CaSFFA 2021 – FREM (2019)

So far the Czech & Slovak Film Festival of Australia has taken me from rural cultural comedy to intense urban paranoia. Today’s selection takes a hard left away from narrative into a more abstract exploration of arctic landscapes and the lifeforms existing within them. Its transformation of natural environments via an implied science fictional lens invites comparison with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men (2020) (reviewed here), which used narration and music to suggest that a series of monuments scattered throughout former Yugoslavian territories were the remnants of a bygone civilisation. FREM (2019) takes a contrasting approach, stripping back the narration to a few introductory sentences before allowing the images and sounds to speak for themselves.

Viera Cákanyová (writer, director, cinematographer and editor) opens the film with some old analogue footage shot on a beach. The low resolution of the source material is immediately apparent in the digital artefacts created by its transference to a high definition non-analogue medium, large squares of blurred colour and mismatched frame rates distorting the original picture. Cákanyová’s opening narration draws attention to the analogue source of the imagery, establishing a connection between the breakdown of picture quality and the decomposition of the biological matter from which all life on Earth, including ourselves, is formed. After a rapid-cut montage of human life viewed through a nostalgic haze, she introduces the topic of artificial intelligence and our hopes that it might help to solve the big human problems like climate change and immortality. She interrupts this topic with confronting imagery of a deer being gutted, followed by another montage of deceased animal life, before raising the question of whether we could expect an artificial intelligence to have the same priorities. The narration breaks up into distortion, the subtitles change colour, Cákanyová’s voice is distorted and manipulated, played back and forth in garbled, disjointed electronic forms… and that’s about it for any direct authorial voice.

The rest of the film plays out against the Antarctic wilderness – a cold, still environment more in keeping with the emotive terms normally used by humans to describe a machine intelligence. There is a constant presence of breathing on the soundtrack from this point forth, creating the suggestion that the camera shows the point of view of a (potentially post-human) artificial intelligence. The camera roams around the landscape with no apparent aim, investigating whatever grabs its interest – the shapes of the ice and rocks, the swell of the sea, the occasional sign of life such as a seal. Apart from the sound of breathing, the sonic landscape is an electronic distortion of the natural sounds one might expect to hear, sampled and transfigured until it is effectively unrecognisable without close attention. The visual surroundings are similarly subject to blurring and fragmentation, if less frequently – and it’s unclear whether this is an accident of technology or a deliberate choice on the part of the unknown observer. The first half of the film culminates with the discovery of a visual distortion which appears to be physically present, a two-dimensional disc hovering over the ice – the view pans from one side to the other and back to the first side, at which point it reveals itself as a window into the past, a vibrant green Cretaceous landscape through which a procession of sauropods can be seen.

The transition into the second half begins with a hole drilled into the ice. Drone footage takes a spiralling path as it tracks the lone trail of footprints back to a hut belonging to the 42^nd Polish Antarctic Expedition – although in this context it’s a lone splash of red, with an inhabitant (Martin Kovacík) whose tiny naked form can be seen venturing into the sea. Human sounds begin to join the natural environmental sounds as part of the sonic landscape – fragments of songs, excerpts from television broadcasts, and one key recording in which the unseen speaker tells how he is unable to discern any logic to what is going on. The film concludes with the discovery of a second portal, one which – by implication – extends into the future rather than the past; a future of darkness and stars and fragments of ice spinning in the blackness, what must the remnants of our own planet after its inevitable destruction.

Cákanyová is a Slovakian filmmaker known for her experimental approach to creating documentaries. She made FREM for the public broadcasting service Czech Television, following it up with White on White [Biela na bielej] (2020), a video diary documenting her stay in Antarctica and her interactions with various artificial intelligences. Unfortunately I haven’t had the opportunity to view this, so I can’t actually confirm the accuracy of any of the suppositions I’ve made – but part of the pleasure of watching a work such as this is allowing your mind to form its own connections as it attempts to discover/impose some meaning, much like the artificial neural network theoretically behind FREM. Among the rest of Cákanyová’s collaborators, I’d single out her sound team for their contributions in complementing the visuals to create an immersive experience. Dominik Dolejší, who was responsible for the final mix, began his career in sound design on her film Gottland (2014) – an adaptation of Polish author Mariusz Szczygiel’s “Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia”, winner of the 2009 European Book Prize. Also beginning his film career under her auspices is saxophonist and electroacoustic composer Miroslav Tóth, who worked with Cákanyová on Slovensko 2.0 (2014), which appears to apply a FREM-like approach to Slovakian history and society.

Having spent almost 1000 words writing about FREM, it may seem counterproductive to be say that this is one of those films that really needs to be experienced rather than described. It’s a consciously alienating experience – that’s part of the point (assuming I’ve interpreted the creator’s intentions correctly) – but if you’re not immediately put off by my description, then it may well be for you.

