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.

29th of MARCH

Today I went to Reflet Médicis for the first time since September, I think. It was rainy again, just like on that day when I saw Lino Brocka’s wonderful Bayan Ko, after which I walked back home, having forgotten my metro card. I’d come here more often, but the prices, which are 2-3 Euro higher than in other places, kept me away. But I needed to get my portion of trailers – ten minutes of whatever one can see these days in cinemas – to remember that Reflet, one of the first cinephile spaces that I discovered in Paris a few years ago, back when I was still a kid that as intimidated by the city lights, is still amongst the cinemas with the most fatuous schedules. Although I hate this habit that sets screenings behind to the detriment of “publicity”, today I enjoyed a selection of Béla Tarr – three of four of his early films will be released in a restored version —, of Corbucci’s magnificent Il Grande Silenzio in a 4K version, which I would rewatch if even only for its wintry landscapes, of a short presentation of the Toute la mémoire du monde festival, such a beautiful name, which presents an eclectic platform of restored masterpieces and recently-unearthed strange gems and with a film that looks very interesting, Kiro Russo’s Le Grand mouvement de Kiro Russo, which I should read about a little more. However, today I was there for Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), the third Rosellini film that I’m catching up on in a relatively short time frame, in a copy restored in Bologna. I’d recently read that Olivier Cheval, the theoretician whose erudite writing is charming to me, wrote on Facebook that this is “the most beautiful film in the world”. I can’t say if this is true, but, upon seeing the film, I wouldn’t take Cheval’s words as a sort of silly joke. There are a lot of sequences within that are a testament to them, probably including those in the beginning, which in my case got mixed up with the staccato darkness of sleep (but who could argue that darkness isn’t in itself a beckoning to montage?), while certainly including that beautiful ending in which the brothers bid farewell from each-other, after deciding where they are headed to on their missions. Or that scenes without dialogue, happening during nighttime, wherein Francis meets a leper in the woods and doesn’t say anything: he covers his eyes in horror upon seeing this tormented body, but then approaches the diseased man, who – in a deaf gesture, charged with all the stigma of the world – rejects him, only for the two to end up embracing one another. And the scene in which one of the brothers, short-witted yet so kind, leads to the downfall of a tyrant, is a sample of sacred comedy, in which grace and morass intertwine in the confrontation between this heavenly beggar and this caricaturesque leader, encased in his iron armor. I don’t know if Rosellini loved cinema, but he understood it so deeply that he could abandon it – after he created this thrilling film, along with a couple of others at its level – for the sake of television, leaving others to rise to the task of completely fulfilling his genial intuitions.

30th of MARCH

At midday, between 2 and 6, I went to the Cinematheque to see my first film there in a long time: Fluchtweg nach Marseille by Ingemo Engström și Gerhard Theuring, a 3-and-a-half hour-long documentary, presented as part of a carte blanche given to the Deutsche Kinemathek for Toute la mémoire du monde, compiled by Martin Koerber, who, starting today, is the former director of the institution’s archives. Due to the rather slow translation – Paris is probably the only city in the world of this size in which local intellectuals are unable to understand even a bit of English —, Koerber spoke for about half an hour, but what he said was on point. Two aspects were especially of interest to me: the moment in which, aged 20, he “climbed” up to West Berlin – “the western part of a city in an eastern country” – and truly faced the consequences of the war for the first time. That’s the way he understood that “something awful had happened” – by looking at a town that was reduced to the level of an empty landscape. And then, he said another thing: that this film was actually a television production, and that it could be regarded nowadays as a document regarding German television in the seventies when publicity/commercials were banned from broadcasting, and such gems could be discovered on the small screens. Meaning somber, contemplative works, that patiently revealed the atrocity committed here, amongst “us”, following a path spanning from the north of France to its South, on the traces of Anna Seghers’ grand novel, Transit, which was recently the basis of a fiction film directed by Christian Petzold. It’s something inconceivable nowadays when television has become the locus of all kinds of sensationalists and platitudes: there is no middle road, no decency, perhaps only very rarely (n sports, for example). What I saw today was described by Koerber as a cinematic essay: and truly so, a subtly-fictional thread is interwoven in the film, in the person of Rüdiger Vogler, one of Wenders’ fetish actors, who recites parts from the novel in a café on the Mediterranean coast, one of the present, under the shape of shots with majestic landscapes, almost in the vein of Straub-Huillet, the kind of images that elicit our attention and fill our eyes with the vastness of the panorama, and another of the past, under the form of Nazi propaganda archives. In these “newsreels” I discovered some traces of an age that is slightly overshadowed nowadays, when – maybe as a consequence of the imperatives of Claude Lanzmann – cinema took its decisive step forward in investigating the extermination of the Jews. But, then again, there are a couple of less unbearable images, easier to assimilate to so many other lies that were invented by the camera in the name of ideology, which culminates in the present-day delirium that we are witnessing close by. The film lies in suspension somewhere between the tele-convention and the cine-form, and it’s precisely this apparent lack of sophistication, which is constructed progressively, time-block by time-block, that imposes its method of charting a space and, especially, all which that space is not showing (any longer). Towards the end, before discovering the landscapes of resistance of the marquis of Vercors, who closes the film, we hear the story of Walter Benjamin, who died just within the grasp of liberty, somewhere on the border with Spain, and apparently buried in a place of arresting beauty, in a cemetery built all along a rocky wall that opens up to a Mediterranean gulf.

