| Start: | Jan 15, '09 04:00a |
| Location: | UP Cine Adarna (Film Center) |
Tickets at 100php.
Contact Kints: 0905.2404177 for details.
Beyond the Time Barrier
Review by Christoph Huber
Hollywood may have taught us that It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but
Lav Diaz reminds us that the world is also sad sad sad sad. And if
that repeptition sounds crushing to you (whereas the one in the title
of Stanley Kramer's Hollywood film is just there to tickle), you are
on the right track: Inaugurated by the epic masterpiece Evolution of a
Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang pilipino, 2004), the
Filipino's director recent cycle of black-and-white video works, with
their seemingly unwieldy lengths - inbetween seven and eleven hours -
represent a unique achievment and ofer unique experiences in the
history of cinema. Their length is not an affectation, but a
necessity, in reaching for heights of expression that the conventional
(and commercial) "rules" of moviemaking deny. They demand (but also:
allow, for their durational strategy is ultimately liberating)
uncommon dedication and concentration by the viewer, whose patience is
rewarded with a physical experience of time and a stunning, singularly
concrete feeling about their spaces, emotions and characters unlike
almost anything else. The film's world starts to feel lived-in (and in
that sense, Diaz' penchant for unbroken marathon screenings of his
work is all the more understandable: bringing food and other stuff to
the cinema, you have to make the screening room something like your
living room: a lived-in place as well).
Which in a roundabout way, brings us to the ingeniously titled
Melancholia, (after all, already Hippocrates characterized as the
symptoms of melancholia "all fears and despondencies, if they last a
long time" - a perfect match for the director's temporal strategies.)
For Diaz' most recent film, the highlight of the Orrizonti section at
the 2008 Venice film festival, whose main prize it deservedly won, is
on the one hand a deeply moving seven-and-a- half-hour lament about
resistance against all odds following through on the now somewhat
familiar strategies of the filmmakers' recent work. On the other hand,
its remarkable structure and subtle revelations of layers, adopting a
(self-)critical stance (both in respect to its characters as well as
to itself - and both political as well as aesthetic) mark it as maybe
the boldest experiment yet in Diaz's daring reconception of
cinema-as-we- know it.
In the beginng Melancholia may seem linear and following the logic of
a conventional narrative - a tale of a prostitute, a pimp and a nun in
a small town in the Philippines, described with Diaz' characteristic
attention to details and rhythms of life, of perception and thought.
But in the first of two decisive breaks - roughly after a third,
respectively two thirds into the film - these carefully rendered lives
prove to be chimeras made up to deal with the pain of existence and
the throwbacks in the fight for freedom equality. From then on, sounds
and motives (not just visual ones) begin to dominate the flow: A woman
wailing unforgettably in the jungle, her sad ballad haunting the
proceedings, as the losses and crushed hopes of the protagonists
become ever clearer. Ever the commited filmmaker, Diaz not only
insists on the political dimension - for all its depression,
Melancholia is nothing less than a cri de coeur for continuing
revolution -, but also incorporates fascinating detours into the
situation of Filipino filmmaking (reminding one, for instance, of the
crucial Brocka subplot in Ebolusyon).
"Why is there so much sadness and too much madness in this world? Is
happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man's
pain?", asked Diaz in his director's note accompanying the film's
description in the Venice Festival catalogue. The answers to the last
to questions seemingly remain ambivalent: the wounded world of
Melancholia may suggest desperation at times, but the effort of the
characters to struggle on - and the efforts of Diaz himnself, who from
what are nearly no-budget filmmaking circumstances, wrestles a
richness, both philosophical and artistic, that all those pricier
films daren't even dream of - also touches deeply, with a renewed
sense of hope and commitment that remains incorruptible even under the
most adverse of circumstances. Beyond the time barrier, Diaz'
filmmaking manages to open reservoirs mostly untapped by cinematic (or
"visual") art. There is a long sequence of guerillas in the jungle
near the end, whose radical means and spiritual dimension begin to
suggest what Steven Soderbergh recently persumably tried for, and
miserably failed to achieve in his two-part epic about Che (Guevara).
One of Diaz' fighters writes in his notebook: "I now realized the
lyrical madness to this struggle. It is all about sadness. It is about
my sadness. It is all about the sorrow of my people. I cannot
romanticize the futility of it all. Even the majestic beauty of this
island could not provide an answer to this hell. There is no cure to
this sadness." By bearing witness to this sadness, without simply
succumbing to it, by speaking out about to the woes of the world and
our times, Diaz offers a poetic approach that may be somewhat
disillusioned, yet is clearly driven by an unrelenting urge and a
refusal to give in, whether to the (mostly unwritten) laws of the
market, to the (obvious, but mostly circumscribed) failure of
politics, or to the (downplayed) worldwide decline of ideology,
solidarity and humanist values. As Robert Burton noted in "The Anatomy
of Melancholy" back in 1621: "All poets are mad." Lav Diaz may be one
of the maddest of them all.
Christoph Huber
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