(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Directed by: Miki Polonski,
Photo: Katia Shepeliavaya
Look out the window and at the houses around where you live. Think of all the people behind the facades. Do you know who they are? Do you have sett them? Do you know their fate? Probably not. In 2015, most people have enough of themselves and theirs. In our globalized reality, we quickly forget the "little realities". Take a block, for example. Anywhere in the world, in any city. Like the one right next to your own home. How many worlds, and perspectives on existence, hide in such a building? How many lifetimes, how much joy, how many tears are not there? All such places hold our whole world in miniature.
In Miki Polonski's documentary 1 Building and 40 People Dancing we get a portrait of such a place in Bat Yam, a city in the Tel Aviv district, off the coast of Israel. Polonski's film is warm and close to the people he documents – this is a film that takes the time to really show us the human flicks the director is familiar with. This is first and foremost a diversity of stories – storytelling about ordinary people and their lives, without frills. The director supports what the main characters have in mind, and paves the way for the stories of their history and future.
Building and 40 People Dancing is available for streaming for New Age readers on http://vimeo.com/127125920 (password below)Movie password: 40
Tragedies. Two of the ladies live and breathe for the animals they own. They fondle and hug their parrots. One of them also rearranges the little apartment again and again – she repairs, makes parrots for the parrot, erects new shelves and paints the walls. Why this activity? Because she lost her husband and two sons a few years earlier. One was drowned in an attempt to harass his friends – he was supposed to swim across a river, but panicked along the way and drowned. The other son was killed while serving in the Israeli army. The man died shortly after emigrating to Israel from Ukraine.
Another lady lives in a scrap heap […] in the mess she sits listening to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni.
Another lady lives in a scrap heap, in a huge mess, but takes up the intellectual realm. In the mess she sits listening to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and, in an interview with the director, explains how seducers are thinkers who do not want to corrupt women but release them. "Casanova wanted to do something about their predictable lives," she says. Eventually, we realize that she too is carrying on a tragedy: When she emigrated to Israel with husband and children, they also died, just as with the girlfriend in the same house. Then it's nice to dream away in the world of opera occasionally.
The cry of sorrow. Still, the most poignant fate is the older man who sings and screams at his lost love story. When he was young he fell in love with a woman who now, it seems, has left him – but they still call each other every day. These conversations are the very hub of his retirement. Until she stops taking the phone. Lets not call. It is heavy for the old man. The days go by while he waits. And waiting. Sometimes it goes well anyway, he forgets away, caresses the cat who lives in the aisle, and then he sings so that it rattles throughout the block. But when he is unhappy, right after another unsuccessful attempt to reach his love, he screams in despair and calls out his lost loved one's name. Everyone hears him. It is as if the man's proclaimed grief ties everyone in the block together in a destiny.
In an interview for a while, he sits behind rolled-up blinds and describes himself as a prisoner. "For years I have been imprisoned in this apartment. It's like I've killed somebody, ”he says. "Always alone. Everywhere alone. Wherever I go, whether it's to the theater or to the beach, I'm always alone, ”he continues. But then he gets a visit from his sister, and it's not too bad anyway. When she's gone, he visits his opera-loving neighbor with a plate of food, and gets an emotional boost from it. Empathy, the ability to assist someone who may be worse off than himself, gives him strength and joy. The shoulders are lowered a little. To the grief once again rolls in and squeezes out a scream.
Necessary oblivion. The film gives us the immediate environment of humans – where they play with their animals or sing – but also quickly delves into the sad stories that hide behind the trivial everyday activities. Everyone has lost someone, everyone is somehow hurt by a cruel loss in the past. They are traumatized, something irreversible has happened. Still, life goes on. Still, they can chat with the neighbor, feed a cat, pat their parrot on the back or catch a smoke and smile when they see some children playing in the space in front of the house. In a sense, everyone we meet in the film covers their trauma through other activities – by turning up shelves, or listening to opera. Or maybe their respective despaires are transformed into the heartbreaking cry that periodically fills the ascent? Maybe that's what makes it possible to endure the loss. Though – is that awful really covered?
Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Unhistorical considerations that if we could remember everything we have done and everything that has happened to us at all times, we would quickly perish. This applies not only to those who have experienced particularly cruel things, but to all people, the philosopher believes. If we lose the ability to forget – to be unhistorical, as he calls it – we cannot focus on what lies ahead and drown in the past.
Retail Wealth. Nietzsche's thoughts on oblivion lead to a story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man who could remember everything. If you set a time and a date, he would be able to recall every last detail of this moment in the past – how the clouds in the sky looked just that day, right at that time. He could remember the shades of the table in front of him, the texture of the tree, hissing in the ear canal. We may think that remembering everything is a wonderful gift, but in reality it is a curse. The total memory prevents him from thinking, says Borges. This is exactly why he has no future. No, there is no trauma that prevents him from moving on, just the enormous detail of the past that he cannot tear himself away from. He knows nothing about the future, but he knows everything about the past.
Fortunately, we are not like the protagonist of Borges's short story. The ability to forget saves us from the past – but the ability to indulge in the many events that are happening around us right now can move us away from what has happened and direct our gaze to the here and now. This we see, with all clarity, in 1 Building and 40 People Dancing: It's not the dramatic events, but all the little things the people of Bat Yam delve into that make them survive. It is all the everyday rituals and pursuits that enable them to move on and not be invalidated by what has happened to them.
But when he is unhappy, he screams in despair and calls out the name of his lost loved one.
Reconciliation. 1 Building and 40 People Dancing is a deeply empathetic film, because it is about life itself, that we experience losses we cannot really bear – but that everyday life goes on. Towards the end of the film, the opera-loving lady talks about her love of literature, especially the Russian one. “I love Dostoevsky. Even in such a rotten world, there is always a beautiful love story unfolding, full of character and beauty. ” She becomes depressed by reading him, she decides, but it is still clear that the Russian author also gives her the life force needed to continue. The depression, if that is what it is, is based on a literary experience that she can repeat and thus open the future through. Through Dostoevsky, she looks forward, not back.
So yes, life goes on even after the worst thing we can think of – and we will almost always be able to find something, or someone, that can give comfort. It can be an animal that reassures us; There may be books that distract you. In them we are reminded that another reality exists. That beauty exists. In this way, we can always look for something that can reconcile us with discomfort, suffering and loss.
Cyclical movie. The film alternates between clips from the different apartments, the same stretches in the common areas, again and again, from different angles. It doesn't get boring, on the contrary. Every time something a little more happens, something a little different. There is never anything spectacular that takes place, but everyday life unfolds with its usual content. But everyday life points forward, towards richness of variety and all the details that can lift a life from grief, not backward.
Miki Polonski has made a film that does not lead to any climax, but rather studies the different variations in a cycle. This is how the rhythm of the film corresponds to the course of nature – with the alternation between night and day, summer and winter. But also between grief and joy, life and death. In the local and small, he therefore finds the universal and the great.
Røed is a film critic in Ny Tid.
kjetilroed@gmail.com
