A material by Victor Morozov about what a „capital of cinephilia ” means anymore and about the pleasure of „travelled cinema”, as critic Serge Daney called it. A parisian correspondence which proposed to relive freshly-seen films, telling the story of fugitive impressions that do not have the pretense of being exact, but that might yet have something to say about a passion. The format will be free, personal, and will only abide by one cardinal point: cinema.

15th of February

I managed to shake off my relative indifference to what is going on here, which I was forced to take on due to a chronic lack of time, to see one of Hong Sang-soo’s latest films, Introduction, which was recently released in cinemas. It’s not one of his imposing heights, but even one of Hong’s hills is, not gonna lie, much more important to me than a lot of smaller films. That’s the thing: I grew up with Hong. After my mom suggested that I see In Another Country (2012), his first film with Isabelle Huppert, I became aware of the power and significance of a contemporary arthouse cinema that arrives at us from far away. As I discussed the other day with Andreea, who is in Berlin right now and has seen his latest, Hong has always been very significant to us—those who started to devour the Cahiers in 11th grade, on the minibus that even today connects Bucharest to Tulcea, right after buying it at the Kyralina Library —, on par with the names  (Philippe Garrel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Larry Clark) that made an immediate impression on the white sheet of paper that was our cinephilia. Maybe Hong doesn’t come to me as he used to back in the day, bearing the listless anticipation of discovery – but something of this duty of watching where he is at right now has remained intact. I’m hot saying anything new by observing that his Fassbinder-esque frequency – two, three films a year-, translated into an economic system that had a grand suppleness, which allows him to work when and how he wants to, is one of the pillars that still sustain a collective cinephile experience nowadays, a regular rendezvous, like a necessary road sign. Both we and he have changed. I was in high school when I saw Right Now, Wrong Then, and in my first year of bachelor studies when I put the poster of the film, with the beautiful Kim Minhee and the rotund Jay-yeong Jeong, its protagonists, upon the wall of my dorm room. I was on my inter-semestrial holiday when, again at home, I saw  On the Beach at Night Alone and Yourself and Yours. Likewise, I was in my second year at Grenoble when I saw Grass at Le Méliès, the cinema with the most beautiful halls that I have ever visited, and I was already in Paris, enrolled in my master’s studies, when I saw The Woman Who Ran, the only time I ever visited Le Cinéma des Cinéastes, at Place de Clichy… Some time ago, I was interested in the happenings and the voluptuousness with which the actors were able to show off in long shots, having drunk God knows how many soju bottles. Recently, I became interested in the formal device, the technical skeleton that is so light that it allows for floating, as if this shabby digital camera, which still imposes its signature in front of the world, but also Hong’s insistence on making films that are all echo, repetition, false tracks and ironic winks. Introduction makes no exception. For a while  –in the first part – I didn’t quite understand where it was headed to, and I would indeed say that some lesser inspired scenes are at hand here, beyond their daring choice to resume themselves at a few arid discussions, speaking with a cigarette in hand (an increasing topic in the case of Hong, together with the unmissable soju.) But then the film envelops us with the power of a few painful things that are only half-revealed, lessening the burden of feeling into a light contemplation.  In the final sequences, where the main character drunkenly throws himself into the eaves of the cold sea, one can find the fabulous passion of Hong’s most powerful films, like The Day After, that go up and above in their observation of a man’s downfall, but also the calm and tenderness of intimate revelations, like in the above-mentioned On the Beach at Night Alone. It no longer mattered that despite running five or six times a day – its runtime is less than 70 minutes long –, the film is showing at the MK2 Beaubourg in its smallest room, the one that has a small and bad, TV-like screen… I returned from Beaubourg with Ioan, who I believe also appreciated the film, happy that there still is something left from the joys of yesteryear.   

25th of February

I went with Ioan to Belleville, to see Bruno Serralongue’s Pour la vie exhibition, which was organized at a small and airy gallery, Le Plateau. Free entry, then a few rooms with around thirty exhibits, of which I was much rather attracted to, beyond the portraits of people involved in various battles — not inasmuch war zones, as areas where there are certain kinds of confrontations between types of communities, unequal power relations, and where they’re attempting to create new possibilities and to put them into practice –, as I said, I was captivated by the devices that were screened in the first room under the title of “Risky Lines”: a collection of photos shot in Calais, in the “migrants jungle”, with barbed wire fences, graffiti scrawled in Arabic (but also one in Romanian), on the barracks, with ferry boats at night. Also, very interesting was a series dedicated to these precarious high rises in Saint-Ouen, that will be demolished to make place for the Olympic village in 2924. Nothing particularly jaw-dropping in these photos, no Barthesian “punctum”, but a very useful lesson to me in terms of careful, non-intrusive documentation of a space that turns into a field of political force. Besides, a title of one of his recent projects, Comptes rendus des sorties des Naturalistes en lutte, with its highly factual and modest sobriety, is a faithful summary of the aims and openings of this kind of approach, which operates through the discreet effect of observing the residue of conflict in reality, and of subtly altering our perceptions, that are confronted with something well-known, but that now presents itself under a slightly delayed and pretty concerning form. Photography acts as a silent witness, one that is careful with distances, that collects small fragments of reality in order to remember moments of resistance.

