another film can flourish… 

Lapü | Film | Juan Pablo Polanco, César Alejandro Jaimes | COL 2019 | 75’ | Zurich Film Festival 2019

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C’est l’histoire de deux solitudes : celle d’une main, oui, une main coupée, se promenant toute seule sur ses doigts ; et celle de Naoufel, enfant puis adolescent, entre famille perdue et futur très incertain. Si la figure de Naoufel, par sa malchance quelquefois un peu forcée, embrasse la société des perdants, des faibles, des maltraités par la société — et ne peut que nous faire penser au Rémi d’Hector Malot en version contemporaine —, les aventures de la main qui s’échappe d’un laboratoire médical constituent certainement l’élément d’intérêt et d’originalité qui marque la dramaturgie autrement trop mélodramatique de J’ai perdu mon corps. La construction de l’entrelacs entre les deux histoires se fait avec lenteur, par un montage convaincant (car) assez ouvert.

Les films d’animation nous ont habitués à jouir de la liberté d’espace et mouvement, ici bien exploitée par Jérémy Clain dans le périple improbable de la main, contrairement au parcours plus réaliste de Naoufel. Mais c’est la liberté de mouvement dans le temps qui marque le récit filmique de J’ai perdu mon corps : nous nous retrouvons souvent à perdre plutôt les coordonnées temporelles, entre les flash-back — ou flash-forward ? — de Naoufel enfant/adolescent et une main qui se révélera plongée dans un futur destiné à se souder au présent de la partie finale du film. Dans ce puzzle temporel bien intrigant, c’est l’identité de la personne et de son caractère qui émerge avec encore plus de décision. Naoufel est fidèle à lui-même, à son corps ; l’histoire de ses malchances et de ses hésitations ne fait que mettre à l’épreuve et donc souligner l’intégrité de son âme, qui est également celle de son corps.

Ce n’est pas seulement par la beauté souvent romantique des dessins que J’ai perdu mon corps explore le registre de la sensualité. La main et sa perspective inhabituelle en sont aussi un vecteur, mais moins que le choix de cadrer les scènes depuis des points de vue improbables, avec une préférence pour les détails et donc pour la profondeur de l’image. Une si belle saga esthétique et une architecture cinématographique si importante ne feront alors que nous laisser un peu déçus face à la maigre qualité de l’histoire racontée, tachée de misérabilisme et soutenue par une histoire d’amour un peu conventionnelle. 

J’ai perdu mon corps | Film | Jérémy Clapin | FR 2019 | 82’ | Zurich Film Festival 2019

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Welcome to the realm of kitsch and decadence! Beat Oswald invites us to enter the “Palace”, a “Senior Living Community” in Florida, actually the Palace at Coral Gables, which hosts “Independent Living Residences” and is the first of a series of residences of The Palace Group. The kitsch is apparent through the standard luxury of the heavy “royal” decorations that are dominated by redundant ornaments and the colour gold. The structure is perfectly functional, and markets and offers not only care and comfort but joy and fun. The decadence emerges as a fact of the aging bodies and, moreover, through the youth obsession of an entire generation. This obsession is so American that the film seems ultimately to speak more of the States than of the condition of old people in general.

Even if this specific documentary subject would naturally encourage the assumption of a caustic and pitiless gaze – and Beat Oswald is also an ethnologist… – his camera is able to maintain the same distance and respect towards the people that lead the business, and the clients that take advantage of the services. Without empathy, but also without irony, this very well edited film succeeds in making us go beyond the descriptive layer and pose existential questions. Through an exaggerated celebration of life, we cannot avoid feeling the breath of death. Billy Strayhorn’s song, Lush Life (1933-1936), therefore becomes a refrain that gains a metaphysical flavour where nostalgia is simultaneously banned and triumphant, where loneliness and lust intertwine, where a senior resident will have something to say to each and every one.

Golden Age | Film | Beat Oswald | CH 2019 | 85’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2019

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Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres 

Oui et non : ce sont les options référendaires que les Québécois ont vécues en 1980 et en 1995 pour se séparer ou non du Canada. Deux dates qui marquent deux générations, celle de Joseph et Emma, en couple puis séparés, et d’Ulysse, leur fils qui retrouve les mêmes agitations politiques que ses parents, le même engagement. Et oui et non, c’est également l’alternative à laquelle sont confrontés Joseph et Emma quant à la question de leur réunion ; l’un, le plus ambitieux des deux mais également le plus défaitiste, la souhaite ; l’autre s’y essaye puis s’y accroche. Mais Ville Neuve — le village à la mer où Joseph se retire pour chercher un nouveau début — est un film qui se tient tout en deçà de ces options, et plutôt explore les plis infinis qui, sous la pression de la vie vécue, se multiplient entre le oui et le non. C’est un film d’animation dessiné en noir et blanc où nous pouvons découvrir les mille tonalités de gris, les mille formes des ombres, les reflets, c’est un film de nuances.

Et un film de parole. Le récit, quelquefois relié à l’action, est surtout structuré autour des moments de méditation, voire des stances poétiques qui rythment les évolutions des âmes, entre regret et espoir, souvenirs et tentatives. Il s’agit d’un voyage qui se déploie tout à l’intérieur des protagonistes du film, dont il faut louer la solidité – elle n’était pas donnée, avec une ligne narrative si radicalement intimiste.