31st of MARCH

Just a couple of words about what I saw today: The Round-Up by Miklós Jancsó, part of a carte blanche offered to his disciple, Béla Tarr, who is the guest of honor of Toute la mémoire du monde; or, at least, was, since – as we found out right before the film that he was due to present was about to start, he had canceled his trip to Paris in the last moment, due to health issues. So, I only ended up with the film itself, magnificent in the freedom that it allows its camera, phenomenal in the élan with which it constructs shots, then fills them up with movement, characters, and choreography. The filmmaker hadn’t yet entered his phase of bucolic dances, in the era of The Red Psalm, but even here one can notice the voluptuousness of its exteriors and of the endless field, which tends to isolate everything in an abstract bubble. It’s a film that, given historical relations, I couldn’t read much beyond its main coordinates (it’s 1860, the main topic is the repression of the lower classes by the increasingly punishing bourgeoisie), and so I ended up watching it as pure cinetism, pure movement of troops that barely leave a trace of real behind, like models on the light-infused canvas of the lens. A superb experiment, that would be impossible to do nowadays, because it’s already a dead end, a maximum (see Serghei Dvortzevoy’s Tulpan, another story set in the fields, but that is otherwise incomparable). In a time in which cinema had discovered form, as András Bálint Kovács notes in a work that is systematic, and quite morose in its systematic nature, Jancsó, the lodestar, could leave a stellar trace all across the sky.

6th of APRIL

Once again at Reflet Médicis, to see El Gran Movimiento by Kiro Russo, a film that has been highly recommended by a lot of people that I care about. And, indeed, I was fully wrapped in the film throughout its entirety, despite the inevitable few minutes of sleep that I simply could not manage to chase away at the cinema from the last month, that nice, fluffy, and warm feeling that you have stumbled upon the work of someone – hitherto unknown – that hasn’t given up arms and is still fighting under the noble, long-forgotten ensigns of cinema. It’s really a film about everything – a space transfigured by a shifting camera, a time that is short-circuited by editing, social struggle, mythology, documentary, and fiction, a whole that is arranged in an arresting symphony of images shot on film stock and designed to create an entire system which it then destroys just a moment later, in order to propose a new one. In fact, what I appreciate most is this stubbornness of asking cinema for something other than a story: a clash between shots (editing), an attention toward landscapes (framing), a detail that breaks the screen in half (texture), activism (ethics). For example, there is a shot where the camera sweeps the urban panorama from bottom to top, traversing from a fountain with muddied water towards a decrepit landscape, which turns to a wooden horizon and then to the sky. In this particular movement, I can see the richness of a cinema that is willing to let itself sway to the most anodyne gestures – who of us has never shot a similar all-encompassing panorama with our handheld cameras? —, which is bestowed with a sort of refreshing radicalism on the big screen. I saw in El Gran Movimiento an interest in community and trust in the creatures of the night, but also a deeper mission – which, I believe, comes from the great Asian masters – for the possible avatars that contemporary cinema can imagine. I was indirectly reminded of The Human Surge and Esqui, two recent films that were just as maximalist in their DIY economy, that reimagine the grandeur of the world in a flicker of the editing wand, and imbues cinema with a type of thought that it’s mostly forgetting, as of late.

