A Árvore, André Gil Mata

In 2017, André Gil Mata, then studying cinema in Sarajevo, filmed a letter to his grandmother Alzira two years after her death (so important and so beautiful, Grandmother Alzira): a letter against forgetting and against distance. In it, he outlined the ideas for two films, and from one of them came this one, Drvo (in Portuguese, A Árvore). It was more or less about this: filming the story of a city and two wars. And the film would begin with a long, rigorous shot lasting 15 minutes: roofs covered with snow (the snow he tells his grandmother about, the snow of Sarajevo, with its blue light); then, the pane of a window, on which a child draws with her finger; then a slow pan backwards, over the surface of a table, the plates and cups, the clinking of crockery; then the mother joins her child and draws on the glass with her; and the camera does what it can to avoid perturbing that peacefulness, as it continues slowly backwards to reveal, bit by bit, the bed, the stove, the entire bedroom. Let us note here the first key idea running through André Gil Mata’s films: the idea of time and its passing. If you like, the idea of cinema as a guarantee of memory and attention, or as a time machine, capable of the fastest of leaps or the slowest of revelations.

But we’ll come back to this. Because the first shot of the film has yet to finish. As we stop retreating, the camera passes a threshold, or another window, and sweeps along a wall, slowly, to the right: every crack, every imperfection. Then it goes into another bedroom, or maybe the same one, and begins to advance with the same slowness. An old man is lying on the bed, a different one or the same, and the same window, or another one, seems now to be missing its panes. From somewhere comes a flash, an explosion, a barrage of shots. But through the tears in the paper that covers the window we see that the roofs are the same. The blue snow is the same. And the city is at war: once again. We’ve arrived at the second key idea of Gil Mata’s films: that of repetition. Because re-reading and going back over things reveals what time alone is unable to reveal. Just like now: it’s a different war, a new war, mechanised, the noises are different — sound, here, being Gil Mata’s third key idea, but we have only just started to discuss the second. The war is different, like I said, but it’s the same war that, we discover later, will take the mother from her child, and force both the child and the old man to walk weighed down by life.

Let us try out an idea for a moment. The idea of cinema as glass, but of two different types: portrait-glass and landscape-glass. The first is what it sounds like: a mirror, and mirror-films reflect those who make them with different amounts of distortion. The second type, which includes films like this one (exacting, attentive) is more complicated. Because there is both the glass through which we see the snow-covered roofs, and the glass on which we draw with our finger, over the top of the landscape. What is that drawing? Does it reveal or obscure the landscape?

I must confess something: when I mentioned the idea that led to this film, I didn’t include all the details. The idea had a second part: filming the story of a man and two wars. (A body-city: what marks does he bear?) This was on purpose: what I did was to hide something so that I could reveal it. And the same is true of the way in which Gil Mata uses images, with the help of sound. We return to the third key idea. The sound design (and this film has no music, only noises, many of them common to his oeuvre: the mechanism of clocks, the crunching of boots in snow, the heavy breathing, the clank of glass bottles, the splashing of oars in water, the rushing of a river, fire), by giving the film a rhythm or a beat, slows it down and takes the place of the narrative function of the images. It sets them free to say little. To hide. And gives us the task of filling in the gaps. For example: Gil Mata brought an image to this film of a dark figure in the snow, next to a tree on a riverbank, trying to keep itself warm. What is he hiding and what is he revealing? What is behind the glass?

Just now I talked of memory and attention and returning, but I could have said the same thing in briefer terms: love. Cinema as a love letter. What are these films about Grandmother Alzira if not exactly that? What is the persistent gaze and the patience, the pain and the longing? We might say that André Gil Mata’s camera falls in love with its object and prepares itself for the day when it will die. It knows this, yet doesn’t want to know it. At the end of the film, the old man tries to tell the child a secret, but she doesn’t understand him. Nor could she. Happily, or unhappily, she still has a whole life to live in order to die.