Explore by #Experimental
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
Le quattro volte
Online streaming at the Solothurner Filmtage 2021
Il carbone scalda l’uomo, che pascola le capre, che si riparano sotto gli alberi, che fanno il carbone. Il film è del 2010, ma allo stesso tempo è senza tempo, perché ci immerge nel ciclo della vita procurandoci un’esperienza ormai rara, ma pur sempre vera, almeno quanto lo è la nostra carne. Le quattro volte – in cui nascere e morire: umani, animali, vegetali, minerali – è anche uno studio etnografico su di un equilibrio arcano tra uomo e natura, come lo si può ancora (per quanto?) scoprire in un paesino calabrese nel massiccio del Pollino. Ma al tenore chiaramente documentario si sovrappone un discorso tutto cinematografico, che esalta la telecamera, il racconto visivo, fino a farci riscoprire i suoni del paesaggio – con un attento lavoro di sound design. Nella lentezza ipnotica dei cicli naturali pure si sviluppano delle linee drammaturgiche. Per quattro volte, appunto: gli ultimi giorni di un anziano pastore, i primi giorni di un capretto bianco, gli ultimi giorni di un pino maestoso, i primi giorni del carbone appena creato. Quattro storie individuali intervallate da momenti corali, ovvero cerimonie religiose e pagane: il tutto come fosse completamente astratto dai nostri tempi. Per questo si potrebbe criticare il film di ricercare anacronisticamente la poesia di un tempo inesistente. No, ai miei occhi è solo lo sforzo rigoroso di avvicinarsi all’essenza naturale dell’uomo, al tempo della natura stessa. In questo il film di Michelangelo Frammartino è pienamente riuscito: un’esperienza unica che solo il grande schermo può rendere così efficace.
Le quattro volte | Film | Michelangelo Frammartino | IT 2010 | 88’ | Cinémathèque suisse Lausanne, Solothurner Filmtage 2021