pocahontas

Documentar despre o planetă necunoscută - The New World

Giulia Ghica Dobre

Men's Health, septembrie 2008

Terence Malik, ultimul poet de la Hollywood, îşi începe povestea despre Pocahontas ca şi cum ar face un documentar despre o planetă necunoscută.

Avem pe de-o parte europenii care debarcă în Virginia la 1600, şi indienii care le apar în faţă. Două specii îngheţate de uimire în faţa stranietăţii celuilalt. Se salută, fac schimb de sunete de neînţeles, de mişcări magice. Printre englezi, John Smith (Colin Farrell), un soldat aventuros şi indisciplinat, căruia i se va cere să urce râul în căutare de alimente. Indigenii însă îl capturează şi aproape că l-ar fi linşat, dacă nu ar fi intervenit tânăra prinţesă Pocahontas (sublima debutantă Q'orianka Kilcher, 15 ani), fascinată de acel bărbat care vine dintr-o lume îndepărtată.

John Smith, ca orice adult, se înmoaie în faţa atenţiilor repetate ale adolescentei şi uită rapid de misiune. Trăieşte idilic în satul indian, în prezentul cel mai pur, între băi la râu şi curse pe câmpurile de cereale. Când se întoarce la fortul englezesc, Pocahontas îl urmează, îndrăgostită. Smith, ca orice bărbat, preferă fuga din faţa responsabilităţii relaţiei, şi acceptă o misiune de cartograf pe teritoriile Canadei. Prinţesa indiană se vede dăruită de către destin cu un soţ englez bogat şi faimos, care o va transporta la curtea regelui britanic, şi alături de care va trăi la graniţa între exponat bizar de bâlci şi integrarea totală.

Precum în toate filmele lui Terrence Malik suntem ghidaţi în The New World de o voce dinafara cadrului, care comentează fapte şi senzaţii ale vieţii cu încântarea cu care s-ar descrie fabricarea manuală şi irepetabilă a unui obiect fragil şi preţios.

Precum în toate filmele sale, iubirea este o plonjare totală, natura o stăpână distantă şi maiestuoasă, iar oamenii sunt distraşi de la schimbul lor de violenţe reciproce doar de câte o durere ireparabilă şi hipnotică.

Precum în toate filmele sale, timpii naraţiunii sunt dilataţi enorm, iar peisajele şi sunetele sunt exclusiv naturale.

De ani întregi nu au mai existat filme care să redea atât de atractiv o civilizaţie visată (precum cea a indienilor americani).

Cum s-a scris în America, ceilalţi fac film, dar Malik clădeşte catedrale. E de-ajuns să consumăm secvenţa iniţială, cu sosirea caravelelor, acompaniată de întregul preludiu wagnerian de la Aurul Rinului, simbol al pierderii inocenţei acelor tărâmuri încă nepângărite de cupiditatea occidentală, sau împletirea amoroasă ca metaforă a destinului Lumii Noi. John Smith şi Pocahontas devin, în mâinile magice ale lui Malick, cei două poli în jurul cărora se aglutinează eternele conflicte umane între natură / cultură.

Să te pierzi în misterul reverberat al încadraturilor lui Malik este o experienţă total nevăzută, de frumuseţe şi disconfort.


The New World - USA 2006.
Un film de Terrence Malick.
Cu Christian Bale, Jason Aaron Baca, Colin Farrell, Ben Mendelsohn, David Thewlis, Q'Orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce

vama veche pe abscons

am facut ieri un trip nebanuit de tulburator, pana la vama veche si inapoi; cu nori in majoritatea drumului... am luat-o si la dus si la intors pe drumuri ascunse, sate surprinzatoare, foarte dichisite, cu plopi uriasi si salcami centenari, ca in basmele copilariei! Ca un lung drum initiatic, pe urma unor semne lasate de o vrajitoare buna, spre a "recupera lipsa", cum spuneau fratii Propp in cartile lor...la Vama erau nori si plaja incredibil de goala, am ramas 3 ore, erau valuri si nu puteam sa sfintim apa din cauza copilului, asa ca pe la 15h30 am plecat inapoi..linistiti, absolutizati...pe aceleasi drumuri bizare, parca rupte de istorie, dar foarte inverzite, nu de Baragan  arid... ca un prag absolut necesar, si trecut, cu o usurare maxima! astazi m-am trezit ca dupa un vis magic: intreaga, calma, gata.

