Slow films, easy life (Sight&Sound)

Via Filmwell :

"Part of the critical orthodoxy I have complained about has been the dominance of Slow Cinema, that “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years”, as Jonathan Romney put it [see here]. “What’s at stake,” he wrote, “is a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze . . . a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.”

I admire and enjoy a good many of the best films of this kind, but I have begun to wonder if maybe some of them now offer an easy life for critics and programmers. After all, the festivals themselves commission many of these productions, and such films are easy to remember and discuss in detail because details are few. The bargain the newer variety of slow films seem to impose on the viewer is simple: it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece.

Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (”Bal” Semih Kaplanoglu, 2010) – a beautifully crafted work that, for me suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu – there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not. Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion."

“Passive Aggressive”, editorial by Nick James, Sight & Sound, April 2010

Typical. Misunderstanding CCC. Looking down on art cinema.

We're back in 2006 when CCC was ironically nicknamed "boring art films"! And this is not the dumbing down mainstream press uttering these words... it comes from the most artfilm-friendly cinephile publication in the UK, by the very colleague of Jonathan Romney (long-time defender of CCC) cited in the article. Real film critics giving up on art... who is going to defend real culture then?

First he calls it "slow cinema", like Matthew Flanagan (read "Slower or Contemplative?"), which is a mischaracterisation that induces contempt and caricature. Limiting this cinema to "slowness" is reductive and superficial. This is precisely because unhappy viewers remain on the surface of these films that they are unable to obtain any substance from them.

"Details are few" says he! It's not because you can hardly fill a half-page with plot points and characters arc, or because the list of notable features appearing on the screen is short, that there isn't anything else there to see. Critics need to learn how to name things (and fill up their list of itemisation) that are not obvious, to learn to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness, to learn to understand the depth and complexity in the intervals between the apparent (nominal) details.

It's like dismissing Kasimir Malevich or Yves Klein because there isn't enough "details" on the canvas... sometimes Art is not about WHAT is represented, but about what is NOT represented, or an abstract reflection on the effect of representational minimalism. I thought critics assimilated this breakthrough of non-figurative art long time ago! (see: Non-narrative Film Criticism)

I can't believe a serious magazine would publish such anti-intellectual banter. If you don't like these films, deal with it frontally. No need to pretend that art would never put you to sleep. I believe the guilt is onto the sleeper. Filmmakers, good or bad, don't have to make your job easier. That's your problem. If you have trouble watching films as an imposed assignment, find another job less strenuous on your patience. Because Film Criticism isn't going to change to suit your Diva's demands. When you trade your opinions on cinema, we don't need to know whether you enjoy getting up in the morning, forgetting to drink your coffee, driving to the screening room, struggling with your digestion, feeling nauseous from hangover, falling asleep... This is not the kind of "opinion" you're paid for. We don't ask critics whether they ENJOY watching films for a living, we ask them if these films are any good!

Here is how he defines his profession of film critic : "it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece". The guy is paid to watch movies to give his opinion, and he would like us to feel sorry for him to have to watch all films before knowing whether it's a masterpiece... Maybe he expected the job to be signposted in advance, with big labels in red letters saying "MASTERPIECE" on the DVD screener, so he knows which films to watch and which ones he may skip. Dude! Your job is to watch the damn films, masterpieces or not. "Patience" and screen "fascination" is a REQUIREMENT of your job! "Precious time" is what your are required to invest for the privilege to give your opinion on films.

"sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not" : wonderful insight! Thanks for the truism. How is this any different when you watch dumb comedies and superhero sequels??? Yeah, sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not. But if we knew in advance, you'd be out of job!

If you want to watch only "masterpieces", you're not a critic, you're a READER. Readers don't have to watch all the films, they sit at home and read in YOUR magazine which are the "masterpieces" because critics did their job. What is so hard to grasp here?

And this guy runs a film magazine and writes editorials??? At least he admits he's "bored and a philistine". Typical of the anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment inclination that plagues today's film culture. If you can't tell art from boredom, you won't be taken seriously when you think you've found art in mainstream formulaic genre... cause THAT is the easy life for a film critic (and most of the time they are overstating the alleged greatness of genres, hoping to pull a Truffaut)

This said, to be able to identify CCC in "slower films" doesn't mean that they are therefore ALL great or revolutionary or exceptional... Yes, there are bad CCC films! Who would have thought?

