Someone is passing a
photograph of a missed person to passers by. They are asked if they
know this person or if they have seen him.
Who is missing this man,
his wife, his children or the filmmaker?
The story of the film
remains a hidden one, hidden between places and landscapes. The film
has two opposed movements which both are representing cinematic
poetry in its own right.The first one is that the film seems to
dissolve itself in single moments or details: a child is playing, a
young woman (probably the wife of the missed man), the shacks or
small lanes of a village, a river landscape or a mighty thunderstorm.
The other movement is the search for this missed man which begins
with a search for the traces he left or could have left. That
increases our attention for each detail which could be a trace and we
do not perceive these single moments and details as accidental as we
did before. Later they appear as tiny and fleeting traces of a
disappeared life.
An old abandoned building,
almost cleaned by any sign of the identities who dwelt here.
Sometimes the concrete things, buildings, landscapes, people or
things observed with a nearly ethnographic view disappear into
abstract forms, a slightly surrealistic touch, like the film
material´s chemistry is already in the process of decay. Only light
and colours are visible. The headlamp of a jeep creates two strong
cones of light which outshine anything else in this anyway dark
images. Sometimes it is just fog which swallows the concrete shapes
of people.
The woman (who is probably
waiting for her husband to return) is visible behind a window. The
glass is dirty and smeared and her concrete shape is slightly
distorted. If the image is darkened by a thunderstorm, the image is
almost monochrome. There is a moment when two lanterns seem to be the
only sources of light in an impenetrable darkness. The light has a
tendency to disappear in this film and with it all visible things
like a fading memory.
Who is this missing man, a
father, husband or a man far away from home lost on his way to find
work?
Gumnaam Din
celebrates the art of imagination. Its single images are traces
itself. And the traces are sometimes small and appear as signs of the
fleetingness of a human identity. A family photo which shows a time
when the family was united and it seems as precious as it it is the
only existing proof.
Ekta Mittal´s poetic film
essay is not only a little gem but as well a questioning of habits of
seeing, but as well the implicitness of our culture which is
permanently flooded by images. Cinema as a visual art is more, an
artificial memory which is almost as delicate as the human one,
depending on a living body.
After this 28 minutes of
Gumnaam Din, I am asking myself if the film I just saw is
still the same which is saved in my memory, enriched by aspects the
film did not show but has evoked in me. Like all good films, Gumnaam
Din is as well a lesson of seeing. It is not only quite a luck to
see such a film which will be hard to find as soon as the Berlin Film
festival is over. I think if a film festival has any meaning to day
than it needs these visual meditations about cinema more than ever.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings (Berlinale
Shorts V.)
Wed, 26. Feb, 16.30,
CinemaX 3
Thurs, 27. Feb, 16.30, Zoo
Palast 3
Fri, 28. Feb, 21.30, Cubix
9
Sat, 29.Feb, Colosseum 1