Something in the Woods – Valley of Shadows / Spoor

Shortly before this month’s film festival began, I ended a two-month binge on Hong Kong cinema with a journey back into the mysteries of the European woodlands, visiting Norway and Poland in the recent past of 2017. Coming on the heels of my folk horror documentary review, you’d be forgiven for thinking I planned it – and although there’s an argument to be made that these films could be considered as folk horror, my initial reference point was their potential classification as werewolf (or other shapeshifter) films. As to whether this is actually the case… well, it’s complicated.

There’s a tendency among some reviewers to reduce everything to plot, as if the way in which a story is told is completely irrelevant to its quality. Some people even deride films they haven’t seen purely on the basis of a Wikipedia plot summary – especially frustrating when that summary has been written by somebody who clearly didn’t understand what they were watching. It would be very easy to describe the plot of Valley of Shadows [Skyggenes dal] (2017) in a trite one-to-two sentence summary, but this would be doing the film a great disservice and would in no way convey the experience of watching it.

The focal character is Aslak (Adam Ekeli), a young boy living in rural Norway with his mother Astrid (Kathrine Fagerland). Their lives are defined in part by the absence of his older brother (never named), a junkie being pursued by the police for unspecified violent crimes. Aslak’s only friends are his dog Rapp and Lasse (Lennard Salamon) – an older boy who lives nearby and goes to the same school. Sneaking into a barn together to look at a dead sheep, the latest death in a spate of killings believed to have been committed by a wolf, Lasse tells Aslak that he believes the killer is actually a werewolf. Not long after the police inform Aslak’s mother of his brother’s death, Rapp goes running off into the woods chasing something… and still hasn’t returned by the evening. Unable to wake his mother the next morning, Aslak sets out into the woods to look for Rapp by himself.

As we experience the film from Aslak’s perspective, much of what is happening needs to be pieced together from sparse fragments of overheard dialogue, or completely dialogue-free stretches where we can see that adults are talking but can only guess what they’re saying from context. Zbigniew Preisner’s music is similarly sparse, creating an underscore of melancholy solitude resonating with the open landscape and muted colour palette – until Aslak begins his journey into the forest, at which point Lisa Gerrard’s gorgeous contralto bursts forth and the music swells majestically to match it, creating an eerie, almost fairytale-like atmosphere. It’s at this point that Marius Matzow Gulbrandsen’s cinematography really comes into its own, working in concert with the score to evoke the feel of a spiritual quest into the wilderness. I fell thoroughly in love with this section of the movie, sound and image working hand-in-hand to create something transcending a simple recitation of events. (I’ve been listening to the soundtrack while writing this review in order to bring the movie alive in my head again, which has been a mixed blessing, since it just reinforces the idea that my words are inadequate.)

I don’t really want to say anything more specific about the story beyond this point. On an emotional level, both Aslak and Astrid make at least some progress in coming to terms with their feelings of loss. While we do learn whether or not Rapp and Aslak will be reunited, the truth about Lasse’s werewolf hypothesis is left entirely up to the viewer – and I can easily imagine different people formulating their own “obvious” explanation about what really happened. Some people might find it all too straightforward, others might find it frustratingly inconclusive – but the film is bracketed with a definite emotional arc and the lack of any explanatory dialogue is, to me, a virtue. It’s not a film to be explained, it’s a film to be experienced – and that experience is something I’d be more than willing to repeat.

Valley of Shadows is the first feature from director Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen, coming six years after a series of award-winning short films. He co-wrote the screenplay with Clement Tuffreau, who had previously co-written a film called Sam Was Here (2016) but – more intriguingly to me – also directed NYC Foetus (2009), a documentary about Australian experimental musician Jim Thirlwell. Zbigniew Preisner has been a film composer since 1983, scoring major works by directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski – Dekalog (1988), The Double Life of Veronique [Podwójne życie Weroniki] (1991), Three Colours: Blue [Trzy kolory: Niebieski] (1993), Three Colours: White [Trzy kolory: Biały] (1994), Three Colours: Red [Trzy kolory: Czerwony] (1994) – and Agnieszka Holland – Europa, Europa [Hitlerjunge Salomon] (1990), Olivier, Oliver (1992), The Secret Garden (1993). His musical collaborator Lisa Gerrard grew up in Melbourne among a range of musical influences, forming neoclassical darkwave/world music band Dead Can Dance with Brendan Perry in 1981 and contributing to a vast number of soundtracks over the years. I’m not familiar with Marius Matzow Gulbrandsen’s other work as a cinematographer, but the film which jumps out at me is Marko Raat’s Lumekuninganna (2010), a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen [Snedronningen] (1844) for adults.