There are bad Soviet Montage films too, bad Italian neorealism films, bad Nouvelle Vague films, bad Westerns, bad documentaries... Yes. It happens! Thanks for the lesson Sight & Sound.

Did you expect films that play it "artsy" to be automatic wins? that if it LOOKS slow, then it must be great art? There is no recipe for art, not in art-films, not in genre movies.

CCC is not a formulaic trend that only produces masterpieces. It is an alternative way to make films, a new narrative mode, a different angle in storytelling, and it gives a new perspective to the audience. You can't judge it with your subjective mainstream prejudices (lack of details, lack of events, slowness, boredom...)

If young filmmakers try to imitate certain traits without understanding what CCC is, they are wrong and they make bad films. But that doesn't undermine CCC, not for savvy critics anyway. There are a lot of wannabe directors who think they can imitate a comedy formula and become a great filmmaker... but it's not that easy. Why? Because critics don't have the "easy life", they know to look past the surface and tell uninspired imitation from a genuine research that happens to take a form common to a certain trend.

If artists tried to avoid their art to look like nothing else around, we would never see the emergence of a collegial trend in the major aesthetic movements of cinema history, in Art history in general.

Related:

• Dan Kois Syndrome (Proud Bordeom)

_________________

see other posts on this debate : 1 (Flanagan) - 2 (James) - 3 (Shaviro 1) - 4 (Shaviro 2) - 5 (Thoret) - 6 (Guardian) - 7 (Boring is not an argument) - 8 (Lavallée) - 9 (Frieze) - 10 (James 2) - 11 (Romney)

The Films of Sharunas Bartas

Lithuanian auteur Sharunas Bartas is the kind of filmmaker one would immediately be tempted to label “pretentious” and “self-indulgent” because there is absolutely no concession whatsoever that he gives to the viewers in terms of the narrative, artistic, political and personal ambitions of his films, burying them deeply within their part-hyper real and part-surreal constructs. All his films have hinged themselves onto a particular moment in Lithuanian history – the nation’s independence from the USSR, just prior to the latter’s complete collapse – and they all deal with the loss of communication, the seeming impossibility of true love to flourish and the sense of pointlessness that the political separation has imparted to its people. The characters in Bartas’ films are ones that attempt in vain to put the dreadful past behind them, traverse through the difficult present and get onto a future that may or may not exist. With communication having been deemed useless, they hardly speak anything and, even if they do, the talk is restricted to banal everyday expressions. Consequently, Bartas’ films have little or no dialog and rely almost entirely on Bressonian sound design consisting mostly of natural sounds. Also Bresson-like is the acting in the films. There are no expressions conveyed by the actors, no giveaway gestures and no easy outlet for emotions.

The outdoor spaces are deep and vast in Bartas’ films while the indoors are dark, decrepit and decaying. The landscapes, desolate, usually glacial, nearly boundless and seemingly inhospitable, are almost always used as metaphors for a larger scheme. His compositions are often diagonal, dimly lit and simultaneously embody static and dynamic components within a single frame. Interestingly, his editing is large Eisensteinian and he keeps juxtaposing people, their faces and landscapes throughout his filmography. But since the individual images themselves possess much ambiguity of meaning, the sequences retains their own, thereby overcoming the limitations of associative montage. Another eccentric facet in Bartas’ work is the amazing amount of critters found in his films. There are puppies, kitten, frogs, seagulls and flies seen around and over his characters regularly. May be, not considering the specific connotations that these creatures bring to these scenes, the intention is Eisensteinian here too – to indicate that the characters have been reduced to a level lower than these beings, unable to either communicate with each other or be at peace with nature, devoid of the notions of nationality and politics.