La souffrance est liée aux échecs du passé, et le drame de Ville Neuve est tout dans la difficulté de se libérer du poids du passé, le côté sombre de la maturité. Voilà, peut-être, la raison pour laquelle Félix Dufour-Laperrière insiste sur l’eau, thématisée par la mer et son ouverture, mais aussi véhicule d’un principe de liquidité qui connote les contours des relations, et cela à travers la liquidité des formes : l’encre sur papier des dessins mais surtout la fluidité dans la dynamique de l’animation. Insistance également sur la nuit, si présente, si sombre, dans laquelle la scène plusieurs fois évoquée de la montée de la cloche dans le film Andrej Rublëv d’Andreï Tarkovski (1966) fait figure de phare.

Ville neuve est un film qui met en scène le drame de la stagnation des âmes et des relations, lesquelles peuvent trouver, justement à travers et en traversant les marées de l’hésitation, la beauté du début, nouveau début ou début tout court. Car, au fond, l’hésitation elle-même est un début de beauté.

Ville Neuve | Film | Animation | Félix Dufour-Laperrière | CAN 2018 | 76’ | Cinéma Bellevaux Lausanne

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Il film di animazione La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia è rivolto ad un pubblico di ogni età. Infatti si basa sulla favola omonima di Dino Buzzati (1945) che sa catturare l'attenzione di grandi e piccoli, perché dotata di diversi livelli di lettura: una semplice fiaba che nasconde interpretazioni a livello sociale, politico, filosofico, molto attuali.

Non c'è un vero lieto fine: gli orsi affamati e in cerca del figlio del loro re, Leonzio, lasciano le montagne per scendere a valle, dove abitano gli uomini, ma sono respinti da loro con pregiudizio e ostilità, pur essendo innocui. Con apertura e resilienza gli orsi riescono a cavarsela e a trovare stratagemmi per sopravvivere, fino a riuscire a regnare pacificamente insieme agli uomini. L'equilibrio non dura, perché vizi e difetti degli uomini intaccano alcuni orsi, che alla fine decidono di ritornare ai monti.

L'illustratore Lorenzo Mattotti, sceneggiatore e regista del film, rimane piuttosto fedele all'omonima opera letteraria, realizzando una coproduzione italo-francese, che è un piacere per gli occhi, spumeggiante per l'inventiva, per la costante sincronizzazione del suono al movimento come nelle animazioni Disney dei primordi, per la rappresentazione di paesaggi, luoghi, oggetti, dettagli, tanto fantasiosi quanto ricchi di cromatismi, di riferimenti alla cultura siciliana e dell'Europa meridionale più in generale. Accentuano il lavoro di radicamento spazio-temporale le musiche originali di René Aubry, che utilizza anche strumenti del folclore siciliano per le sue composizioni, e le voci dei personaggi, affidate – nella versione italiana – a Andrea Camilleri (il vecchio orso), Antonio Albanese (Gedeone), Toni Servillo (Leonzio), Corrado Guzzanti (Salnitro).

La cura delle immagini, disegnate una per una con grande lavoro da un'équipe di professionisti (i movimenti dei personaggi animati sono stati costruiti a partire dall'osservazione di quelli degli attori scelti) ha realizzato quasi un piccolo capolavoro nel suo genere. Peccato che il regista abbia assecondato troppo spesso la dimensione spettacolare offerta dall'intreccio, lasciando spazio a scene di combattimenti, inseguimenti e mostri spaventosi di varia natura, di cui l'immaginario delle anime è purtroppo già pieno, e senza le quali il film non avrebbe affatto perso in innovazione e capacità affabulatoria.

La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile | Film | Lorenzo Mattotti | FR-IT 2019 | 81’ | Fantoche Baden 2019

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Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres

At the presentation of the film at the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival in Baden, we discovered that the making of Away has been a one man show. In a titanic enterprise, which somehow also ensured a certain degree of freedom and economy, Gints Zilbalodis did everything alone. Equally titanic seems the enterprise of his young protagonist, a teenager surviving an air crash accident, alone on an island, at the furthest point from the only town on said island. A slowly-moving black giant wants to kill him and the story of Away is the adventure of his escape from death in search of safety among the humans.

With this minimalist line of narrative, we are immediately projected onto an allegoric reading of the film, which will accompany us in every moment of the story. The accident as a birth; the choice between a paradise of solitude and the risk of facing death in order to join the other human beings as a coming-of-age dilemma; the mercy for the weakest animals as the ideal of solidarity; the breath of death as a memento of never giving up, etc.

The more or less philosophical or moral thread of Away constitutes only one layer of the film, for the visual layer, with its gorgeous aesthetics, is constantly rivalling any conceptual one. Actually, the conceptual and the aesthetic join together in a “vertical” dimension, where the abysm of existence is echoed through breath-taking landscapes. These landscapes, always great and beautiful, stress the disproportion between the individual and his world, actually making them “sublime” – in the Kantian sense. The absence of words, the inexorably approaching death, the both wide and isolated world, which acts as attractive and inhuman at the same time, the very (possibly deliberately too) repetitive music: all of this contributes to a metaphysical experience.

For this reason, Away is able to awaken the deepest feelings of childhood. More than focussing on the moral wisdom of mythology, Zilbalodis’ animation film expresses rather the sensations that a child can feel hearing a mythological tale, or the sensations that an adult can feel in a dream – the recurrent scenes of the black giant approaching the escaping character hints at a typical situation of dreams. After this intense experience that only animation can convey on a screen, it will be difficult to come back to the norms of reality. For me it remains open whether the young protagonist will find the coveted safety among the humans and their town. I would have probably liked to continue to wander through the sensuous and metaphysical landscapes, even if the death breathes down my neck…

Away | Film | Animation | Gints Zilbalodis | LV 2019 | 74’ | Fantoche Baden 2019

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