The strongest echo the film left in my memory was the permanent noise of demolition of buildings. Several time we see demolition excavators destroying a huge building. It is hard to imagine if here is something demolished to build something new or it is just an orgy of destruction. Very often there is a duel on the soundtrack between this mean sound of demolition and the jazz music by Magic Malic. The music appears to me like an encrypted part of the cultural heritage which is in danger to vanish. It has its pendant in the images where the destruction, the rapid change is confronted with the protagonists who stay in this seemingly deserted city Pointe à Pitre.
Cinema is for me often a kind of traveling, but seldom a full booked all-inclusive tour. The fascinating images do not show the places where tourist spend their holidays. There is a mood of solitude and melancholy. But real traveling is not just vacation. If one never felt solitude, melancholy or sometimes even depression, one has not traveled at all. Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island is official an oversea department of France, but in truth one of the last colonies on this planet. How the filmmaker often said in interview, the majority of the population consists of descendants of slaves but it is owned by the descendants of slave holder. Their mother tongue is Creole. The own identity, history or culture is endangered. The only documented identity are their names in a French passport.
To continue my idea of an analogy between cinema and traveling, what remains in my memory of all the journey I have made so far are the encounters with people I met, especially the native people. As a visitor, the stranger, you get at least an idea about their life, in the best case even a taste of their culture. But as soon as you get involved with the residents of a country you are exposed to, this completely other life, the escape to the next hotel bar is out of reach. Of course a film seen from the spectator´s perspective is a virtual journey. The 93 minutes of L´Homme Vertige are distilled out of a huge amount of work, experiences, decisions many years of shooting and many hours of footage etc. which we do not see in the film. But as these experiences and work is entirely transformed into images and sound, they nevertheless evoke in me moods I know from my travelings. Neither during traveling nor while I see a film, I can´t hesitate to imagine, even if only for short fleeting moments how it would be to live there to share a likely life like the people I met on my journeys or the people I encounter on the big screen. Especially the images, shot at night in this seemingly abandoned city I remember like a strange dream.
The protagonists in this film are really exposed to this urban landscape, climate or social conditions and very much involved in their own struggles. But for moments we share with them the mean sound of demolition which penetrates even the walls of their private apartments. It evokes the scaring feeling that what we call home is not guaranteed and can taken from us at any moment.
There are the things we experience through these images of an urban landscape or through the tales told by the protagonists. But even the things we do not know, the complex postcolonial history and culture of Guadeloupe – there is a strange feeling they are hidden in these empty streets or in the individuals presented in this film. Malaury Eloi Paisley said once that she wanted ”to tell something about this solitude, the decomposition of bodies and the city at the same time”. Film is as well a kind of memory, but one which can at least theoretically stored forever why the biological human memory will vanish after the end of a life.
L´Homme Vertige is often like a complex musical composition. Each protagonist sings his own song. The images we see from them are the images they wanted to present from themselves. There is Eddy, who is struggling with drug addiction and always trying to make in effort to bring his life on the right track and whose stories are unforgettable. Ti Chal an old man who is very sick and is depending on an oxygen tube was an independent activist, Eric is something like a guardian of the endangered culture of Guadeloupe, especially literature and as well a living memory.
L´Homme Vertige is like a kaleidoscope. In it´s circular structure always around these protagonists the filmmaker knows for many years and to whom she has a very personal approach, the film reminds me in its circular structure as well in Shilpo Shahor Shapnalok (The Happiest People in the World) by Bangladeshi-German filmmaker Shaheen Dill-Riaz or in Köy by German filmmaker Serpil Turhan. These films are condensed accumulations of experiences and encounters.
L´Homme Vertige is an impressively cinematic encounter. That it was by accident the last film I saw at this festival must have been fate.
Rüdiger Tomczak
There is a very interesting conversation between Malaury Eloi Paisley by Christiane Büchner and Madeleine Bernstorff on the Arsenal-webseite: Finding history in the body
No comments:
Post a Comment