28th of February

Saw Artavazd Pelechian’s La Nature yesterday, a very disappointing film. Given the invasion of Ukraine, it felt even worse. There’s nothing to say here, actually—no image, nor any connections between images, meaning some editing. The entire film is, head to toe, complacent and insulting, alike to confirmation of the fact that, at least in cinema, it might just be better to let the grandmasters of yore alone in their hibernation. The sequences in which symphonic music runs over images of avalanches and eruptions are touching in their naïveté—this juxtaposition cannot overcome its own “aestheticism” —, but in those in which we see, even if only in the corner of the frame, tiny humans that are overwhelmed by the fury of nature are truly embarrassing: I really cannot see how anyone can reconcile the manner of consuming this film—in an exhibition or a cinema hall, contemplatively so—with the tragedy befalling our fellow humans. This bourgeois method of sampling of high art is—to use a terribly hideous word—problematic. As for the images, I don’t really understand how much research lay behind their discovery: they seem to have simply been picked up from the results of a half-assed YouTube search. I’ll choose to forget this failure and rinse my eyes with Les Saisons, Pelechian’s short film that I could at any time include in a top ten of the greatest films ever made.

3rd of March

I did manage to get on with things today, went for a bike ride, visited a Picasso-Rodin exhibition at the Picasso museum, and on this occasion, I noticed the obligation to wear a mask in spaces that ask for a vaccine pass has been lifted. The exhibition was pretty interesting, especially in the upper levels (amongst sculpted exhibits that I passed by with a certain amount of indifference), through the connections that it makes between video footage—TV reportages of an old-timey Picasso that is very affable and nonchalant, for example—and paintings. Few revelations, but still, there is a hypnotic video of the artist working with ceramic with amazing speed—three hits of his chisel and bam, done —, plus a painting, “Young Boy with Lobster”, gray and vaguely obscene, painted by Picasso during the Second World War. After all, opposition, revolt, indignation shouldn’t be shoved into someone’s face in order to be “political”, they can be even more efficient and durable when they are hijacked, like in this case, towards the purpose of deafening horror. 

7th of March

Berlin. We’re here for the weekend. On our first evening, we find the Intimes Kino somewhere around Frankfurter Allee, in a very bobo area of the East. The truth is that I don’t know what to choose. As we speak, Patrick is programming a cycle on agriculture at the Zeughauskino, but these days they’re showing a Wang Bing movie that I’ve already seen. In the end, we decide to see Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore at the Arsenal, in Potsdamer Platz, a discouraging sign for the utopian in me that the most radical cinema one can see is shown in the most neoliberal of town squares—filled with glass towers and high-rises—in this magnificent city. An hour or so before, we were on the Karl Marx Allee, discovering the marvelous Kino International. But they’re showing Belfast today. We regretfully abandon this socialist pearl and head towards the West.

10th of March

Saw my first film together with my mother in Paris today, after God knows how much time away from the cinema. I chose Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which passed through the local halls without making much of a splash, and the only place that was showing it at a slightly decent hour was Saint-André-des-Arts, the Parisian cinema that has one of the most interesting programs around, because it shuffles auteurist cinema with research documentaries, with many beautiful films showing exclusively here (for example, Laure Portier’s Soy Libre). So, we went to see Red Rocket, a new offering from the director behind Tangerine and The Florida Project, two rather superficial films, but cute in their colorful (architectural, human) explosion. This film goes down the same path: a cartoon-like inspiration based on a real, uncondescending interest towards the margins of American society, whose dramas he distills in a comedic tone—and I ended up laughing more than I expected at the stories of this ex-pornstar that returns to his native Texan town, after an “illustrious” career in L.A. I especially enjoyed how the film manages to portray this small-town life, which is very familiar to me, wherein one is forced to find people or places to do with a limited palette of options at hand, yet, still, one can find worthwhile things. That’s what the film’s protagonist ends up going, sharing his time between his ex/current wife, who he uses to gain a roof above his head, a kid that he wants to debut in the porn industry, and a geek pretending to be an army veteran after nabbing a camo vest. Clocking in at over two hours, the film is filled with all sorts of small happenings, and this “loser that’s always ready to bounce back”, who, amongst others, recalls the Sadie Brothers’ hysterical exploits, is a very attaching and complex character, propelling himself one lie at a time, one arrogant gesture at a time. Baker doesn’t quite hit the same tempo as the aforementioned brothers, but he finds a form—with an outburst on the strident superficiality of the zooms in porno aesthetics—to shoot this industrial town in which workers, druggies, and geeks alike become an easy audience for this nothing-magician to trick. I saw that the writers of Cahiers were reproaching Baker for risking poverty porn, but I feel that the film is very organic when it comes to integrating poverty in its Disneyland-esque decor. In any case, a big surprise.

