The feature film competition at the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) bears witness, in a polyphonic manner, to the recent transformations in the audiovisual world.

I would risk saying that now, in cinema, the radical experiment – that fragile and endangered area where formal and political hypotheses are tested, the boundaries of the unrepresentable are questioned, and the territory of images to be investigated is constantly expanded – stands under the umbrella of a tutelary figure: Harun Farocki. No risk, however, in considering Farocki, who passed away in 2014, as perhaps the most brilliant mind that has focused on the art of film in recent decades, i.e. in that tumultuous period that took us from the fall of communism (the democratization of live TV) to the Arab Spring (the surge of amateur videos shot with the mobile phone). Farocki expanded cinema-thinking with a violence of intuition that remains difficult to measure even today: it is enough to see how many “Farockian” films – a term used perhaps too indulgently to describe a somewhat reflexive audiovisual production – still appear today, paying tribute to his work, if not even being epigonic.

Among other things, Farocki taught us to understand a murky gaze captured in an equally murky moment of History; he taught us to discern where it is heading and who it is fleeing from. In other words, he reminded us of the lesson on the image as the fruit of a field of multiple, often opposing forces. He showed us that the footage of a surveillance camera is just as vital to the analysis and understanding of the contemporary world as the most avant-garde auteur films out there – if not more so. He left us only after charting essential paths through this photo-video history, linking the Holocaust and the hologram, the supermarket and the exhibition hall, and always cultivating caution against hasty interpretations.

The International Feature Film Competition at BIEFF could have been subtitled “Reality Has Begun”, after Farocki’s famous essay Reality Would Have to Begin. I don’t want to push it any further than necessary. The films in the selection maintain their autonomous aura, their personal quests, far from the whims of the critic trying to draw convenient parallels to shorten the number of characters. One thing I would note, however: for all of us who have become simultaneously more fascinated and more suspicious in front of images of any kind, discovering an unsuspected passion-curiosity, it’s becoming more clear that we live in a post-Farocki era.

Post-, because the intuitive, almost outlaw-like journey through the thickets of audiovisual land gave way to a proper exploration-exploitation, which turned the wasteland of images into a beautifully cultivated plot. That’s both good and bad. Farocki could transition between them gracefully but also abruptly, gathering inventions with each jump cut. Now, the venture in image studies has become a domesticated sphere, the directions are more predictable, everything has been systematized. A film like Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion, dedicated to the perplexing evolution of the doorbell, is illustrative in this regard: more laborious than anything Farocki did in his lifetime, it is also more exhaustive. But the exhaustion of the subject through transitions from current surveillance cameras to 19th-century drawings depicting the popular rage against which the ancestor of the intercom emerged must be taken both ways: on the one hand, as a drilling into the improbable depths of this invention; on the other hand, as a process of obtaining a result that has everything of a rigorous demonstration and perhaps too little of the intensity of revelation.

Can we get out of this contradiction? With great effort. Aware, in other words, that cinema still owes an element of the inexplicable that we, as viewers, must navigate on our own. In Monisme, Riar Rizaldi, making his debut in feature film, works on a three-arc story, delighting in obscuring where, normally, mainstream cinema tries to justify and clarify. The film, for Rizaldi, is an unstable repository of incoherent energies, a kind of common denominator of activism, poetry and/or resigned subsistence. Monisme encompasses in its images everything that would otherwise be found separately, bringing together protagonists with different interests related to the Indonesian volcano Merapi, which is about to erupt; it’s like a container that barely keeps from boiling over. In a way, Rizaldi radicalizes the hypothesis of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (another path-opening master): he turns random facts into document and speculation into the viscous matter of reverie in neon lights.

