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Věra Chytilová in Vevey
Věra Chytilová in Vevey
Once again released worldwide – this time in a restored version – Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966) will restart as well as put an end to the much-awaited naturalization of its filmmaker's career in international cinephilia. So it happens with every "supreme masterpiece" of any director.
That's one of the reasons why Vevey International Funny Film Festival's invitation to present no less than four comedies of hers in a retrospective programme, including but not limited to Daisies, came as a big surprise: a contemporary of the Romanian New Wave presenting The Czechoslovak New Wave to a Swiss-French audience. Somewhat symbolically, a screening of Calamity (1982) that I was supposed to present at the Romanian Cinematheque in March 2020 was cancelled by recent history, yet the very same film opened the retrospective in Vevey, more or less the same; judging by its length in meters, the 35mm copy from the Romanian archive lacks three minutes, most probably the (unfulfilled) sex scene, and the very first thing that I said had to do with this cultural uneasiness. Our shared history of Eastern European cinema is certainly not as homogenous as it seems from afar. As such, back in the sixties and seventies, Romania had its doubts about the new Eastern waves, importing them with great care, i.e. censorship. Our analogue copies of films made by "comrades" such as Miloš Forman and Márta Mészáros testify to an uneven Eastern past.
Different, but certainly not unlike and that's probably why I find Chytilová's down-to-earth films such as The Apple Game (1977), but especially Prefab Story (1979) and Calamity (1982) to be superior to Daisies and all its experimental extravaganza. In these three features, brought together by Isotta Regazzoni and James Berclaz-Lewis, the director is at her most complex, enriching her philosophy of ethics – individualism as freedom but also immorality, to say the least – with all that the wonderful horrible life under Eastern communism had to offer: ideal, absurd, grotesque, jovial. It's precisely this humanist mixture of moralism and hedonism (regarding the image as well: the real-life childbirth scenes from The Apple Game) that make Chytilová such a challenging intellectual of those times and her seemingly disproportionate, haphazard cinema, reflects her as such: an unstable mise-en-scène, always in motion.
Daisies (Semdikrásky) | Film | Věra Chytilová | CZ 1966 | 76’ | Vevey International Fun Film Festival 2022
El gran movimiento
Screenings in June 2022 at the Cinéma Spoutnik Genève and Bildrausch Filmfest Basel 2022
Il m’arrive, parfois, de voir des films qui n’existent pas. Je les fabrique dans ma tête à partir des images qui défilent sur l’écran. Ainsi, je ne saurais véritablement vous parler d’El gran movimiento, un premier long métrage qui souffre de cette tare propre aux premières œuvres que Luc Chessel décrit si bien, souvent partagées « entre ce qu’il faut faire pour réussir un premier film, et ce qui veut vraiment s’exprimer ». Kiro Russo a voulu réussir et il y est parvenu : non content d’être sélectionné à Orizzonti à Venise en 2021, il en est ressorti couronné du Prix spécial du Jury. Ma foi, c’est très bien. Cela aurait été encore mieux s’il avait fait un autre film. Celui-ci, je l’ai réalisé moi-même, dans ma tête. À dire la vérité, il transparaît, en puissance du moins, dans El gran movimiento. Parfois, il saute même aux yeux avant de battre en retraite. Vous voyez le truc ? Insaisissable et tangible à la fois. J’aime ça. Les choses qui échappent, je veux dire. Le cinéma, de toute manière, a toujours reposé sur la tension entre le visible et ce qui s’y dérobe. Bref, je m’égare. Ce film qui aurait pu exister, donc, aurait été un essai visuel sur l’aliénation urbaine (qui, en tant que phénomène irréductible à des causes exclusivement matérielles, est un magnifique sujet de cinéma). Il serait constitué des séquences d’El gran movimiento, assez nombreuses, qui auscultent La Paz à renfort de zooms à la lenteur appuyée et donnent à penser que ça craint cette ville, que ce n’est plus tenable. Chacune de ces séquences ne rate pas son effet : on se trouve saisi par l’impression de faire face à une métropole à l’agonie, filmée juste avant son effondrement. Si Kiro Russo avait évacué de son film récit et personnages, qui réduisent l’aliénation donnée à sentir par les séquences que j’évoquais plus haut à quelque drame individuel, nous l’aurions devant nous, ce bel essai visuel, et je vous en parlerais. Certes, il n’aurait peut-être par remporté de prix à Venise. Et alors ?
El gran movimiento | Film | Kiro Russo | 2021 | 85’
Virgin Blue
One has not necessarily to refer to authors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul or to Asian dream cinema in order to stress the importance, in cinema, of rendering tangible ghosts, spirits, and other imaginative presences. And this practice does not only concern cinema; at least since Goethe’s Erlkönig, literature (mainly romantic) has also explored the many aspects of this materialisation of imagination, and has been an important wellspring for cinema. Here, with Niu Xiaoyu’s first feature, we sink into a world – the one of the young Yezi – where characters from the past and other spirits saturate the space of her room, her apartment, the garden she usually goes to. Do these spaces simply become her psychic agora, a sort of theatre of the soul? Through the delicate relationship with her grandmother, who starts suffering from dementia, we even lose reliable references in time. Memories, the past and the present melt together, largely thanks to the “presence” of her grandfather, who recently (?) passed away.
The film insists almost obsessively on putting Yezi’s internal forum forward, a radicalisation that could appear redundant, but which serves a specific dramaturgic role. Yezi confesses that she does not want to leave her childhood and become an adult: this is probably the fundamental key to reading the obsessive materialisation of imagination, not just as a symbolic fantasy but as a form of resistance against the outer world, the world of the adults, a world that goes beyond the comfortable bubble of family.
There is more than this motive of a difficult coming of age in Niu Xiaoyu’s film though, for she is able to create a distance from Yezi’s closed universe. She directly talks, as director, to the grandmother, who appears to be her own grandmother, in the flat that is her own flat. This puzzling gesture reveals the documentary layer of Virgin Blue, that thereby assume the form of auto-fiction, putting Yezi into the role of a fictional alter ego of the filmmaker herself. In this way, we can feel the separation from Yezi, and therefore from her dominating interiority. We are not just in her world, but look at her world – assuming the perspective of the filmmaker. The heterogeneity of formal elements and settings, also including real children choreography and comic drawings (by Niu Xiaoyu herself), reinforces this effect of detachment from Yezi’s exploration of her inner world.
Through this film therefore we both live and observe a universe in which childhood memories and demented perception coalesce. Through this film we experience and observe a kind of imaginative autism, which speaks perfectly for childhood, probably dementia, and certainly the specificity of cinema world – and finally the intriguing continuity between childhood, dementia, and cinema… That is why we could say that Yezi is also the spokeswoman for the interiority of cinematic perception, and Niu Xiaoyu its witness, both involved and distant.
Virgin Blue – Bu yao zai jian a, Yu hua tanga | Film | Niu Xiaoyu | CHN 2021 | 100’ | Locarno Film Festival 2021, Cineasti del presente