In many ways, the cinema of Bartas stands in between that of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr – both filmmakers concerned with chronicling life in a communist state. While the childhood memories, existential crisis and spiritual yearning in Bartas films directly has its roots in Tarkovsky’s films (all the films starting from Mirror (1975)), the visual (dancing in entrapping circles, meaningless glances and chatter over banquets and eventual self-destruction of the drifting characters) and aural (the Mihály Vig-like loopy and creepy score consisting of accordions, accentuated ambient noise) motifs, stark cinematography and political exploration are reminiscent of Bartas’ Hungarian contemporary. But, more importantly, it is the attitude towards his characters that puts him right in midpoint between Tarr and Tarkovsky. Bartas’ work has so far been characterized by two impulses – a warm nostalgia and sympathy for his characters that betrays the director’s hope and love for them, as in Tarkovsky’s cinema, and an overpowering cynicism, clearly derived from the (post-neo-realist) films of Tarr, that keeps remarking how the characters are all doomed and done for. This (unbalanced) dialectic is evident in Bartas aesthetic itself, which employs copious amounts of extremely long shots and suffocating close-ups. In the former, characters are seen walking from near the camera and into the screen, gradually becoming point objects eaten up by the landscape while, in the latter, Bartas films every line and texture of their faces with utmost intensity in a way that obviously shows that he cares for them and the pain that they might be experiencing. This conversation between optimism and pessimism towards his people also places him alongside the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian – another historian of traumatized lives in a Soviet state before and after independence.

Praejusios Dienos Atminimui (In Memory Of The Day Passed By, 1990)

One of the finest films by Sharunas Bartas, In Memory of the Day Passed By (1990) is a somber, evocative mood piece set in post-independence Lithuania and opens with the image of large flakes of snow moving slowly along a river. This is followed by a shot of a woman and her kid walking on a vast, snowy plain and moving away from the viewer until they become nonentities assimilated by their landscape. This pair of shots provides a very good synopsis of what Bartas’ cinema is all about. The rest of the film presents us vignettes from the daily life of the people living in the unnamed city, possibly Vilnius, and from the garbage dump outside it. One of them presents a tramp-like puppeteer wandering the streets of the city without any apparent destination. Like the puppet that he holds, the people around him seem as if their purpose of living has been nullified, now that the national strings that had held and manipulated them so far have been severed. Consequently, there are many shots that deal with religion and the intense Faith that these people seem to be having, perhaps suggesting a yearning for the replacement of a superior power that guides them. Bartas suffuses the film with diagonal compositions indicative of a fallen world – a world that can go nowhere but the abyss. Appropriately, the film closes with a variation of its opening image: flakes of snow flowing downriver – an apt metaphor for the many nations that would drift without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Trys Dienos (Three Days, 1991)

Three Days (1991), Bartas’ maiden feature length work, unfolds in a harbor town in Lithuania where two men and a women search for a shelter in the largely uncaring place, possibly to make love. The first Bartas film to feature his would-be collaborator (and muse) Yekaterina Golubeva, Three Days plays out as a post-apocalyptic tale set in an industrial wasteland, complete with decrepit structures and murky waters, where both positive communication (Even the meager amount of dialogue in the film turns out to be purely functional) and meaningful relationships (Almost everyone in the film seems to be a vagrant) have been rendered irrelevant. Every person in this desolate land seems to be an individual island, stuck at a particular time in history forever. The visual palette (akin to the bleached out scheme of the director’s previous work) is dominated by earthy colours, especially brown, and the production design is highly redolent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The actors are all Bressonian here and do no more than move about in seemingly random directions and perform mundane, everyday actions. Like in Bresson’s films, there is no psychological inquiry into the characters’ behaviour and yet there is much pathos and poignancy that is developed thanks to the austerity of Bartas’ direction and the intensity of Vladas Naudzius’ cinematography. The film is titled Three Days, but it could well have been titled ‘three months’, ‘three years’ or even ‘eternity’ for, in the film, all time is one, the notion of future nonextant and hope for escape futile.

Koridorius (The Corridor, 1994)

If Three Days presented people stuck in time and moving aimlessly through desolate landscapes, The Corridor (1994) gives us ones stuck geographically and drifting through abstract time. Bartas’ most opaque and affecting film to date, The Corridor is a moody, meditative essay set at a time just after the independence of Lithuania from the USSR and in a claustrophobic apartment somewhere in Vilnius in which the titular corridor forms the zone through which the residents of the building must pass in order to meet each other. Extremely well shot in harsh monochrome, the interiors of the apartment resemble some sort of a void, a limbo for lost souls if you will, from which there seems to be no way out. Consisting mostly of evocatively lit, melancholy faces that seem like waiting for a miracle to take them out of this suffocating space, The Corridor also presents sequences shot in cinema vérité fashion where we see the residents drinking and dancing in the common kitchen. Of course, there is also the typical central character, played by Sharunas Bartas himself, who seems to be unable to partake in the merriment. Conventional chronology is ruptured and reality and memory merge as Bartas cuts back and forth between the adolescent chronicles of the protagonist, marked by rebellion and sexual awakening, and his present entrapped self, unable to comprehend what this new found ‘freedom’ means. Essentially an elegy about the loss of a sense of ‘being’ and ‘purpose’, The Corridor remains an important film that earns a spot alongside seminal and thematically kindred works such as Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968) and Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975).