7th of APRIL

Returning to the Cinematheque, where the Jean-Pierre Limosin retrospective has just opened with Gardien de la nuit, in the presence of the filmmaker. I had known about this film for a long time, that is, for about two years, when I was fully diving into the works of Serge Daney, who wrote a phenomenal piece about it in Libération, when it was released in1986, and which I remembered, independently of its content, as a self-contained object. I had been looking for the film ever since, without any luck. Watching it now, however, I can say that Daney’s text is better than the film. I can’t remember anything save for the strong impression that it left on me, but I’m pretty much sure that Limosin’s movie will quickly vanish from my memory without leaving any lasting traces. It’s that kind of semi-official cinema that was gaining ground in the eighties – somewhere between Claude Lelouch and Guy Gilles —, and whose greatest creator, to me, was Jean-Francois Stévenin. These are relatively conventional films, but which manifest an interesting sort of freedom with regard to narration, and, especially, a welcome sort of nonchalance in the act of filming. It shows an almost complete lack of self-awareness, a thing which the young filmmakers of today can no longer enjoy: they must always place themselves within one tradition or another. The story simply slides past – it’s about a young man that works as a policeman at night while stealing cars during the daytime and trying to charm a girl. The entire film functions based on the principle of the story’s fundamental gratuity, after the image of this armed robbery which the protagonist (Jean-Philippe Écoffey) is a part of, and which earns him a small bag of cash which he empties into a river from the heights of a bridge. It’s not clear why he does this – for the adrenaline? To impress the chick? For the beauty of it? But it’s maybe this sequence of events that lies at the lower limit of causality is, in fact, a normality that has been lost from contemporary scriptwriting. I slide in between these films in the particular search of small moments, small hidden gems, and I am seldom disappointed. Like this shot that is taken from within the car’s trunk, which frames three dogs sitting in the backseat, innocently swinging to the driver’s brutal movements. Beautiful, unsignalled, like an efficient trick – the only one possible – that resolves a practical problem of the mise-en-scène. Cinema should be about this, in particular.

9th of APRIL

Mini-retrospective at Reflet Médicis, which I mentioned earlier, patroned by Béla Tarr (rounding up my recent readings of Esterházy and Forgács) – The Outsider. A pretty maniacal film – ample shorts and long discussions about god-knows-what and, in any case, a formal perseverance that I hadn’t seen in a long time. Still, I felt a sense of shame, just as perseverant, probably generated by the repeated image of rotten/yellowed/missing teeth in the mouths of these actors performing sad, somber characters. There’s a bit too much grit here, maybe, but it’s certainly one that isn’t revolting in an explicit and easy-to-read fashion and gives an unpleasant sensation about Hungary in the eighties: a poverty that is too much, too profound. Still, I am shocked by the carceral sensation that I was left behind with, because the idea of community, as filmed by Tarr, has something artificial, stuffy, even oppressive about it – far from other films that came out in the same context. The scenes between the two newlyweds – terrible and hateful. The formal project is interesting – very natural yet highly manneristic: how can one explain this? I was gripped by a sensation of uselessness concerning these shorts with “no” information, running on dead time, with a Cassavetes-esque penetration: to what ends is all this effort mobilized? What is it trying to prove? Mixed feelings. I have one Tarr film left, and I’ll have seen them all. Damnation is my favorite, still, and his final films seem pretentious fakes to me. At the end of the screening, I was given a booklet about the filmmaker, edited by a professor at my university, who was in the commission that graded my dissertation last year. I’ll read it on the bus.

My second Limosin film at the Cinematheque retrospective: his debut, Faux fuyants, co-directed with critic Alain Bergala at the beginning of the eighties. Limosin talked about how he made this film without any producers, on a shoestring budget, shooting for a long period together with close collaborators – with Denis Gheerbrant manning the camera, and Claire Simon at the editing table —, and this feeling of confronting the regime of the periphery of experimentalism had a bittersweet feeling, as it isn’t motivated by any formal or narrative constraints: it might as well have been shot of a big budget. Because the film is otherwise pretty much conventional, even empty and flat, and not even the presence of the New Wave Tokow Boys band, with Rachel Rachel in one of the main roles and a member of today’s audience, didn’t amount to much. A story about manipulation and interdiction that evoked Jean-Claude Brisseau, with nothing of the rough edges of this much more interesting filmmaker, much more willing to risk with his films. 

10 of APRIL

The last chance for Limosin: Tokyo Eyes (1998), which someone described as his masterpiece yesterday. I wouldn’t know what to say about that, because the story seemed completely nuts – a kid is hunted by the police because he’s scaring unknown individuals with a revolver, and who sees the light after being guided by a young girl -, and has something of a “moral” that is even more obvious than in children’s cartoons. I didn’t manage to connect at all with the filmmaker, who was present at each of the screenings and who was notable for his repeated usage of the phrase “en fin de compte”. There’s one thing I remember, though: the second-to-last sequences in Faux fuyants and Tokyo Eyes, the first, regarding a high-altitude crime, and the second, a handful of floating shots in a popular neighborhood of Tokyo. How did a French director end up shooting a film in Japan, with Japanese actors, in their own language? By pure accident, and because nobody wanted to support his project in France (which is kind of understandable to me…). So, Limosin met a Japanese producer – he had already traveled to the country many times, seeking to initiate himself into the mysteries of video art-, who was up for the challenge. But I’ll always prefer – to stay within the realms of a landscape (both aesthetic and geographical) that is somewhat easy to recognize – the films of one Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Victor Morozov

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