I'm not sure if I saw this film the wrong way, or completely as intended. The first part follows children in rainy weather in a city. It was almost like Monsoon, except that film was in boring hi-fi 4K digital, while this is in glorious black and white. Long static takes. It's so beautiful, with the black water, and the white sky, and the shades and hues of the cityscape caught inbetween. The city seems derelict, lots of trash and debris being fished out by the kids, lots of construction work and rundown buildings, a dog on three legs. Then the film moved to the beach, where the water is grey and the sky was filled with grey clouds as well. A shanty-town has been build up next to a stranded ship, which is weird. I thought it had to be about poverty, and that the ships had been left by shipping firms. The children search for scrap-metal, or swim in the water. At one point a downpour happens, and the world changes yet again, with a fog making the boundary between water and sky unclear, and land now being indistinct blots in the background. I was very moved by this film, which had the patience to simply observe the existence these children had to deal with, and let us make up our own opinions on it. Perhaps the storm was the unfair world economy, the ships equal to the debris and trash if only on a larger scale?
Well, no. The storm was a real storm, Yolanda, the biggest typhoon to ever hit the Phillipines. Countless people died. This is revealed only late into the 2½ hour movie, in what is only the second dialogue at the time. Many of the children has lost entire families, or siblings. The ships were cast ashore by the typhoon, and wiped out whole stretches of houses, killing loads of people instantly. All of a sudden, the whole experience changed. But was this really a 'reveal', or should I have known? A short while before, there is a clip of three foreign backpackers taking pictures of the poor children, smiling and laughing and having a great time, with a big ship looming in the background. Silly fools, I thought, and a moment later I realized I've been as dumb myself. I thought they only saw pretty pictures, while I understood what was going on, but I was very, very wrong.
Nothing can take away from how stunningly beautiful the pictures are, though. I've only seen one other Lav Diaz film before, Norte, at PIX in april this year, and I wasn't as impressed as some. It was impressive, but it wasn't as beautiful as I'd hoped. But that one was Diaz' first colourfilm, and perhaps his last? The eight hours of cinema he has released since then - this one and the 5½ hour From What is Before, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno this year - has all been in black and white, and I loved the aesthetics in this film. Like, really loved them, so much that I feel very much guilty inside about it. But perhaps that was the point? Perhaps I will know never forget it, because I was tricked into investing myself in the pictures, before I knew what they depicted? No matter what people think, this should be a strong experience for everyone.
Three Artfilm Shorts:
Another grouping of films, this time I'll just deal with them in order.
Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (Bill Morrison, US, 2014) is a collection of old archival footage from World War I set to music by Aleksandra Vrebalov played by Kronos Quartet. To be perfectly honest, it felt as if the musical performance was the important part, and the filmic portion created to add to that. The footage was very interesting, and there'd definitely been done some artistic choosing with it, like juxtaposing some footage of tanks tinted in blue with footage of planes tinted in warm yellow and red hues. The tank showed it's prowess by mowing down a tree, mainly. A battle scene was made unintelligeble by tear and wear in the almost 100 year old footage. A shot of a fire bled out onscreen. It was all well and good. But the soundtrack seemed like the most important part, and it would obviously have been more served if the Quartet had been there, though of course then it would have been a very different kind of show. The music was interesting, moody and dissonant, with found sounds of old speeches, millitary commandments and hymns. I'll give the soundtrack a listen a few times if it pops up on spotify.
Filmicly speaking, How to Make Money Religiously (Laure Prouvost, France, 2014) was much more interesting. A collage of low-grade digital and video footage, with voiceover, text on screen, and musical ques, it all reminded me of late Godard films (like 3X3D, which I wrote about last spring) and it's an aesthetic I love. It was all very confusing and hard to grasp, but then came the coup: A text said that 'multiplied' viewings was recommended, and then the film began again. But it didn't seem exactly the same, it seemed much more understandable. Or was it just because I'd seen it twice? But no, there were definitely some small diferences, adding up to a somewhat logical narrative of some sort of crime escapade and the money made from that, and all the love and respect that money brought. It was all very toungue in cheek and sarcastic, but it was also very well-made, and I loved the aesthetic. A nice surprise from an artist I didn't know anything about, even though she won the Turner prize last year.
I know about Ben Rivers. His collaboration with Ben Russell, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, won the New Vision prize last year, which honestly pissed me off, as it meant the screening I had planned for days all of sudden unexpectedly was sold out. So actually, I know nothing about Ben Rivers. Things (2014) didn't teach me that much more. A portrait of his house in four seasons, it was all well and good, if nothing out of the ordinary. There was a squirrell that attacked a wooden squirrell and started to bite into it. That was fun. The end was great as well, all of a sudden the house was made into a computer game. But, yeah, the big discovery of the screening was Laure Prouvost.
Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2013)
2014 has been a quite brutal year for the documentary community, with too many filmmakers dying, at times under tragic circumstances. The death of Farocki was perhaps less than tragic, with the 70-year old filmmaker having managed to make over 90 films in his life. It felt soon to me since I'd only learned about him some months ago, when a few of his films were shown in Copenhagen, and I managed to catch Still Life from 97. I was determined to catch this one, his last, at the festival.
It turned out to be a very straightforward portrait of the titular architecture firm. I'd perhaps hoped for something more, like the juxtaposition between old art and modern commercial photography in Still Life, but on the other hand I'm quite interested in architecture, and as such, this was cool. The firm had a lot of balls in the air, with a university building in Potsdam having trouble with the choice of colour for it's facade, competition proposals being made for other buildings including a 'virtual reality' center, and design work being done on chairs and doorhandles. Most of it was extremely detailoriented. People holding small patterns of colour next to each other talking about november light and stuff like that. What was of particular interest was the way reality reacted to the creativity. Doorhandles had to be of a certain thickness due to the design process. The chair had to be easily constructed, since earlier designs were too complex. Costs were too high on certain proposals. In Potsdam, the contractors didn't want the proposed colours, to the frustration of the firm. In a late scene, the firm went to an engineer with their nearly identical proposals for doorhandles, and the guy immediately chose one of them, as the other one would perhaps at times let the hand slip and get caught in the door. So that was the end of that discussion. This wasn't the greatest of films, and either the camera was very poor, or the equipment the film was shown at couldn't due it justice, but there were some ugly artifacts in the film, but as a cheap portrait of an interesting firm, this was well and good.
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