Container #9: Next Screenings Nature & Drift
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Next Screenings:
We have two screenings tonight! Nature and Drift. Don’t worry, Nature is only an hour long and Drift, part of our mini Helena Wittmann retrospective in the lead up to our screening of the her latest film, Human Flowers of Flesh, is not much longer. Also they’re both great elemental works.
Nature | Artavazd Peleshian | 7pm Tuesday 1 November at The Elizabeth
At its essence, Nature is a stunning collage of nature footage at its most classically sublime: we see images of volcanic eruptions, sweeping deserts, swirling floods, waves of earthquakes, and collapsing icebergs and glaciers. Presented in black and white, mostly sourced from found footage, the immediate pleasure of Nature is the grandeur of these images.
In the hands of Armenian legend Artavazd Peleshian—a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, but whose innovations took him away from his peer’s experiments in staging and instead back to abandoned editing possibilities of Soviet montage—it becomes something else. His first film in nearly thirty years, Peleshian uses Nature to expand on his concept of “Montage-at-a-Distance” and its structural use of repetition to suggest patterns of thought. In doing so, he creates a film both wilfully universal and distinctly the work of one person.
Unrated 15+
With thanks to Fondation Cartier
Drift | Helena Wittmann | 8:15pm Tuesday 1 November at The Elizabeth
Two women spend a weekend together at the North Sea. Walks on the beach, fish buns at a snack stand, mobile weather forecasts. Sky, horizon, water. One of them will soon return to her family in Argentina, whereas the other one will try to come a step closer to the ocean. She travels to the Caribbean and the unknown makes her vulnerable. Then, the land gets out of sight. On a sailing vessel she crosses the Atlantic Ocean. One wave follows the other, they never resemble. Thoughts go astray, time leaves the beaten track and the swell lulls to deep sleep. The sea takes over the narration.
From one perspective, Helena Wittmann’s important debut can be considered as a narrative film, minimalist, of slow cinema and patiently bound by the ocean. From another perspective, Wittmann’s Drift exists as a series of explorations of experimental film—it contains an overt homage to Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and, as Michael Sicinski observes it also, not least, interpolates the key environmental works La Région Centrale (Snow, again) and Fog Line (Larry Gottheim)—and testing how experimental traditions can be framed by narrative. Holding these two elements in balance is water in all its abstract physicality.
Unrated 15+
With thanks to Helena Wittmann and Fünferfilm
p.s. here’s a nice interview with Wittmann from the release of Drift: Between the Waves.
Upcoming Screenings:
1 November: Artavazd Peleshian’s Nature + Helena Wittmann’s Drift
15 November: Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (pictured below)
29 November: Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh
6 December: Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (pictured above))
13 December: Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum
Thank you. We hope to catch you on tonight for our double screening of Artavazd Peleshian’s Nature and Helena Wittmann’s Drift. Then on 15 November we’ll be back for Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s medical ethnography film (and Cannes standout) De Humani Corporis Fabrica—aptly named after anatomist André Vésale De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books, 1543) which married new modes of biological observation and inquiry with Renaissance breakthroughs in visual representation and engraving print technologies. After that we’re going to enter a bit of sun-drunk series to take us out into summer.