7th of April, 2020 – Jean Luc-Goddard accepts the proposal of Lionel Baier, the director of the Cinema Department of the ECAL (The University of Arts and Design of Lausanne), to participate in a masterclass that would be shared live on Instagram. The auteur, who is truly an institution in and of himself, was due to discuss “images in the time of coronavirus”. This event was planned to happen by the time the midpoint of the quarantine in Europe was already underway. All eyes turned to Godard; expecting his verdicts of the images that have been generated and disseminated in this period – Zoom conferences, home movies, statistics, Eurocentric maps painted out in various shades of red – from left (the West) to the right (the East) – television shows, and maybe even, why not, the live stream itself. Things didn’t really pan out that way.

Of course, the legend of Godard is founded on indiscipline, on the fact of not responding to any given expectations. Baier didn’t find in Godard, a tireless radical, the agile media theoretician that would have obediently supplied the audience with answers to all of their curiosities. What he found instead was the same Godard as the one twenty years prior to today, who had just completed the final episode of his Histoire(s) du cinéma – a Godard of long-forgotten citations, of semiotics, of semantics and selective erudition, much more an archive than a daily newspaper; a sort of old-fashioned dada didacticism, as Yoana Pavlova calls it.

Being live on Instagram, over thousands of screens across the globe, Godard speaks about how he records films on video, how he watches the news, asks his friends for DVDs, and reads the daily newspapers (three of them, to be more precise). I’m not saying this to poke fun at Godard, even though I think he’s relishing every single moment in which he’s espousing himself as being indifferent, rather than vulnerable, in front of the 21st century’s most alarming time. In short, I think he’s consciously inviting people to poke fun at him; after all, he always lands on his feet.

Anyways, jumping from Godard to Georges Perec, the experimental novelist, isn’t big enough of a step to ask for a justification; I’ve always thought that Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien / An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975), the fascinating experiment in which Perec tries to emulate a surveillance camera by jotting down everything that’s happening around him in a Parisian café, should be a fundamental reading in film schools around the world. But I’d like to take a closer look at a quote that I pulled from Godard’s masterclass, which sent me directly to Perec:

“I don’t believe in language. I believe the real problem and what needs to be changed is the alphabet. There are too many letters and we should delete many of them. And then move on.”

It’s hard not to think of lipograms, the experimental writings that doted on excluding certain letters. In this sense, The Disappearance, Perec’s lipogrammatic novel from 1969 (translated into Romanian by Șerban Foarță, and printed by Art Publishing in 2010), is the most famous example: “a novel without any E-s”, as one advertiser found a way to put it while promoting the translation. Of course, the letters weren’t deleted, just suspended.

But let’s digress for a bit. The cinematic language, the ABC’s of cinema, are concepts that are already very well established. Sure, we could exaggerate and say that the pandemic has forced a couple of letters from this ABC to slide away, letters such as on-location shooting, going to the cinema, or the development of film reel. Coincidentally, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, one of the many events to move its programming online, has invited several directors from across the world to make short films from within, and about quarantine, offering another one of Perec’s novels, Espèces d’espaces / Species of Spaces (1974), as a point of departure. The writings compiled under this title, which are a series of playful, nonfictional, and autobiographical essays, try to classify spaces and the way in which we occupy them while playing around like a termite within the space of the book’s pages. The result of this endeavor is three omnibus-films, named in chronological order, i.e. SPACES #1, #2 and #3, which gather eight films made by Greek directors (in the first part) and fourteen international filmmakers (split into two halves of seven across the remaining two parts: “There are many letters in numbers”). They are what I call the dailies.

Quite obviously, these omnibuses are unequal and repetitive, the kind of risk that this kind of endeavor takes upon itself from the very first moment. Of the twenty-two short films included, I have selected ten that, in one way or another, seemed relevant to me in terms of quarantine-inspired imagery. I chose films directed by Giorgos Georgopoulos, Rinio Dragasaki, Syllas Tzoumerkas, Tarik Aktas, Mateo Bendesky, Rachel Leah Jones, Radu Jude, Stavros Pamballis, Victor Moreno and Albert Serra. In order to offer a meager tribute to Perec myself, I have decided to break apart (to blow up? to dilute?) this text with quotes pulled from Godard’s masterclass, which I’ve chosen more or less randomly. Is this dialectics? Only in the best-case scenario, but, mostly, it’s just a playful illustration.

“For me, language is not just one language, it’s all of them together…”

I’ll begin with my personal favorite, Mateo Bendesky’s These Days, that makes an ingenious selection of short domestic footage. Television images pixelate if you come too close to them. And is what Bendesky’s images seem to count on – a vertical couch, a sink that is about to spill over, a mosquito that is just about to fly out of the window, but cannot. They are flashes of anxiety, thinly sliced, with a rhythm that doesn’t allow us to approach too much, in order for it not to pixelate.