Speaking of Agnieszka Holland, she’s responsible for the other half of my double bill – Spoor [Pokot] (2017), a faithful adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych] (2009). The original title “Pokot” is a Polish hunting term that refers to the count of wild animals killed (and since I implicitly trashed Wikipedia earlier, it’s only fair to thank them for pointing this out), which as far as I’m aware has no English equivalent – but the substitute title “Spoor” is equally relevant.

In contrast to the young male protagonist of Valley of Shadows, Spoor‘s lead character is an old woman. Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) has led an adventurous and nomadic life, a civil engineer who built bridges for disadvantaged communities in the Middle East when she was younger. In her twilight years she’s settled down in a cottage on the outskirts of a Polish village near the Czech border, living alone with her two beloved dogs and teaching English at the local primary school. She’s a fervent believer in astrology and thinks evolution is nonsense, but it’s her love for animals that makes her an eccentric in the eyes of the townsfolk, who glorify hunting. Even out-of-season hunting, which is technically illegal, is tacitly endorsed by the local police and all of her complaints about the matter go nowhere.

When her dogs fail to return home one evening, Janina is devastated, but her efforts to pursue the matter are – as ever – stymied by official indifference. Even the local Catholic priest (Marcin Bosak) is aggressively unsympathetic, telling her that it’s a sin to treat animals with the same consideration as people and that she should pray for her soul. (In a sermon delivered much later in the film, he even has the gall to describe St Hubert – patron saint of hunters – as “the first ecologist” while identifying hunters as “God’s ambassadors to nature”.)

Against this backdrop, Janina isn’t terribly upset to learn that one of her neighbours – a poacher known as Big Foot (Adam Rucinski) – has choked to death on a bone, being rather more interested in the way the local deer appear to be watching his house. When the local police chief (Andrzej Konopka), another hunter, is found dead in the vicinity with deer tracks leading away from his body, Janina tries to convince the authorities that the local wildlife are taking revenge on their oppressors – but although she is met with the ridicule you’d expect, the deaths don’t stop there.

As the story progresses, Janina forms her own little gang of misfits. There’s her elderly neighbour Matoga (Wiktor Zborowski), a social recluse who’s skilled with explosives; Dobra Nowina (Patrycja Volny), a sweet young woman trying desperately to get her younger brother away from their abusive parents, and who is being sexually exploited by violent local businessman Jaroslav Wnetzak (Borys Szyc); Dyzio (Jakub Gierszal), a similarly young IT specialist working for the local police who is hiding his epilepsy and devotes his spare time to translating William Blake into Polish; and Boros Schneider (Miroslav Krobot), a Czech entomologist with a thing for pheromones who hooks up with Janina after finding one of the bodies.

This is a film which revels in demonstrating that life doesn’t stop just because you’re old. Janina, Matoga and Boros are all in their mid-sixties but continue to live life to the full when given the opportunity. They put on animal costumes and dance at parties, they smoke joints around a campfire, there’s even a sex scene – which, while less pneumatic and lingering than your typical erotic escapade, is still frank and has the potential to make younger viewers squeamish (delighting the director no end I’m sure). As for the spate of murders, Spoor contrasts again with Valley of Shadows, providing a clear and definitive answer as to who or what is responsible and why.

I’ve been aware of Agnieszka Holland’s reputation as a talented filmmaker since the release of Europa, Europa but have somehow never quite gotten around to watching any of her work. She is credited as “scenario collaborator” on Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy and appears to split her working life between Poland and America. Although her feature film work has slowed down since the 1990s, she’s developed a healthy sideline in directing episodes of high profile US/Canadian TV shows such as The Wire (2004-8), Treme (2010-13), The Killing (2011-12) and House of Cards (2015-17) – she even directed the TV miniseries remake of Rosemary’s Baby (2014), which I’d never considered watching until now. Speaking about Spoor to The Guardian, she provided the following delightful statement: “One journalist for the Polish news agency wrote that we had made a deeply anti-Christian film that promoted eco-terrorism. We read that with some satisfaction and we are thinking of putting it on the promotional posters, because it will encourage people who might otherwise not have bothered to come and see it.” Holland brought her compatriot Kasia Adamik onboard to assist with the direction, although I wasn’t able to determine why or the extent of her contribution.

I have no intention of providing any definitive answer as to whether both, either or neither of these films includes a werewolf or any other related creature – but I’d certainly encourage you to watch them and find out for yourself.

We Are One Retrospective – Offerings from Czech Republic

I’ve been enamoured of Czech cinema for some time now, but still have a very minor familiarity with it. Because of this, viewing the contributions of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to the We Are One Global Film Festival was of especial interest. One offer was one feature film and a curated selection of four student short films from Future Frames, KVIFF’s spotlight on up-and-coming filmmakers.

