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Silence in Dreamland – Tito Molina (2013)

I know exactly where to put Ecuador on the map. Unfortunately, I do not know where to put Ecuador on the map of world cinema. It’s one of those countries that is shamelessly underreported. There is quite a lot of material about South/Latin American cinema. Yet, Ecuador plays only a marginal role and I wonder why that is.

Tito Molina has put Ecuador on the map of world cinema. With Silence in Dreamland (2013) he has created a stunning portrayal of – surprise! – silence and dreams, but also of ageing, loneliness, and love. The narrative can be quickly summarised: an elderly woman, lonely after the death of her husband, goes about her daily chores. The routine is broken when Cokie, a truly lovable dog appears in front of her window and both strike up a very special relationship. This summary is a good example for why I never read summaries. Indeed, many films have kind of the same thrust and summaries therefore make them boring. But it is the cinematic treatment that is interesting, and it is the same here with Molina’s work.

Silence is a superb slow film that has a meditative, observational rhythm, though partly disrupted by quick cuts so as to indicate brief dream interludes that come in a flash. Molina’s attention to detail, such as his close-up of the woman’s neck to focus on her pulse and her breathing, helps to create an intimate portray of her. I felt as though she was more than a simple subject of a film. There was a bond between filmmaker and character, even between viewer and character, which grew throughout the film. Another detail, which I loved was the persistent electricity cut. Sometimes you didn’t notice it until you looked at the oven behind her, which suddenly ceased to display the time. It’s subtle, but it’s also a reminder that the background of a film is just as significant as everything that happens in the foreground.

Molina introduces aesthetics to Slow Cinema that are unusual. I’m speaking of dissolves, a lot of music in the background, superimpositions. If I had read about these techniques in his film beforehand without having seen the trailer of Silence, I would have been hesitant. Yet, Molina uses these techniques and incorporates them superbly and lovingly into the genre, or movement, or simply this form of cinema. This combination of techniques greatly enriches the viewing experience. A while ago, I wrote about the effects of music and dialogue on our perception of slowness and came to the conclusion that both speed up the film. For some reason, I didn’t have the same impression this time. Either I have changed my point-of-view regarding the issue entirely, or maybe Molina makes better use of music and dialogue than Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Mekong Hotel. It is a mystery. In any case, there is quite a lot of music in Silence, which is a rather interesting contradiction. The music, however, is slow. Very traditional, kind of melancholic so that it works well with the subject matter of the film.

Silence awakened my interest in photography again. I know I say this with a lot of films. But despite this, it is actually not as easy to impress me visually as it sounds. Molina has a superb eye for composition, though, and I wonder what his background is. It doesn’t look painterly, but oh my, some of his shots are worth taking a snapshot of, have them printed and framed. Especially the shots at the sea are magnificent. Shot from above, we see the woman and Cokie walking along the beach, for instance. They both mere dots because of the sheer height of the camera. Molina’s capturing of the sea is truly beautiful and adds a hypnotic rhythm to the film, apart from its making you fall in love with his photographic eye.

In all, I wasn’t all too surprised to see such a fantastic film after the trailer perfectly convinced me that this would be a superb work. Molina is certainly an upcoming and very talented director, who is worth following in the future.

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My thanks goes to Tito Molina, who has kindly provided me with a copy of his film. An interview with the director will follow on this website.

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Day 24 – Surprise (me)

I finish this year’s advent calendar with a self-experiment in slow-filmmaking. It’s one thing to watch slow films all the time. But as I was to find out, it’s an entirely different matter to sit behind the camera and keep quiet for only five minutes just so that you don’t ruin the sound. It was fun to do, though, and I enjoyed it. You can find the video at the bottom of today’s entry.

The last 23 days have taken me to many countries. I was in Argentina with Lisandro Alonso, and in Mexico with Nicolas Pereda. I was in imaginative, historical spaces with Albert Serra, and in dark and evils spaces with Béla Tarr. I found myself in cramped apartments in China, in vast spaces of Turkish forests. I was in Japan, Iran and Sweden. Oh, and not to forget, I joined a couple of monks in France. The films I watched were a glimpse of suffering in the Philippines, of longing in Taiwan, of past memories in Thailand.

Over 37 hours of slow film. I cannot deny that it became difficult towards the end to find words for the films. Watching a slow film is, I find, an entirely different experience. Slow films really take you on a journey. You spend so much time with the characters that you feel as though you have been through what they have been through in two hours.

It was a great idea, though. It is one thing to watch a slow film here and there. It is a wholly different matter if you watch 23 films in a row. It gave me a real grasp of what Slow Cinema is about, how many nuances there are, what themes they actually tackle, and how similar and yet different the filmmakers are in their approaches.

I hope you enjoyed the excursion into slowness. This blog will now return to the usual weekly or fortnightly posts, and film comments whenever I’m lucky enough to find a diamond somewhere.

Merry Christmas!

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Day 8 – Vive l’Amour (Ming-liang)

Time for a bit of love on the second advent. Or maybe not, because Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’Amour (1994) is, as all of his other films, not exactly uplifting. But let’s start from the beginning.

Vive l’Amour stands, with Rebels of the Neon God (1992), at the beginning of Tsai’s career. The film was made almost 20 years ago, and when I saw it it reminded me of something Béla Tarr said (I think it was him, but I can be very wrong here): I always make the same film.

It is not so much that Tsai makes the same film over and over again, but if you are familiar with all of his films, you begin to notice the similarities of all of them. It is not only the actor, Kang-Sheng Lee, who appears in every one of his films (who made an impressive appearance in Walker). It is also the themes that remain the same. I mentioned in previous blog posts that poverty is a major issue in Slow Cinema. This is not the case in Tsai’s films. What is striking in his work is the treatment and depiction of loneliness and longing.

Vive l’Amour (1994), Tsai Ming-liang

To my surprise, I had difficulties labelling Vive l’Amour as a straightforward slow film, even though I know that it is often listed as one. I wondered whether I have perhaps become too used to slowness in film that it has become hard for me to judge if something is exceptionally slow, or just “normal” (as in, normal speed like in real life). The film is not a fast film, but I find it faster than his other films. Considering Tsai’s development as a director, his films have over time become slower and also more photographic. L’Amour is not photographic at all, an element that I found specially interesting in his other films such as I don’t want to sleep alone (2006).

There is also more movement in L’Amour than in his other films. Again, this is not to say that the film is fast. I’m merely trying to point out differences in filmmaking that are evident. Tsai has, however, already included his seeming obsession with tight corridors and double framing. And his love for melons!

Vive l’Amour (1994), Tsai Ming-liang

Already, his characters are suffering from loneliness, and even though there is, as usual, sex involved in his films, there is actually little intimacy between the characters. Whenever I watch Tsai’s films, I cannot help but think of a poem by Alfred Wolfenstein, a German poet, whose vivid Städter from 1913 describes the gradual isolation and loneliness of people living in (big) urban spaces. For me, every film by Tsai is an illustration of this poem, an illustration of how cramped urban spaces encourage anonymity and solitude instead of social living. But even though people choose to live in solitude, they long for love and social interaction. This discrepancy naturally causes problems, and Tsai is a director who has picked up this issue time and again, and made some wonderful films out of it.