CPHDOX day 5-6: Scenario, Journey to the West, The Mad Half Hour, The Land of Seven Sheep

There are some strange pairings at the festival. I saw a Swedish 15-min short on Moments of Silence paired with a 50 min Taiwanese film on a man walking slowly. I guess both of them was about something speciel entering the everyday. The Swedish short will be reviewed elsewhere. I also went to a showing of two shorts that were still works-in-progress. They'd been financed with money from DOX:LABS. It's a bit difficult and probably also unfair to review works-in-progress, but I've written a bit about them anyway.

Scenario (Philip Widmann & Karsten Krause, Germany, 2014)

Scenario is apparantly born out of an art installation. It shows. Based around a suitcase containing a report on an affair in early seventies Cologne, between a married secretary and her equally married boss. Along with the often explicit description of the affair from the boss' point of view, the film offers neutral, statistical information mostly on the lives of young German women at the time. The woman herself, Monika, remains silent. This becomes pretty obvious as the boss seems less than enlightened on gender-relations -at one point he describes yet another young lover as 'sex-starved' because she moans loudly during sex, ie. actually enjoys it.

The visual side is sparse. Apart from a few short staged sequences and shots of the suitcase, mostly the film consists of shots from Cologne. Modern day Cologne, though it looks older as it's shot on grainy celluloid. There is a wonderful sense of mood, constantly overcast weather, empty space or crowds passing by, never singular persons. It might seem a little dull. But we learn many interesting things about Monika, and yet she remains vague. What she's like in bed. We see the nude-photos her lover took. That she had three abortions and a kid who died five days old. That she would have her period aprox 260 times througout her life after the affair. But without her own words, how can we know her at all? It's like trying to know a society through statistics and pictures of it's crowded streets. Or something.

Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2014)
I'm absolutely in love with this film, it's one of my favourite films of the year. It's about a monk walking around really slowly! Mainly it's some absolutely stunning pictures, mostly from Marseille. Tsai Ming-liang released Stray Dogs last year,one of the films of the decade, and has been making these films on this monk for a few years. He is a master of the form.

For the unprepared, the film migh be hard to take. There were some walkouts at the screening, especially at the first shot, a close-up of a face, held for what seems like an eternity. But patience pays off, through beauty and humour. A small girl in awe of the monk. A man surprised by the strange creature walking by his window. Two shots uses Norman Fosters Ombriere building to disorienting effect. And there is a cameo from Denis Lavant, the great French actor who played so many roles in Holy Motors, did this in Mauvais Sang and this in Beau Travail. His final appearance in this film is one of the greatest things ever.

I'll admit it took me some googling to figure out what this was.

I'll admit: I cheated a bit. I saw the film on a stream back at the beginning of the year. But it's so much more stunning on the big screen. I want to go to Marseille, just to see the places this was filmed, and perhaps walk slowly down a few stars myself. I'm so unhappy I can't watch this at the second showing on saturday, but Journey to the West will be released along with Stray Dogs by New Wave Films in Europe. That is one hell of a package.

The whole of Walker is on youtube. Journey to the West is a lot like this, but better.

The Mad Half Hour (Leonardo Brzezicki, Argentina, 2014)

Last year I saw Brzezicki's debut feature Night at the PIX-fest, and really loved it. This, being a short film, and a work in progress, was a lesser work, but it was ok. A black and white depiction of a night in Buenos Aires, it had a young man having an existential crisis during a tennis match with his boyfriend, then going out on a night of the town. There was also a group of young women, and an art show. It was ok.

I wanted to see what it added to Night. That film was about a group of young characters travelling out to a house in the woods after a suicide of a mutual friend, who'd created a series of sound-art on tape. This had another young man losing the will to live, though not killing himself. It had an artist, who created a sound-piece with strings of nylon. It had the characters travelling into a wooded landscape all of sudden, where they acted like feral animals. There were some repeated motives. I'm not sure this film really added up to much on it's own, but the director is one to watch. He can do something with sound and grass, and hopefully he'll find a more substantive story and the money to tell it at some point.

The Land of Seven Sheep (Wiktoria Szymanska & Martin Boege, Poland and Mexico, 2014)

This is now in black and white.

I have even less of an idea what to make of this. Funnily enough, it was also in black and white, and was also about travelling into a wooded area (of Mexico, I think, though I guess it could be some part of Poland I don't know about, or somewhere else entirely) A young girl spending a vacation at the house of an elderly man, mostly spending her time with the sheep. Very beautiful pictures, the young girl and the lambs were all very cute. Actually, it wasn't as much black and white, as it was completely desaturated of color, but there were some traces of red and blue at times. But at one point, the young girl ran through some puddles of water as she followed the sheep, and it struck me how uncannily like the beginning of Carlos Reygadas Post Tenebra Lux the whole thing was. And yeah, this short film didn't tell me that much that Reygadas didn't tell me more poetically in the short segment of his film. But, you know, work-in-progress short films are a bit like demos. There is definitely promise in these two directors, the film was beautiful. If they get another film at a festival near me, I'll check it out. But I'm not gonna prioritize watching the finished version of this one, I don't think.