Wojciech Has, or cinema before death

Nieciekawa Historia (107", 1983) by Wojciech Has

The theme of departure was already treated by Has in his Pożegnania (Partings, 1958) and Rozstanie (Farewell, 1961): the willed or fated separation from a lover, a milieu, a lifestyle... In Nieciekawa Historia (Uneventful Story), based on Chekhov's Boring Story, Has returns to his obsession with the non-event to explore the imperceptible fracture in a man's life, that moment which dislocates the perception of time, not instantly, but in its wake, so that the origin of the change is like a vanishing point in the perspective of memory.

Departures, farewells, the war, loss, and the death of another are turning points and points of no return marking human lives. The thought of one's own death, however, disturbs chronology, locating the impossible event both in the future, as something yet to come, and in the past, as something that has always accompanied one -- as a shadow. Nieciekawa Historia is, among other things, a portrayal of attitudes before death. A cinematic memento mori.

The movie opens with a long tracking shot of a bourgeois interior. The stillness of the furniture; the half-empty dining table with a silver tea set and an unfinished piece of cake on a porcelain plate; oil paintings hung on the walls covered with faded wallpaper; and the opening credits resembling gravestone inscriptions, evoke death and the denial of death. The accumulation of objects anchors their owner in life; at the same time, it is a burial hoard. The hour is "the dead of night," or rather those last minutes before the break of dawn when ghosts may yet come and go. The faint autumn twilight signals both birth and decline. The only thing that "stirs" in that calm is the clock. And then, an off-screen voice speaks:

If I were asked to name the essential element of my existence, I would answer without hesitation: sleeplessness.

The back-and-forth movement of the pendulum (wahadło) puns on the speaker's lack of hesitation (bez wahania, "without sway," that is "dead certain"), and suggests the contradiction between the measured (rhythmical and calculated) time and the relentless timelessness of insomnia. If death is an eternal sleep, sleeplessness is by no means its opposite. On the contrary, as described by the disembodied voice, it is an exercise in death. The waking of the insomniac is an impossible wake over his own corpse:

Notes from Festival du cinéma réel, part 2

L'Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (66', France 1966) by Marcel Hanoun

On Saturday, March 27, Festival du cinéma réel devoted a day to L'Atelier du cinéaste: Marcel Hanoun à l'improviste, with the participation of the film maker. 

It is perhaps not a coincidence that, while the first part of my festival notes was devoted to the very last film I saw before leaving Paris, Susana de Sousa Dias's 48, the second part is going to evoke Marcel Hanoun's Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung. Made more than forty years apart, one as a document of experiences of political prisoners during the 48-year-long fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the other as a fictional record of an "authentic" trial of a Nazi criminal, the two films bear more than superficial resemblance. As Marcel Hanoun remarked after the screening, his intention -- already in 1966 -- was to forestall voyeurism. Both film makers are aware of the pleasure inherent in viewing images and, in creating what might be called the cinema of ethics, deliberately evacuate their film of images to give primacy to the spoken word.

The last statement is not, of course, entirely true.  . . .

Notes from Festival du cinéma réel, part 1

48 (93', Portugal 2009) by Susana de Sousa Dias

This film was awarded the Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel. Although such seal of approval is no guarantee of the quality of a work of art... this was one of the most moving, well-composed films I saw in the festival. 

A 1950s' police photo of a young woman appears on the screen. Black and white print faded into shades of brown and yellow. A solemn face looks straight ahead: not at the audience, but into the light of the projector shining like an interrogation lamp. A "mug shot" of a victim of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal. Soon, a voice begins to speak, recounting details of her imprisonment as they come to her mind, called forth by the photograph. The voice is calm; at times falters. Breathing can be heard, sometimes the sound of swallowed tears. The face on the screen gradually fades until the entire screen is flooded by grey luminosity. Silence. Breathing. Silence and darkness: de Sousa Dias is not afraid to explore those moments of waiting, risking the discomfort of the audience who, as if suddenly conscious of the two senses of captivity, begins to leave*.

Waiting, expectation. The voice may speak again: the story has not been exhausted. Speaking does not bring relief to the survivor; there is no catharsis in truth-telling. Retold, the torment is relived, and telling it now, like withstanding it then in silence, is a duty. There is no completing of the tale.

Out of the darkness of the mute screen, in the exact same place where the other has disappeared, another face emerges. . . .