Few Of Us (1996)

Few of Us (1996) is perhaps the least political of the already highly noncommittal works of Sharunas Bartas. Not that this film does not base itself strongly on the political situation in Lithuania, but that the now-intimate backdrop of independent Lithuania is transposed onto a remote foothill in Siberia where a tribe called the Tolofars maintains a spartan life style. It is into this rugged, almost otherworldly land that the beautiful protagonist of the film (Yekaterina Golubeva) is air-dropped like an angel being relegated to the netherworld. She seems as isolated from the people of this land as the Tolofars are from the rest of the world. However, as indicated by the incessant cross cutting between the worn out terrain of the village and the contours on Golubeva’s face, this mysterious, hostile and unforgiving landscape is as much a protagonist of Bartas’ film as Golubeva is. With an eye for small and intricate changes in seasons, terrains and time of the day comparable to that of James Benning, Bartas pushes his own envelope as he lingers on eyes, faces and landscapes for seemingly interminable stretches of time. Each image of the film carries with itself an air of a still paining, vaguely familiar. All this sure does bring to surface the experimental and, I daresay, self-conscious nature of Bartas’ work, but what it also does is familiarize us with the hitherto alien and draw connection between this abstract representation of protagonist’s cultural disconnection in Tolofaria and the typical Bartas territory of desolate, directionless lives lead by the people of post-Soviet Lithuania.

A Casa (The House, 1997)

The House (1997) opens to the image of a mansion as the narrator reads a confessional letter written to his mother about their inability to communicate with each other. The house and mother are, of course, metaphors for the motherland that would be explored in the two hours that follow. It seems to me that The House is the film that Bartas finally comes to terms with the trauma dealt by the country’s recent past that he has consistently expressed in his work. Consequently, the film also seems like a summation of the director’s previous films (One could say that the characters from Bartas’ previous films reprise their roles here) and a melting pot of all the Tarkovsky influences that have characterized his work (especially the last four fictional works of the Russian). Shot almost entirely indoors, The House follows a young man carrying a pile of books as me moves from one room of the Marienbad-like mansion to the other, meeting various men and women, none of whom speak to each other and who might be real people of flesh and blood, shards of memory or figments of fantasy. The house itself might be an abstract space, as in The Corridor, representing the protagonist’s mind with its spatial configuration disoriented like the chessboard in the film. Furthermore, one also gets the feeling that Bartas is attempting to resolve the question of theory versus practice – cold cynicism versus warm optimism – with regards to his politics as we witness the protagonist finally burn the books, page by page, he had so far held tightly to his chest.

Freedom (2000)

Sharunas Bartas’ chef-d’oeuvre and his most accessible work to date, Freedom (2000) is also one of the most pertinent films of the past decade. Taking off from the wandering trio setup of Three Days, Freedom begins with a chase scene right out of genre cinema transposed onto Bartas’ highly de-dramatized canvas. The two men and women seem to be illegal immigrants who are on the coast guard’s wanted list. If The House was national politics distilled into a claustrophobic setting, Freedom is the same being set in seemingly limitless open spaces. The most rigorous of all Bartas films, Freedom is the kind of film Tarkovsky might have made had he lived to see the new century. Like the Russian’s characters, the people in this film are all marginal characters (and are often aptly pushed from the centre of the frame towards its margins) who want to escape the oppressive, unfair politics of this world and become one with nature and the unassailable peace it seems to possess. Alas, like in Blissfully Yours (2002), they are unable to depoliticize their world and start anew. The tyrannical past is catching up with them, the present is at a stalemate and is rotting and there is no sight of the future anywhere. Bartas expands the scope of his usual investigation and deals with a plethora of themes including the artificiality and fickleness of national boundaries, the barriers that lingual and geographical differences create between people and the ultimate impermanence of these barriers and the people affected by it in this visually breathtaking masterwork.

