Amusements

Various links:

The art of Fortunio Liceti:

Serious chat about trivial things: Graphic Policy Radio talk "Captain America: Civil War"

Interview with "Embrace of the Serpent" director Ciro Guerra.

A brief history of horror...

Hard to be a God

Trudno byt bogom

Aleksei German, 2013, Russia

‘Hard to be a God’ falls somewhere between Tarkovsky and ‘Zardoz’. By which I mean it contains leanings towards brilliance, campness, pretentiousness, indulgence, uniqueness, something genuinely bonkers. The comparison with Tarkovesky isn’t a stretch at all since since ‘Stalker’ was based on the book ‘Roadside Picnic’ by the same authors, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: ‘Hard to be a God’ is based upon their 1964 novel. And ‘Stalker’ provides a good example of the science fiction of  ‘Hard to be a God’ which is free of any visual clues that might obvious symbolise an otherworldly setting. There are no futuristic vistas, for example, no alien designs; just people saying and acting bizarre things(although you may note that the costume Don Rumata wears looks like the remains of a spacesuit). It was directed by Alexei German and completed by his son Alexei German Jnr upon his father’s death in 2013.

It’s a medieval science-fiction scenario, which you can’t say about too many films, in which a group of astronauts have landed on a planet that seems trapped in its Dark Ages, bent on killing anyone they deem intellectual. This is why people act like “The Fool” from a play, with added killing. These astronauts aren’t meant to interfere with the development of this society but, of course, they do and have. One, calling himself Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), is already bearing a “Godlike” status simply because he is more focused and alert in a land of violent idiots. This therefore makes him more successful in his violent outbursts even as he loses himself to the cacophony of squalor and craziness all around him as he tries to blend in. The fact that he has apparently gone so successfully native is another reason it may be hard to distinguish the sci-fi basis as he behaves much like those around him.

Disgust is one of its main attributes: every scene wallows in mud and liquids, people smearing themselves with gunk; a face can’t get a close-up without someone else touching it, or someone else picking its nose; it’s a wonder any skin appears clean in some way at all. And this is before the gore kicks in. Long takes nod towards not only to Tarkovsky but also Bela Tarr and Alexandr Sokoruv, but there is none of the stillness of Tsai Ming Liang. Each scene is bursting with people, filth and the surreal, through which the camera glides following a plot that almost comes to the surface. There is a war nbetween The Blacks and The Greys and Don Ramata is looking for someone…  Much dialogue bears non sequiturs and it quite likely that even as you are being dazzled by the madness onscreen you will moments where you will be thinking “What?”, “Why?”, “Who?”, “Really?” and “W.T.F.?”. It makes little concession to easy plotting, even if the story is simple when spelt out. But dazzling it is. The cast propel themselves into the muck with vigour in the manner of over-eager amateurs who think such wallowing is vibrant acting (and similarly, you can also say this of Di Caprio in ‘The Revenant’): but I don’t want to claim the acting is amateurish because that isn’t so. Merely that the gusto creates some of the aforementioned campness and indulgence, but it knows what it’s doing. Think then of the dense production design and affectations of Peter Greenaway mixed with the black-and-white austerity of ‘Embrace of the Serpent’.

But that is the meat of this, for the story takes secondary importance to the catalogue of grime and cruelty. It is a treatise on man’s penchant for stupidity and barbarism, even as it indulges in a feudal social structure. IMDB quotes a synopsis by Svetlana Karmalita for the Rome Film Festival that says,

This is not a film about cruelty, but about love. A love that was there, tangible, alive, and that resisted through the hardest of conditions.

But it is  about cruelty, surely, as to deny this is to ignore a central ingredient; and it is not so much about ‘love conquering in the worst of times’ as showing a context where affection doesn’t stand a chance. It is about bringing to life a crazed crowded scenario that you might find in classic, renowned paintings. It is about failure; it is about how religion and blind faith can facilitate malice and obstruct progress. It is about the failure of colonisation and where the native culture is too overbearing to be changed by one man, no matter a self-proclaimed God.

Embrace of the Serpent

El abrazo de la serpiente

Ciro Guerra, 2015, Columbia-Venezela-Argentina

Ciro Guella’s film is a mesmerising journey into a long dead world of an Amazon in the midst of colonialism, based upon diaries by scientists Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evan Schultes. Naturally ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the films of Werner Herzog will come to mind , but there is a formal elegance,  uncanniness and style here that has little to do with Herzog’s more neo-realist aesthetic. Gorgeous and haunting vistas of black and white cinematography by David Gallego segue into one another, occasionally crossing timeframes to tell the tale. 

An ailing explorer (Jan Bijvoet) goes into the Amazon jungle and enlists the help of a native, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Boliar) to find a legendary flower, supposedly capable of curing disease. Years later, another explorer with the same objective also enlists the older Karamakate’s assistance, sparking memories even though Karamakate has forgotten some of the rituals he used to know. 

It’s a stark but soulful excursion into a world where white men bring madness and death with little to counter that this is what they symbolise. The second visit to the Spanish Mission where a mad self-appointed messiah has taken over is the material of a horror film, for example, but ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ is only interested in this as part of the texture. In this world, the native fables where celestial animal spirits come to Earth (and where the title comes from) are a poetic tonic to the unforgiving nature of the white man’s religion. Karamakate is aware he is of a dying consciousness, one of the last of his kind and in the end it is all he can do to accept this with a few acts of defiance that will deprive the colonists of the jewels of his people.

Karamakate proves a fascinating character that easily quashes apparent “noble savage” archetypes, a character resistant to typical Western interpretations, always critical of other Amazonians that have befriended the white man. The importance of this film giving a rare voice to the Amazonian tribes-people has been officially recognised as it 

bears tragic witness to colonial atrocities that have ravaged natural resources, devastated indigenous populations, and broken a link between ancient wisdom and Western man's exploitive madness. Accordingly, the Governor of the Guainía Department, one of the locations used for the film, decorated Ciro Guerra with the Order of the Inrida Flower for “exalting the respect and value of the indigenous populations, likewise giving the Department recognition for tourism and culture.”

http://www.cineaste.com/spring2016/embrace-of-the-serpent-ciro-guerra/

A haunting and haunted world is evoked and alienation is a near tangible thing, not only in Karamakate’s isolation from the world as the last survivor of his tribe, but also in the Spanish mission’s decent into madness. Karamakate does not appear to have let loneliness and isolation bring on such madness: he is clear of thinking and opinion and radiates a natural pride. He goes on the white men’s excursions for his own reasons and makes little concession to them. 

Time is fluid as the narrative slides from past to present, via as much by the river as by memory. By putting the past foremost the film puts it on an equal level with its present rather than relegating it to “flashback”. Although the editing does not fracture time and find associations and symbolisms by juxtapositions in the style of Nicolas Roeg – ‘Walkabout’, say – Guerra exhibits a similar awareness of the bond between editing and time. By the time it seems to go a little ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (it’s only colour sequence), it has long been evident that ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ is also about film as a transcendent, hallucinogenic experience. It’s a film that evokes memories, dreams, the fluidity of time and a lost culture and refreshingly seems scornful of traditional white narrative norms. 

Beautiful, strange, tapping into the potential for film to give voice to everyone, even those long gone. An exceptional achievement.