{Silent Souls}
{Intimate Grammar}
Delightfully exhausted is how I feel. I may have seen only six films in three days, but it has been a wild ride for the senses and in each and every film, every journey, I have found something to enthral me, delight me, educate me, and to alter the tempo of my heart’s beat. I began in France with Jeanne (The Silence of Joan) and I found the stillness mesmerising. For me, film is sometimes a painting, a collage, a still life, a song, a poem. It is the beauty of these painted scenes I look for, often above all narrative. Beautiful scenes I find are not always obvious. Jeanne’s ashes a dusty streak floating across the surface of the water. The realisation and flicker of disappointment on Beauty’s face as she realises she is to live happily ever after with not a Beast but handsome mortal prince (Beauty and the Beast). It is the sand and steel palette of the Russian landscape at the water’s edge (Silent Souls). And it is Kaurismäki's blue, red, ochre, and green colour palette that frames beautifully the characters & still lifes he draws to music (Le Harve). It is the woman losing her mind to old age and catching sight of giant dancing bumblebees in the public gardens (in Sebastián Silva and Pedro Peirano’s Old Cats). It is all of these things.
{Those Kaurismäki blues.}
Recently I have seen Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls and in poem with few words learnt of an ancient Finno-Ugric people, the Merja. To the Merja, love and water were their gods, as is told through the allegory of Miron, a factory manager, as he bids farewell to his recently deceased wife, Tanja. With the help of his friend, Aist, they prepare her body according to the rituals of the Merja. Two Buntings in a tiny cage, oversee their tender journey to return her bodily ashes to the water.
"We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. We wanted to recreate this world that didn't exist any longer, but was constantly present with us."
(Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls)
{Silent Souls}
From this quiet world to Israel in the mid 60s just before the Six Day War (Intimate Grammar), the walk between cinemas gives me time to prepare, but this is not always the case. Next up, I travel to Japan, I think, but I cannot be sure. I’ll send postcard soon.