Septyni Nematomi Zmones (Seven Invisible Men, 2005)

The most unusual of all Bartas films, the pre-apocalyptic Seven Invisible Men (2005) starts off like a genre movie – a bunch of robbers trying to evade the police after stealing and selling off a car. It is only after about half an hour, when one of them arrives at a farm that is near completely severed from the rest of the world, that the film moves into the world of Bartas. Seven Invisible Men is the most talkative, most rapidly edited and the most politically concrete of all the films by the director and that may precisely be the idea – to serve as a counterpoint to all the previous movies. All though there is too much talk in the film, rarely do they amount to meaningful conversations, bringing the characters back to the hopelessness of the director’s earlier works. Like Freedom, all the characters here are people living on the fringes of the society – con men and ethnic and religious minorities – who seem to have sequestered themselves with this settlement of theirs. All these characters seem to be trying to escape their agonizing past and the politics of the world that seems to give them no leeway in order to start afresh (The heist may have been the last attempt at escape), in vain. In the final few minutes that recall Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), we see the house, in which the characters have been living in, burn down to dust. But, unlike Tarkovsky, it is Bartas’ cynicism that overwhelms and he sees his characters as ultimately self-destructive beings that have lost all control of their lives and hope for a better future.

Werckmeister Homage

Werckmeister Harmonies cited in pop culture by The Simpsons, Tarr Béla came a long way!

The Simpsons (2010/Groening/USA) Season 21, Episode #19

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000/Tarr/Hungary)

The Forsaken Land

Sri Lankan filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara’s debut and only film to date, The Forsaken Land (2005), opens at dusk with the shot of an armed man carefully surveying a vast stretch of land, walking over it in a zigzag pattern and pausing occasionally to observe specific points on it. Following this, we see a montage of seemingly unrelated images – a hand running over a tube light, a rigid arm jutting out of a stream of water and a couple sleeping, filmed head on – that recall Weerasethakul’s films for some reason and announce the otherworldly nature of this land where the story is to unfold. The Forsaken Land embodies the quintessence of the radical, new age aesthetic known as Contemporary Contemplative Cinema with its penchant for protracted, long shots and accentuated, hyper-real direct sound (particularly the sounds of elements of nature), its keen eye for landscapes and its tendency to favour the documentation of rhythm of life and gradual changes in human behavioral patterns over construction of intricate plots and dense theoretical analyses and announces (as do most of the films employing this aesthetic) that the time for action is over and the time for reflection has indeed begun. Having been slammed by the right wing for being anti-war and, indirectly, pro-terrorist, and received threats from the ruling majority, Jayasundara hasn’t made a film since.

The Forsaken Land is set at a time when war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Ealam (LTTE) has reached a deadlock and is at a point where either side can trigger the next phase of battles. But it becomes clear, as the film unfolds, that this abeyance of war is just an illusion of peace that will be disrupted anytime, as indicated by the threatening presence of tanks, trucks and jeeps everywhere. The film charts the lives of six individuals living in a remote area in southern part of the country – Anura (Mahendra Perera), the lone guard at the local military outpost who goes to duty everyday to protect it from a nonexistant enemy, his wife Lata (Nilupli Jeyawardena) who stays home, spending her time observing the world around her, his sister Soma (Kaushalya Fernando) who goes to work in the town nearby and who is either unmarried or has lost her spouse, his colleague, the old man Piyasiri (Hemasiri Liyanage), who seems to have a strange affinity towards the little girl Batti (Pamudika Sapurni Peiris), who may or may not be the daughter of Soma and a soldier Palitha (Saumya Liyanage), who has an affair with Lata. Not only is none of these relationships made clear, but they are also rendered irrelevant. Information is aptly given in extremely small amounts with only barebones of a story to support it.

