(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Forget!
Directed and photo: Eduardo Williams
In what is called parkour, free running or you're moving (movement art) is about playing, jumping and stretching out of obstacles in urban and natural surroundings. For Sébastien Foucan, who established the term "freerunning" in the documentary Jump London (2003), it is also about transferring bodily acrobatics and agility to one's attitudes and mentality. Foucan has pointed to the liberating and natural of this "movement art": "For children, it is instinctive to see their surroundings as an opportunity for play and self-expression through creative physical activity. Society should cultivate this natural behavior rather than discourage it when children grow up. ”Foucan also believes that free running can work positively for people living in difficult environments, such as conflict zones. The dedication, strength, and rigidity required to climb a high wall can come in handy with various forms of toil, distress, and injustice.
Argentine Eduardo Williams' I forgot! (2014) is not a documentary about free running – It's a documentary that "Free runner". What the movie is about is really quite unclear, but it has qualities that coincide with this concept. Can film be a "moving art" that extends past obstacles? This almost annoying abstract question first appeared at the end of the film, making a resilient form. But more on this later. First: What does this documentary mean?
Obscurity and claustrophobia. Through an observational camera, we follow some young Vietnamese who are at work, sitting on stairs and talking about life, who go for walks among fruit trees, who drive mopeds and who climb in abandoned buildings. There seems to be a main character here: a young man who struggles to keep his spirits up in an exhaust-filled city life characterized by stressful small jobs. But we get minimal information, and Williams jumps from scene to scene without markers that tell us where we are, what time we are in, and why we are here and there. The film is not only fragmentary and unclear on a narrative, thematic and structural level, but also purely visual: Human faces tend to be "drowned" by the city's neon lights, dark alleys, dust and dazzling sun. And when we sit on mopeds at speed, not only are the roads narrow and the traffic chaotic, but the rain hits us right in the camera lens.
As in Williams' previous film, Could See a Puma (2011), it is not about giving us information and an overview of a situation or reality, but about showing us how people live in relation to a landscape that clings to them.
Could See a Puma, an enigmatic fiction film, is set in a kind of ecological crisis scenario, and can give associations to the apocalyptic, lifeless landscapes from Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and Satan Tango (Béla Tarr, 1994). The film is in color, but the landscape's discouragement makes it feels as a black-and-white film. In the ruined environment, however, people are shown as quite playful, laughable and adaptable. The world seems to have collapsed, but they continue to get drunk, talk about communication difficulties, go for walks in the mud, and take pictures of friends' tattoos.
I Forget! the city (it is not said which city we are in) appears as a crowded, dusty, noisy, polluted, obscure and stressed place, where people sometimes find "free zones" and put the effort behind them by climbing or eating fruit in lush surroundings. Williams' wide-angle lens gives the settings a curved shape that resembles "fisheye aesthetics". These images do not unfold a world, but give the impression that the city curves claustrophobically about the people.
Cinematic freestyle. At the end of the film, Williams follows a group of young boys (is the main character among them?) Who drive out of town and free runner in abandoned buildings. Gravity and the hard concrete are palpable, and the risk of falling is clearly present when the boys jump from window to window. Afterwards they laugh nervously and relieved. Williams' camera has a bodily presence; it stands there on the concrete wearing sneakers and behaving like an expectant witness, involved in what is happening.
The images do not unfold a world, but give the impression that the city curves claustrophobically about the people.
After a while, the boys have climbed all the way up to the roofs. We see a big city as a heavy and towering background for their play and play. From a bird's eye view, which seems to have found the highest point, we look down at the bodies jumping around. Now the weight is not just palpable; it is as if we are being pulled down to the ground – as if the images themselves are affected by gravity. But then, all of a sudden, we lighten up – the camera jumps up into the sky.
Throughout the film, Williams' camera has adapted to human movements: We have ridden mopeds at speed, run into alleys and dived into the sea. But now it takes off completely – now the camera makes its own free running and say goodbye to human limitations.
As we fly high up in the sky and look down on the city, we hear street noise and the voices of the boys who remain locked to the rooftops. Sound and image are distant from each other, but at the same time simultaneous. The camera drone performs its clumsy, shaky "acrobatics" up there over the humans, who stand under and control it. By the way, we just have to assume the latter – the camera is running its own race now, and the people are nowhere to be seen. As we fly over the city, we hear the following comments from the rooftops:
"Is he coming back?"
"Hold the machine."
"I feel my pores expand."
"I can not see anything."
"Do not throw it away."
"I can not see anything."
"I saw it."
"It will hit someone in the head."
"We can see the whole figure of the person."
"See!"
"Are you coming down to pee?"
"Piss here."
Williams' film has a form that is not so far removed from this fragmented and obscure exchange of words. The director strikes me as an urban mystic seeking a poetic-observational free runner-documentarism that does not quite know where it is going. The camera at the end of Forget!, which surprises us in its sudden defiance of gravity, and which throws the whole film into a new sphere (the opening under the sea, among divers, suddenly takes on a new meaning), carries promises of a filmmaker seeking cinematic «free space». Time will probably show what these "free spaces" consist of, and whether they will have an effect beyond being playful inventions in the time of drones.
endreeid@gmail.com
This week's documentary for our readers: I Forgot
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