Thus, Monisme steps – not just literally – on a rift: beyond the increasingly blurred boundary between fiction and documentary (already a commonplace of transgressive cinema practices), it is the fruit of an overworked montage, called to rein in three narrative threads. That’s the strength of the film: the enigmatic skill with which it orchestrates a complex relationship. Rizaldi is one of those for whom the axiom “a film = a story” no longer sounds plausible. On the contrary, if there’s still some as yet unextinguished vitality in art, it is to be found in these territories that push the conventional grammar to its limits, making montage, for example, the binder of unseen worlds.

There is, within these films in the selection, a certain malaise regarding images. Perhaps it was the eye of curators Oana Ghera and Flavia Dima that directed things on this trajectory. But, at the same time, it was difficult to avoid it: because this post-Farocki era is by excellence one of blending, of impurity, and of downgrading cinema into the streets, towards the other branches of audiovisual. Specificity has become an inoperable idea. After having penetrated into the heart of wild nature, barely escaped from a jungle populated by almost metaphysical forces, Monisme returns to us, placing at our feet the quintessential artifact of the era: a series of CCTV footage showing, in this case, the smoking mountain. Such images, admittedly, have something vulgar in them that cuts through any vague notion of purity: but it is precisely this vulgarity of the related realms that is the clearest sign of the omnipresence of images. Cinema started out recording “views” from places no one had ever reached before; now, cinema is forced to film where there is already, inevitably, a plethora of surveillance cameras. Today, its gaze is from the start a response-gaze that arrives later.

Take a film like Melisa Liebenthal’s The Face of the Jellyfish, in which the protagonist is startled to discover that her facial features have changed overnight. What does the filmmaker offer us once faced with such a challenge to credibility? Not an elegant horror demonstration of humanity’s insane aspirations (Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage), nor a dirty, plastic, visceral demonstration of body flaws (Cronenberg’s The Fly) – but a post-Farockian film where the face itself, this “window to the soul”, is reduced to a series of mathematical, highly correlatable features that make it a mere identification tool. Closer to a clinical composite sketch than to any close-ups with divas to indulge our fantasies, this event is the pretext for a commentary on todays’s biopolitical society. What disturbs here, ultimately, is not so much the potential confusion that the Kafkaesque metamorphosis could generate in the minds of loved ones, but the feeling that this fact threatens to jam the machinery of control and regimentation of the West, always lurking behind some petty “identity” incidents.

On another note, The Face of the Jellyfish is interesting precisely because it seems to avoid its very subject: the actual act of transformation. It confronts us with the fait accompli: not just an economy of means, but above all a testing of the ancestral convention of cinema, which was first a school of imagination and only then one of complete visual delight. Ultimately, this refusal of “effects” has all the elements of a statement, although it reaches us through an aesthetic asceticism (less of everything for an exacerbated pleasure), a state that the cinephile has always loved, with apprehension. In any case, there is an absence here: the absence of the previous, “original” face, barely depicted through photographs.

Also dealing with absence is Selma Doborac’s De Facto, even if its interest is far from intimate. On the contrary, the film fits into that cinema tradition, between Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Marie Straub-Danièle Huillet, which taught us to sharpen our ears and restrain our voyeuristic impulses. The question that motivates De Facto – how to morally represent atrocity and, implicitly, the absence of the dead – has haunted cinema at least since the Holocaust. It has been revived and revised in all sorts of demanding films, which, through a rigorous formal system and as non-frivolous as possible, managed to subdue the viewer with the rarefied emotion of an art meant for confession, not entertainment. A massive experience that demands dedication – a minimal moral reflecting on those gone. With its space-time blocks in which we witness, live, the nightfall, while two white voices recount to us the terrible history of collective crimes, De Facto climbs a slope of restraint and sobriety, capable of connecting us to the deontological concerns of an art form suitable for memory.

Half of the films in the competition haven’t found their place here: not because they wouldn’t deserve it, but because, following in Farocki’s footsteps, I wanted to sketch a wandering path, whose target remains always elusive, moving, inevitably non-systematic. Other paths within this rich selection may prove just as valid, if not more so. Their marking – another Farockian lesson – remains the responsibility of each one of us, in complete equality of intuitions.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.