berlinale 2011- THE MOUNTAIN

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  One cold afternoon by cocktail's time, in an extremely full cinema hall, I saw : Fjellet / The Mountain, directed by Ole Giæver , a 2011 norvegian movie. This extremely moving and minimalist film is the story of Nora and Solveig . A cross-over between a road-movie and a Kammerspiel, situated in the Norwegian mountainscape. It depicts a lesbian couple taking a hiking trip, following the path of a previous journey they did together several years ago, a journey which ended in tragedy. Now they have to face it again, together. Thus, the two main visual focal points of the movie is their progress through the landscape, and the evolution of their difficult relationship. Mountains and faces. The aesthetics of this film is mind blowing as it is exclusively worked in natural light, gorgeous at that time of the year in the mountains.
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berlinale 2011, my travel into werner schroeter's and more

The cold, the grim, the wind...BERLINALE 2011...But above all, the softly warm encounter with souls I recognize, with creative minds I worship.
Such was the tale about WERNER SCROETER, of whose films I had heard and previewed fragments in my San Fran tumultous years.
The documentary: Mondo Lux -- Die Bilderwelten des Werner Schoeter was produced by Frieder Schalich and directed and written by Elfi Mikesch. It is Werner Schroeter's friend and collaborator Elfi Mikesch that crafted with love a letter to the charismatic dandy and his working style,  following Schroeter's 2006 cancer diagnosis.

The Director chose to pile up scenes of Schroeter rehearsing the play "Antigone/Elektra," while we assist almost as thiefs to bare discussions held during the installation of an exhibition of his photographs.
Mikesch knew she needed to record his working methods and capture his distinctive views on creativity, discussed here with energy and a deep artistic engagement, even when just with a few breaths left, just before Schroeter died in 2010.

There was always something fin-de-siecle, like a moribond romaticism about Schroeter's work, deeply influenced by opera and the way it exposed raw emotions through distinctly artificial devices, among which IRONY plays it all!  His baroque films and stage productions frequently revolved around Eros and Thanatos. While Mikesch doesn't try to psychoanalyze her friend, Schroeter's mention of the suicides of both his beloved grandmother and his first love go some way toward helping the viewer understand the prominence he gave death in his works throughout the decades.

His playful rapport with former lover Rosa von Praunheim reveals his black humor, and Isabelle Huppert's warm recollections further the sense of a generous artist who made lasting friendships. While his youthful personal theatricality softed down with time, he maintained a deep appreciation for the impact of artificiality. His main argument was that artists have to distance themselves from the real world in order to create a new reality.

cottbus

Nothing funny at East!

Strenous job being a child nowadays in the East! At least this is the laborious demonstration of the filmmakers that attended the competition section at the latest Cottbus Eastern European Films Festival……
Filmmakers that fear, most than anything else, about the faith of children. Not anymore as part and as toys of the societies they live in, traumatized societies for many more years to come, but rather as paraphernalia in the merciless hands of destiny. Filmmakers from an Eastern side of Europe where the roughness of Reality reaches the dimensions of ancient tragedies, where destiny remains almighty and unaffected, unpredictable, and overwhelming.
The depicted children of those fierce movies I have just seen last week in Cottbus are subjects to profound mutations. Their relationships with their parents, to society, to other children are subjected to a sort of over democratization. Suddenly they are not treated, by any of these connectors, as kids anymore. At some point in the story they become partners, adults, employees, collaborators. Their innocence, the few bribes that are left after years of traumas, gets buried under layers of toughness, emancipation and rudeness, selfishness and combat.
Such is the case of the Tbilisi based director Dmitry Mamoulyia: DRUGOYE NEBO(“Another Sky”). Initially just another accessory to his father’s life, when they leave their Georgian desert and head to Moscow looking for the disappeared mother, he finds himself propelled into the responsibilities of an adult. He becomes independent in the way he spends time from his father, then soon he will have to earn a living. Doing hard work in a factory for a merciless boss, this quiet boy will be sent to the hardest part of it all. After a short attempt to escape the violence of that drastic job –cutting proud young trees in the middle of a forest – death catches him from behind. Or rather his destiny. Just as much as in the sublime analogy with the proud tough trees being swept away from their roots, cut and cleaned and ordered by alien like machines. In less than a minute. This tragedy can only be observed by a secluded and silent father, powerless, lonely, and distraught.
Between parents and children there is a disconnexion, a fissure impossible to overcome. As in the Romanian film OUTBOUND (“Periferic”). Here an absent mother for years-because of her incarceration- comes back to the real world. With enormous naiveté she tries to recover emotionally and effectively, her eight years old son. After years spent in the orphanage, after years of sexual slavery and abuse, this child is now an insensitive being, disconnected from reality, living a sort of trance which should be for him the only manner of enduring the unbearable. They will employ a lot of time and aborted situations before weaving a tiny connection between them, thinking of a better future life. And the mother, with a sort of infantile bravado, is boasting with a huge amount of money in her purse ... the result, given the earlier ordeals of the child, can be only one: he takes all the money and forsakes his mother while she sleeps, in a train that goes further on, to a destination to which he does not want to be a partaker.