The first thing that one notices in the film is how sparse the locales are. There are hardly any people seen. There is no connection of the village to the world around it save for the occasional bus that takes Batti to her school and Soma to her workplace. There are no TVs, no radios or even newspapers that are seen in the film (till Soma decides to buy a radio from her salary). Anura’s house, itself, stands as the lone man-made structure in this seemingly limitless plain. Additionally, the film does not particularize the location and hence it can be assumed that Jayasundara is universalizing the conditions of his central characters. It is not only a geographical vacuum that these characters seem to be living in, but also in political, moral and cinematic vacuums. Clearly, these characters are suspended in the hiatus between two brutal civil wars, unable to settle down into a permanent life style. They amuse themselves with petty sexual games and illicit affairs while murder is not an uncommon act around here. Somehow, all the characters in the film seem to have landed smack dab in the amoral middle of the moral spectrum (Only Anura turns out to be residing in a void within this void, with a shade of positive morality within, as indicated by the final minutes of the film). Moreover, in the indoor scenes of the film (there aren’t many), Jayasundara and cinematographer Channa Deshapriya light and film these characters in such a way that they seem to live inside a black void, unable to get out and soon to be annihilated by it.

But these people also harbour a hope, in vain, of escaping this limbo. Palitha wishes that he can go north and fly a helicopter, Soma decides to move out and teach at schools in other villages and Anura criticizes Palitha for blaspheming, betraying his belief that there is a higher power that will carry him through. They even speak about reincarnations in these lands forsaken by god. But, of course, they are sucked back by the void and dragged back into the vicious circle. It’s a circle alright. Piyasiri tells Batti a story about a dwarf girl and a hunchback. Like the hunchback who destroys his own house (and later himself) to protect his vanity and keeps doing the same mistake ad infinitum, all these characters seem be going in the same enclosed path (This seems to be the very case with the civil war, in fact, where for some arbitrary ideologies, people seem to be killing each other). Like the eternal repercussions of the hunchback’s deeds, the mistakes of the past – both personal and national – seem to bear upon each of the adults in the film. Only Batti, the icon of future and posterity in the film, with her innocence and untainted morality, free of any scar from the past, offers some hope when she boards the bus out of this blasted village as the film fades to black.

Anura guarding the outpost that is far from being under threat is reminiscent of Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968), where, too, the very purpose of existence of the characters was questioned. But unlike Herzog’s protagonist who attempts to induce aggression onto the ruined, dead and harmless surroundings, the characters in Jayasundara’s film succumb to it. The sudden passivity that follows an intense period of violence seems to have thrown them out of control. But, rather than Herzog, Jayasundara’s use of landscapes to underscore the moral depravity and pointlessness of the character’s lives suggests Rossellini and Antonioni. The house the characters live in is breaking down; there are hints of death around them regularly; the characters are ironically cleansing themselves now and then as if to rid themselves of this stagnation. Why, the building that unites all the characters and is placed physically on the highest ground, as if it is a sacred monument, is, of all things, a toilet. There is an image in the film early on of Anura sitting naked, stripped of his uniform and hence his identity, within bushes holding on to his gun. This could well represent the whole idea that the film presents. What’s the use of a weapon when you are dying out there, stark naked? What’s the use of boosting your defense systems when your people are dying of hunger and cold? However, Jayasundara’s film, although a maiden work, rarely lends itself to such propagandistic statements and, instead, lets us discover what it is like to be out there.

Godard once remarked that the best film on Auschwitz is one that unfolds in the house of one of the prison guards. Jayasundara’s film comes very close to that. It is more interested in what the war has done than the war itself. The focus of the film is the indelible scars a war leaves on its land and its people. The people in The Forsaken Land are those who have not been able to get rid of the inertia of fear and instability triggered by the war. They have resorted to nihilism, indulging themselves in superficial relationships and casual sex, perhaps in a belief that this state of peace is only transitory and there is no escape from the war. Like the fortunate turtle, which Batti finds, that escapes the claws of the vulture for a brief period of time, like that fish out of water waiting for the rain to pull it back into its routine, these people are merely waiting for fate to sweep them along and out of this limbo. And Jayasundara’s film proficiently shows us how such a precarious situation can prompt a human being to shed all the values he/she holds dear. By actually presenting the insanity that happens during a period of ceasefire, in the form of tortures and custody killings, as grotesque, brutal and indigestible, Jayasundara’s film indirectly questions the absurdity of justifying the very same routines during the war as acts of glory and honour.

Bal (Kaplanoglu) Berlinale 2010

Exceprts from Bal / Honey (2010/SEMIH KAPLANOĞLU/Turkey) Golden Bear - Berlinale 2010
10'36" Arte

interview with SEMIH KAPLANOĞLU (Arte) 3'08" [TURKISH/FRENCH]