“The virus is a form of communication that needs something to survive on, it needs to latch to a host, like certain birds.”

Giorgos Georgopoulos’s Vacationers in Pompeii is an offhand approximation of an absurd scenario that has been recurrently related this past couple of weeks – the middle class, meaning people who lack any kind of power in decision-making, but who are resplendently comfortable, are waiting for an imminent catastrophe while perched on the top of their Ikea couches.

“Personally, I believe that the Iraq war happened because the Americans, in their heart of hearts, their inner fortress, wanted to take control of the Chaldean writing system, or I don’t know what”.

Georgopoulos shoots routine moments that he shares with his wife, which he then literally shakes up with a series of artificial earthquakes. One earthquake later, the couple goes on with its morning routine. And it keeps on going on after the second one, the third one, and so on.

Radu Jude’s film offers a good counterpoint. A fable which starts from an idea that several directors had for their own films – to shoot their children while they’re playing, either on their own (Tarik Aktras’ Spotting Fig Trees), or for the film’s purpose (Cleo and Her Daddy Make a Movie, by Stavros Pamballis). Jude and his young boy, Matei, illustrate what is “the first known account of neurosis in medical literature”, which was Avicenna’s experiment on raising two lambs – one in very rudimentary conditions, albeit left alone, and another one that was spoilt but terrorized by a wolf that would appear from time to time, in different places, at various, irregular times.

The first lamb developed normally, while the second one passed away. This is the source of the fable, under the guise of the plush lamb that plays both leading roles in Jude’s film, and Matei’s role (similarly, in Matei’s film and Jude’s game) – the couple in Georgopoulos’ film, all the people (with me amongst them) that could sit on their couches and wait for their impending doom were, in a sense, just some coddled plush lambs that were terrorized by a wanton wolf, that reared his head at his own discretion.

Some of the films are meditative, the results of the imminent act of reflection that arises in this kind of situation – what was, what is, what will be? Some go even further with the anxiety and helplessness of this moment, inviting small metaphors, such as Rachel Leah Jones’ untitled film. A flood that lasts for entire months and which weakens walls, undoing stuccos, blossoming mold. It is what it is. What will it be, then? Sunny, as Jones shows us from her windowsill.

Something poetic and serene is happening on the outside, something that is worthy of an E. E. Cummings quote; or, at least that’s going on in Syllas Tzoumerkas’ vision in his film, Foghorn, which shows one of the most beautiful sequences that the quarantine has had to offer – that of a bathtub in a muddy surrounding, among cows and weeds. Between interior and exterior, here and there, lie the Incredible Thoughts of a Woman on a Tier (dir. Rinio Dagasaki), a paranoid, semi-fictional account that is encapsulated in a single image, that of a woman standing on a parcel between two streets. Dragaski constructs her film as a panic attack, alert yet jerky, interrupted by archive footage flashbacks – flashes of intimacy, of parties and protests of the youth from Thessaloniki.

Speaking of archive images, it’s somewhat surprising that so few of these short films resort to pre-existing materials. Since, after all, the quarantine also meant this – a wave of recovered images, recycled nostalgically, souvenirs of a time that we chastise ourselves for never fully appreciating:

“[Lionel Baier:] So, basically, it’s as if cinema is a tube of glue that helps us stick painting, literature, and text together…”.

It might be a cliché that is worth avoiding. Victor Moreno signed off one of the very few short shorts like this, The Infinite Confinement, but nothing that I wrote about earlier applies to this film, since he uses images of the cosmos, documentary and fictional, to create a fictitious call from a would-be astronaut to the earthlings below. The Spaniard’s gamble is to philosophize around the idea of being shut within space, a concept which he sees as infinite in and around our existence, even if it’s mostly indistinguishable.

That’s just about it in terms of space, image, and quarantine. But there’s one more: Albert Serra and his My Influences. The Catalan prankster, a little star raised to the heights of film festivals, seems much less interested in space, in Perec or the quarantine. On the other hand, he replies with a recurrent preoccupation in much of his public appearances – himself.

It’s a continuation of the persona that the director espouses, the myth that he doesn’t intervene with camerawork at all during shooting reaching its extremes when Serra claims to have no interest and experience in using digital cameras.

“But we needn’t think in terms of authors with all their rights, entitlements, and festivals.”

Starting from here, he ends up talking, from behind a kitsch camera filter, about the film critics that have influenced him – Robin Wood (whom he erroneously called an American, even though he was British), Manny Farber, Amos Vogel, Jacques Lourcelles, Godard, François Truffaut, Paul Vecchiali, Michel Mourlet. Voilà: Serra reads the work of some excellent critics. One must appreciate the inclusion of his short film, as capricious and superfluous it might be since it’s (even involuntarily) a moment of transparency, which explains what these omnibuses are in fact – products of the festival market, which shows not just domesticated poetry and diaristic epiphanies, but, as Serra, who himself

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.