Reanimation

Três Semanas em Dezembro, Laura Gonçalves + Água Mole, Alexandra Ramires e Laura Gonçalves + Elo, Alexandra Ramires + O Homem do Lixo, Laura Gonçalves

Like a friend of mine says, “animation always has a touch of God about it”. We start with nothing and build a universe, which is the opposite to what happens with real-life images. It’s true that Laura Gonçalves doesn’t do that exactly; for her sounds and memories are coal for the furnace with which she aims to heat us, and which antagonistically denounces the system of values associated with what we call humanity. Not only does she reconstitute memory through animation, as if weaving a new fabric from loose threads, but she genuinely wishes to use animation to clothe people. O Homem do Lixo and Três Semanas em Dezembro are both films about family, genealogy, the idea of roots and movement, where memory is alive and everything else is anchored in its crepitation. In that sense it is a re-creation, almost a subletting of God’s function in the form of the art of animation.

And that’s where Laura thrives. She makes images flow according to what she feels is worth highlighting or is relevant, never questioning the legitimacy of these arbitrary decisions. And these are intimately connected to an arbitrary emotion, since this game of chess she is playing is the field of subjectivity, or of intersubjectivity, given that the pieces of memory she is moving are not only her own but also those of the other people entangled in them. It acts almost like a family concession, doing this with a precise ethic: family, tradition, the intimate sharing of memories, all of this can and maybe should be romanticised, if only because romance is already inscribed in the way the director feels what she tells us. Laura accepts this slice of God. And so, focussed on people, on their fantastic worlds, on what they fish for their tables in ancient rives, she lateralises the importance of setting and of what, in doing so, paradoxically, crystallizes as unpalatable reality. Action is the only thing that exists, even if we may see in it a kind of caged abstraction. And here we have a concrete definition of point of view. Laura centres her attention on the life space that echoes within her, that sparks the fuse behind her and causes her to move forwards. In Laura, it seems to me, there is a linear vocation, more than in Alexandra. Not just there, in the philosophical device, in the relation with space-time, but in the very technical and aesthetic dimensions of her work.

In Elo, for example, Alexandra Ramires does some of what Laura does, but does not reject the landscape, only suspending it from becoming: the starry sky doesn’t move, while the characters do, and within them, reclaiming three-dimensionality, is where the movement accelerates and intensifies. This is not a documentary, it doesn’t serve us memories straight from the oven, it questions our sense of the world, scrutinises the apparent unfathomability with our inherent difficulties, like the difficulty of transcending a pre-defined concept of identity or subjectivising the limits of the body. And it contains an interesting, mysterious, limbo-like lunarity for what is to come. Technically flawless, the two filmmakers tend to dance on the tightrope of paradox, inasmuch as they use the transformative movement of everything as a vehicle to express attachment. It is the bottom of the sea, the endless sky, united in the ambiguity of life, just like the final short of Água Mole, the film that Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires made together, where resistance survives indefinitely against the circumstances. It is a poetic gesture of love for humanity, something which God, in my humble opinion, has not been capable of. It is beautiful to see the two united in this gesture.

The opening images of Tri (1965), by Aleksander Petrović, are forceful. Photographs, hard and unadorned, of Yugoslavian territory in the Second World War, accompanied by the sound of sirens and, after, powerful Serbian music. We believe we are going to watch a war film, a genre that Yugoslavian cinema produced much of, because the Tito regime’s power lay in part in the narrative of the partisans’ heroic resistance and their victory over the Nazis.

Yet, although war remains present as a background canvas, this is an anti-war film, which seeks to show how human liberty and dignity disappear or are destroyed in extreme contexts ruled by absurd and gratuitous violence.

This less obvious approach to the resistance and victory of the partisans, with different nuances, is typical of Yugoslavian cinema of the 1960s, as it gained greater international visibility due to the quality of films like Petrović’s. Many young directors had benefited from the state’s heavy investment in cinema, as well as from a certain liberalisation in Tito’s communist regime, which had escaped from Soviet orbit in 1948. Films emerged that were innovative in terms of aesthetic language and content, creating the Black Wave movement of which Tri is one of the leading examples. This movement was clearly influenced by Italian Neo-realism and the French New Wave and, as with the principal directors of those movements, Petrović too began to dedicate himself to the critique and cinematic experiments that prefigured a new Yugoslavian cinema.

Tri’s narrative structure is fragmented, taking the form of a triptych featuring three distinct moments from the unfolding of the war-like conflict.

In the first episode, the young protagonist, Milos, takes refuge in a village. He joins the locals in the station where they desperately wait for a train that will carry them away from the rapidly advancing German troops. The camera scans the frightened and angry faces. Collective panic takes hold and we are confronted with the inhumanity, even evil, that ensues. The Yugoslavian army insults the people and there is a need to find a scapegoat, someone who will exorcise the impending defeat. This happens when an innocent man is accused of being a spy and ends up being shot, without trial or evidence. Milos tries to protest but his voice is swallowed by the crowd as he witnesses this absurd murder. It is in this episode that Petrović uses mainly visual metaphors, avoiding redundant dialogue: the flock of sheep, the muzzled bear exhibited by the cigano for which there is no space on the train, and the woman who watches everything from the window, impassive and resigned.

The second episode takes place at the peak of the war. Milos is a partisan fleeing the implacable persecution of the Nazis through the mountains and swamps of the River Neretva delta, close to the Adriatic Sea. More than film the combat and gunfire, the camera concentrates on the body and face of Velimir “Bata” Živojinović, whose intimate, intense performance made him a star of Yugoslavian cinema. In an abandoned cemetery he finds another fugitive, injured and left behind by his unit, who admits to being afraid — and they feel a complicity. Then, suddenly, the other fugitive sacrifices himself to the Nazis so that Milos can escape, and so that the fugitive can look his executioners in the face — though in fact they prefer to burn him alive. Milos’s desperate cries act as the perfect subtitles to yet another cruel and absurd death he is unable to prevent.

The final scene takes place at the end of the war. Milos is an ex-official of the victorious Yugoslavian army and, once more, he encounters absurd death. He is faced with a group of prisoners accused of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and who are waiting to be executed. There is a moment of hesitation in which Milos’s gaze locks with one of the young female prisoners. But the evidence against her is irrefutable and Milos does not try to save her, even though he realises that, the war now over, these deaths too are just another absurdity.

It is the protagonist’s gaze that connects these stories, the gaze of a passive spectator who, in effect, is never able to intervene. The camera insists on fixing on the face of the principal actor, sometimes in close-up, who offers us an exhausted look often empty of histrionic emotion, since the war is a burden, free of heroism, marked only by inhumanity, waste and absurdity. That is why this film avoids sentimentalism and the many resources of cinema, opting instead for a tight economy of means. And worthy of note is the beautiful black-and-white cinematography of Tomislav Pinter, reminiscent of Italian Neo-realism. The camera wanders between the anonymous faces of the involuntary victims of a war, allowing us to notice the ethnic diversity of those lands. And amid those faced with the gratuitous violence of the conflict, it is a resigned expression that predominates, rather than the presence of any extended dialogue. The realist and poetic images and the beautiful soundtrack (especially the Serbian music) take priority over words.

This is a portrait of war as the territory of bestial actions, wastefulness and the absurd, but seen through the eyes of a protagonist who is never able to control his own destiny, ending up as a witness, a victim and, also, a passive aggressor. It is a work of art that, in the context of today’s new war in European territory, feels like a punch to the gut.