(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Art will "manage accidents", said Swedish filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson during this year's short film festival in Grimstad. In a moody conversation with film scientist Patrik Sjöberg, Nilsson expressed skepticism about the successful film, the one that follows the guidelines for solidity. He explained that he was "confused about his profession", "cursed at making a movie", and one who "did what you couldn't do".
In collaboration with the National Library, the festival organized a special program about Nilsson and Norwegian filmmaker Anne Haugsgjerd. The director's focus was titled "Two voices from the history of Norwegian short film", and both were present for a chat. It was clearly stated that these two "voices", which, among other things, cooperated on Life at Frogner (Haugsgjerd, 1986), shared a certain heretical, self-critical and reluctant – but at the same time cheerful and playful – approach to film.
Playful. There is a comical and actually slightly touching "pointlessness" in a movie like passagerare (Nilsson, 1966). The lack of holistic meaning becomes a major motif in the film. Nilsson compares man's search for a unified understanding with an idiot's attempt to put together the fragments from a broken mirror.
passagerare can be seen as a humorous critique or "deconstruction" of the documentary that presents everything as a coherent whole. The film is reminiscent of Luis Buñuels The Hurdes (1933), which was an attack on the established documentary's "neutralization" of its own ideology, its covert bias, its arrogant perspective on a reality that was often far from understood.
It is an "insignificant" single moment I will remember best passagerare: a close-up of a child leaning his head against a sign, with a narrative voice describing what we see: "a child playing behind a traffic sign".
This moment does not appear as a mirror image of anything, but as an enigmatic and at the same time trivial snapshot. The moment is detached from a meaningful context we will never be able to take part in – it is only an unsteady glimpse and poetry of an ignorant cameraman on the journey, who has put the picture into without fragmentary context. Who knows if the depicted boy ever played behind the traffic sign? As Nilsson told us in the hall, is passagerare "Raised during a journey".
This reluctance to unite meaning, to unambiguously define or contextualize the detail one has filmed, is not only a negative act, a rejection of an established practice in documentary and storytelling – it is also a creative move that allows things to emerge in their «non- gitthet », its« non-easy to explain ».
"The ambiguity of art is a positive quality because it presupposes two opposing forces in the work that struggle in different directions and make its unity impossible." Pasolini
As Sjöberg pointed out, it exists in terms of expression butter on pork i passagerare (he used the word tautology): Picture and word denote the same relationship – the narrator's voice describes what we already see in the pictures. The result is a trivialization of the conditions, and at the same time a problematization of this trivialization. There a well-established form of documentary explains what we see, and fails to call attention to their own description as a certain description, Nilsson highlights the description as a engagement and a game in reality.
The interruption. Anne Haugsgjerd works here in a similar way. Both directors work with the difficult, doubtful, playful, comical and sometimes absurd and impossible in the process that lies in describing something.
At Haugsgjerd, this is especially evident in interception A technique, a sensibility or a stylistic figure which Jean-Luc Godard has often explored, and which may be what has made his later films and a large audience "reluctant" towards each other.
I Life at Frogner, where Haugsgjerd tries to describe the neighborhood she lives in, you hear it hesitantly and interruptingly on the vocal cords and in the formulations, you see it in close-ups of a thinking director, and you notice it in the film's structure. The hesitant work process of describing and thinking is also shown through a main motif that binds the film to Godards History (s) of cinema (1988–1998): the filmmaker or auteur at the typewriter. Smoking, typing, pausing.
The doubt is cut from many films, but Haugsgjerd allows it to be a productive means and a basic feature of the film's expressiveness. Here lies perhaps a form of self-critical vitalism, a cult of life that is skeptical and self-doubting.
Self-criticism. In the viewing and conversation about Haugsgjerds Nice girl… Sit nice! (1991), in which she takes a critical look at purebred dogs, there was talk of a hesitant relationship with being a filmmaker who fronts a clear "I". Haugsgjerd said that in the film she "spoke on behalf of the dogs", but in the film she wonders if she does not appear as an exhibitionist, as someone who wants to show off.
This doubt and self-reflection, like the previously mentioned interruption, was something Godard highlighted as the film's strength over the television media's one-sided, uncritical and careless use of images. TV shows tend to wrap a chaotic and often contradictory world in a polished and pre-framed format. This is a uncritical form of representation which Hausgjerd and especially Nilsson are skeptical of.
In this form of film that fragments and questions things, there is something liberating. It is about interrupting the standardized, distancing oneself from the idea of the film as a unified mirror image of the world, and choosing not to take anything for granted. Not taking things for granted opens up a freedom in the actual – a freedom that is made visible in the filmmakers' ability to let what is not described, and what is not can described, become an important part of what is described. Sjöberg was in on this last, when he in passagerare so an eye for "that language can never articulate."
Pasolini. Also with the Italian rebel, poet, filmmaker and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, film, like literature, was a problematic language that describes reality and should do so with an eye for the ambiguous, the contradictory, the for captured by this language. Pasolini also received a special program during the festival, where screenings and lectures illuminated the director from several angles. Simen Ekern talked about Pasolini and Italian politics, Runar Hodne talked about directing Pasolini, and Camilla Chams discussed the filmmaker's transition from literature to film.
Chams quoted from Pasolini's text The ambiguity: "Every work is ambiguous." In this text, Pasolini further writes: "The ambiguity of art is a positive quality because it presupposes two opposing forces in the work that struggle in different directions and make its unity impossible."
"The ambiguity of art is a positive quality because it presupposes two opposing forces in the work that struggle in different directions and make its unity impossible."
This is about seeing film as a work towards standardization, the successful, the polished, as we also saw in Nilsson and Haugsgjerd. "It is the coincidences that are interesting," Nilsson said. Haugsgjerd followed up with: "The perfect is not interesting." For Pasolini, the argument for the ambiguous and contradictory was related to the unity thinking of fascism and the standardization of life in modern commodity society – which Pasolini related to fascism. Chams quoted Pasolini as saying, "The fascists did not tolerate the dialects."
Pasolini saw a liberating potential in film as "writing" because it was an expression that could not "buy characters as from a disk", but that had to create meaning itself – through images (settings), sounds and clips (montage). The verbal language was instrumental, linked to a conventional dictionary, where the film language was closer to the dreams, the irrational, an "almost animalistic" language that was more in touch with the raw, unconventional life.
In the Norwegian context, there is quite a bit of this critical consciousness that does not take the cinematic description for granted, and that allows this shortcoming to shine through in the film work. One can wish for more films that let the dreams, the ambivalent, the contradictory and "not-given" become a central part of the expression – as we notice it in a master class with Gustav Deutsch and Hanna Schimek, and with two of the Norwegian directors who were honored during this year's festival: Anja Breien and Torill Kove. From the Norwegian competition program was Skate (Jørn Nyseth Ranum, 2015) a film that at least included an inexplicable, chaotic and changing nature that does not care about human psychology – a reality that is often put out of camera focus by Norwegian film playwrights.
The short film festival and the National Library should be praised for highlighting these reluctant and hesitant voices from history, who manage positive accidents in a media reality that often becomes a little too professional, a little too high on their own understanding and representation of the world.
Endre Eidsaa Larsen is a film critic in Ny Tid.
endreeid@gmail.com