11th of March

Because I cannot seem to get unstuck from the news flow coming in from Ukraine, I decided to at least sink in fully, so I took my mom and went together with her to a photo exhibition at the Musée de la Libération covering the work of seven female wartime photographers, covering conflicts ranging from 1936 to 2011. A tangible case in which all the publicity was worth it because I saw a few posters of the exhibition around the Latin Quarter and that was all that I needed. It’s a small exhibition—just a couple of rooms with a few photos, never more than ten per author —, but that was a contributing factor to the attention that I paid to each. Nothing is hidden here, no sense that extracts itself away, no resistance against anticipation, which Jacques Ranciere discusses in the case of the photos in Sophie Ristelhueber’s WB series on the Gaza conflict. Here, the nude reality of war is exposed without any roundabouts, in all of its usual signs, from cadaver to soldier and from gun to toy gun, to trace, beyond a few personal practices and styles, a general trajectory, parallel with the much more famous one of male war correspondents. And so, from Gerda Taro, the partner of Robert Capa, all the way to Anja Niedringhaus – the two women who book-end the temporal frame of the exhibition, both of whom found their deaths on the battlefield —, quickly passing through the work of the famous Lee Miller, we discover a different history of the wars, remarkable through the fact that it’s simultaneously perfectly similar to the male perspective (the same atrocity, the same tilting images) yet still different. Because we can no longer ignore that fact that, behind this photograph of landscape akin to a Flemish oil painting, there lay a woman, just as we know all too well that this militant communist who, during the Spanish Civil War, exercised shooting—in a posture that was meant to then become an icon, a banner—was captured by an eye that was in perfect solidarity. These are photos that represent art only incidentally, precisely through the tension between what is clearly said to the spectator—the ravages of war—and what it hides: the whole exhibition is almost entirely composed out of shocking images, but images that don’t fully offer themselves to us, keeping their sense of autonomy, their secret intact.

I pursued the same feminist line in the evening, at the Centre Pompidou, for my first screening at the 2022 edition of Cinéma du Réel. It’s not a new film, but one that is turning half a century this year, and that is  Sambizanga, the most famous title directed by Sarah Maldoror (I adore the resonance of her name), in the presence of her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, who is taking care of preserving her heritage in cinemas, of the film’s cameraman, and of Nicolas Klotz, the filmmaker who I admire oh so very much, whose father, Georges Klotz, was the editor of the film. There was a beautiful moment in the end when Klotz, visibly emotional, said that the film made him want to write a letter to his father, who passed away five years ago, and then asked himself, in regard to the film’s story of blood, injustice, and struggle: “How can we avenge all of this?”. The film, impressive at times through the freedom of its tone, through its evasions through poetry and a documentary gaze – “it is and isn’t a mise-en-scène”, said Klotz, since the gaze isn’t taken hostage, but is left to wonder, while at the same time there is a given form that imposes itself through this tender closeness to the bodies, through this breath of the skin, through contemplation and acceleration. I was reminded of Med Hondo’s contemporaneous films, containing the same fury, the same belief in cinema’s capacity to, if not to topple the world, then to scream aloud its injustices, to call for arms, to have the intuition to show us how the battle starts… Maldoror, who could very well be “better: than Hondo, studied at Moscow’s VGIK, which might explain the spring in her editing, the chemistry with the anonymous and the dispossessed of the world. Here we are now, at a different point in history, when militant cinema cannot be simply made (just) like that, with all the hopes of yesteryear gone, and a terrible war raging at our gates, but it’s important for such ageless films to continue circulating, to continue finding an audience, to continue being discussed, because there’s something so liberating in seeing and writing about sharp objects such as these, in opposition to the machine that dulls our senses and deepens the abyss of our forgetfulness. 

Victor Morozov

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