The Serbian movie BELI, BELI SVET (“White, white world”) prefers to investigate what happens with children that have barely been taken cared of while young, at an older age, on the very first steps of adulthood. The childhood traumas and the adulthood discoveries of hidden parenthood, unlawful sex and chaotical life, can only spin the female main character to murder. The young woman twists her fate with an oedipal kind of upheaval, in an ultimate gesture of annihilation of the father figure. A father that turns out to be also the father of her own child…
What exactly is the lever that spins these young European directors to inhabit such ominous stories? Where are the comedies, the love stories, where is even the famous eastern European black humor? It seems like these directors have reached the pick of their despair and wish to set a thorough alarm for everyone who cares about the evolution of the eastern societies. A social, political and financial turmoil is stirring these countries now, and unfortunately that is the environment where, at an individual level, people should find their own path. In a society that has stopped, for half a century, to interrogate itself on what is an individual, what are the relations he should have to his family, to the others, to himself.
A few years ago a dreadful drama happened in Poland, involving two adolescent brothers that committed the ultimate murder. The film MATKA TERESA OD KOTOW (“Mother Teresa of Cats”) retraces the atrocious facts in a revolutionary evolution of the story, starting with the post-factum events and trying, backwards, to understand, or at least to set the frame for the reasons, the antecedents of the final one way drama. In a bourgeois family of a Polish unperceived town the mother is an energetic, fine-looking and sensitive person. She has two adolescent sons, and a young daughter. The middle son who is 11 finds himself under the diabolic spell of his elder brother, a young man accused by everyone of being evil, lost, damaged. The absent father- he fights in Afghanistan, the love their mother distributes more to her growing amount of stray cats, a dull life in a dull society, all that impelled the two boys into isolation, into a sort of aggressive autism. The rapid remedies they find or are offered do not have the power of filling the void they feel. And without knowing we assist at the very moment when they conceive murder like anything else, murder as a normal sollution to their mal de vivre…The murder of the only person that still cares for them, their mother…
In the vortex of adults’ deals and lives, children find themselves misplaced and alone, sometimes lesser than merchandise. Such is the case for the tchetchen child from the Russian film OBRATNOYE DVIZHENIE(“Reverse Motion”). In a society dominated by crime, this foreign child is an object that many claim. The Mafia wants him for using his labor power and because he knows a few gory secrets; the mother of an absent son that fights in Afghanistan wants him in order to fill up her motherly void. Subject to torture, but still filled with dignity, the child starts to re-learn the alphabet of civilization and of childhood. He becomes a cherished and wanted child, and loves his new part. He fills up an empty spot, until the soldier returns. And then, Destiny catches up on them all. The one that comes back to an already occupied place will be evacuated. In an almost silent movie, the end can only bring another soundless and definitive moment!
The adolescents of TILVA ROS (“Tilva Rosh”), another Serbian movie that made a stir lately in several festivals, are in a full process of understanding who they are and what their situation is in the up-side-down world around them. They are annoyed kids coming from socially frustrated families. They all have unemployed parents who struggle to earn money with bizarre kinds of businesses. Between innocence and cruelty, these misguided children think they are free. They do not find any real answers, and may be this is also due to the vacuous story it has been build around them in this film. Even though they ask themselves questions, even though they experiment incessantly, they still do not find any answers. The plot, though, could have worked as a real engine for that, as two best friends fall for the same girl. But it didn’t. These children will just spend their days riding their skateboards, inventing ludicrous Jackass like stunts they can shoot with their video camera and then edit up; they drink beer and smoke marijuana, and are even willing to inflict pain on each other, just to feel they have invented something different and out of their daily routine. This is a film that could have been fresh and natural, but instead is not more than a pointless film about, ultimately, blank characters.

After twenty years of democracy, eastern European directors seem to be less social insurgents, than attentive and apprehensive fathers. And this can only be interpreted as a positive sign!

Giulia DOBRE
FIPRESCI-Bucharest
Romania

cottbus again

Over Me - Tricky