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Věra Chytilová
Screenings of Daisies (Semdikrásky) in January 2023 at Kino Xenix Zürich and Kino Orient Wettingen
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
The Green Fog
Capriciously related to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock´s Vertigo, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan & Galen Johnson´s The Green Fog is a parodical Frankenstein assembled from pieces from movies and television shows set in San Francisco. As it was commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society to be premiered at the close of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 16, 2017, the film has been easily classified as a tribute or homage, even a remake. Maddin himself has employed terms such as «emotional geography» and «rhapsody on Vertigo» when asked about this lecture on creative stealing and film scholarship with plenty of funny (sometimes sombre) echoes of a romantic thriller.
In some way The Green Fog invite us to forget Hitchcock and play with the idea of how ridiculous can be a film and/or some ways to watch it. Radical subtractions and humorous additions become tools to construct a weird artefact to prove that authorship survives any attempt to supplant its genuineness; it doesn´t matter who is implied, if Mr. Ed Wood or Sir Orson Welles. At the same time, Maddin and his witty henchmen emerge clear winners from this unsafe zone where Vertigo is a stimulating absence. Its exercise of style consists of unpicking the seam of this classic of suspense and replacing it with an anthology of homeless shots and guillotined conversations.
In this deliciously campy Atlas Mnemosyne of Frisco portrayed by cinema and TV, Maddin & the Johnson Brothers tie the tongues of some characters, launch a Hamletian, contemplative Chuck Norris, and reduce its main referent to a fragment of the stairs seen in the rooftop chase. Throughout this process what was a detective movie turns into a comedy, seriousness gives way to cunning frivolity. If it’s true that there’s always something of burlesque in films that supplant the mood of an original story by strained gravity sthen in The Green Fog any operation is permeated by a disquieting and typically maddinesque malice. The awareness of dealing with shots that have lost their natural hors-champs increases the strangeness of this creature begotten by cinephilia and an acute sense of the uncanny. Ceci n'est pas Hitchcock.
The Green Fog | Film | Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson | USA 2017 | 63’
Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres
Looking for Oum Kulthum
Loin d’être un biopic sur une icône égyptienne, Looking for Oum Kulthum met en scène, à la manière de Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017), le tournage d’un film sur Oum Kulthum (1898-1975). Ainsi, au lieu de vouloir percer les rapports étroits entre création et vie chez la chanteuse, la cinéaste Shirin Neshat, par un processus de mise en abyme, interroge l’entremêlement de ces deux éléments dans le processus de création cinématographique et, par conséquent, dans la construction de la personnalité d’Oum Kulthum. En l’occurrence, elle va dépendre de projections, variant au cours du récit, de la réalisatrice Mitra (Neda Rahmanian) sur cette grande célébrité du Moyen-Orient. Dans les premières séquences du film, hétérogènes et magnifiques, celle-ci cherche à saisir par une posture contemplative qui est Oum Kulthum — en la fantasmant, s’imaginant elle-même dans son propre film, puis en auditionnant des acteurs pour le rôle principal de son long métrage.
Cette appropriation par une observatrice étrangère — comme Shirin Neshat, Mitra est iranienne —, qui plus est une femme, va soulever un nombre considérable de tensions dont le fondement semble idéologique, social et politique. En choisissant des acteurs issus de classes populaires, Mitra veut leur soumettre une vision de la diva qui diverge drastiquement de la leur : d’un côté nous avons une personne humble dont le succès ne l’éloigne pas du peuple ; de l’autre, une Oum Kulthum qui a dû tout sacrifier, notamment sa famille et ses origines, pour parvenir dans un milieu conservateur et traditionnel. La vie privée de Mitra va toutefois finir par bouleverser ses certitudes : à la figure mythifiée de Oum Kulthum, elle lui préfère, quitte à violenter les faits, une personnalité plus fragile tiraillée entre la gloire et la fidélité à elle-même, à sa famille.
Looking for Oum Kulthum semble dès lors dénoncer l’impossibilité pour une femme de concilier ces deux rôles : un choix s’impose nécessairement. À ceci, s’ajoute une belle réflexion sur le cinéma, déconstruisant les figures mythiques pour leur donner plus d’épaisseur, de chair, d’humanité.
Looking for Oum Kulthum | Film | Shirin Neshat | DE-AT-IT-MAR 2017 | 130’ | Art Basel Film Programme 2018
Screenings in Swiss cinema theatres