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet [Adéla jeste nevecerela] (1977, Czechoslovakia, 102 min)

A Czech detective parody featuring pulp detective Nick Carter in a case which involves a carnivorous plant trained to eat people upon hearing a Mozart lullaby by a believed-dead master criminal whose entire career was a build up to taking revenge on his botany teacher for giving him a bad mark which spoiled his chances with a girl. Just the sort of thing I enjoy! The plant is animated by Jan Švankmajer, the script is by Jiří Brdečka (who wrote Karel Zeman’s wonderful adaptations of Jules Verne and Baron Munchausen), and the music is by Luboš Fišer (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders). Very happy to have seen this!

Peacock: A Comedy in Three Acts [Furiant] (2015, Czech Republic, 27 min)

My personal favourite of these short films, a funny speculation on the early years of a famous Czech realist playwright, constructing a narrative around the scanty known facts and labelled with scientific subtitles.

Everything Will Be Okay [Alles wird gut] (2015, Germany, 30 min)

A divorced father picks up his daughter for the latest custody visit and surreptitiously arranges during their day out to flee the country with her. Sad, becomes stressful, but resolves.

Tenants [Lokatorki] (2015, Poland, 30 min)

Even more stressful story about a woman who buys a flat only to find the previous occupant (who is also a full-time carer for her adult daughter) hasn’t moved out and refuses to move.

Warm Comedy about Depression, Madness and Unfulfilled Dreams [Hrejivá komédia o depresii, šialenstve a nesplnených snoch] (2017, Slovakia, 22 min)

Lighter touch than the last two, but conveys the spiky irritability of the family a bit too well. At least it all comes out well in the end.

MIFF 68½ – The Weight of All the Beauty (2019) / Kill It and Leave This Town (2020)

The Weight of All the Beauty [Süda Sõrve Sääres] (2019)

Directed by Eeva Mägi

Haunting Estonian semi-documentary in which a man in his 50s tells the stories of the schoolmates he lost to alcoholism, re-framed as a folk story about their possession and destruction by the Bottle Demon. The narrator takes us to the locations of each part of his story as the slowly tracking camera explores the environs, usually areas of natural beauty but sometimes the abandoned homes of his deceased friends. Tanel Kadelipp’s distorted guitar lurks in the background of these stories as a brooding presence before rearing and wreaking aural devastation. This presence is gone in the final section, replaced by a more contemplative and peaceful sound as the narrator takes us on a tour of graves before retreating into a seaside landscape.

Curiosity about this short film was my primary motivation in purchasing a ticket to this session. My enjoyment of it more than outweighs my disappointment with the main feature.

Kill It and Leave This Town [Zabij To I Wyjedź Z Tego Miasta] (2020)

Directed by Mariusz Wilczyński

This is an intensely personal work from Polish animator Mariusz Wilczyński, a feature-length film which took 14 years to complete. The animation is hand-drawn and must have been painstakingly constructed frame by frame. There are times when the background surrounding the animation has the texture of rumpled paper, drawing attention to the technique – more often the backgrounds are formed from painted textures with the animation running over a separate layer. Some sequences layer different 2-dimensional planes of drawings moving independently, with shadows (computer-generated?) carefully added to create a sense of depth in the frame. On a purely technical basis, this is an astonishing achievement for a single creator.

Unfortunately I had a great deal of difficulty connecting to this movie and I couldn’t really find anything in it to latch onto. Wilczyński’s art style is ugly (not necessarily a problem for me) and suits the ugliness of the material. The film seems to portray a sort of anti-nostalgia, a look back at the rosy memories of the past to see that they’re all tarnished with petty and not-so-petty cruelties. At least some of the elements in the film come from the animator’s own life – he’s inserted himself into the film as a character (sometimes a giant) who, in his first appearance in the film, can barely bring himself to have a conversation with his grandmother, dying in a hospital bed, not even to discuss the film he’s working on.

During this section, Wilczyński reluctantly tells his mother that Tadeusz Nalepa has agreed to provide music for the film, an element which anchors the film even more firmly in a past of regret given that he’s represented here by music from his 1970s blues rock band and died in 2007, soon after the film was begun. The infrequent appearance of his music (and the work of other musicians within the same style) provides the only elements of the film which don’t appear to wallow in ugliness – these are the only times when nostalgia conveys positive feelings, if frequently tinged with melancholy.

It’s difficult for me to provide a fair assessment of this film, as I often found my thoughts drifting away in rejection of what was in front of me, so I may well have missed some nuances which would soften my opinion. Apart from some surreal interjections which were particularly well handled, I have to throw up my hands and admit that this particularly personal journey just wasn’t for me.