Download Film Subconscious Cruelty Sub Indo
Artemisia Grieves
Fiona Tan\u2019s Dearest Fiona follows two memory trails. Neither is of the current year, though both are always present in the filmmaker\u2019s field of view. I wonder about all the memories around a film\u2014some things sit right outside what we see \u201Cright now.\u201D Dearest Fiona is maybe about these circumambient bodies, about how in focusing our gaze on the stuff around a life, we realize that they too are lives. The film\u2019s images are a collection of silent, documentary archival material shot in the Netherlands pre-1920. Farmers cut reeds, process them, press and weave them into baskets. Fisherman fish, laborers pour rocks into waterways. The workers are watched by well-dressed men with soft hands. Sometimes someone looks directly at the camera, unable to look away. What was it like to look at a camera in 1909? Was it like looking at the future? To work, at least\u2014and to force a life into living while people and cameras watch you do it\u2014looks much the same as it feels now. By collecting so much disparate footage of labor, Dearest Fiona gestures towards the obvious cruelty of life under capitalism while keeping space open for the in-between stuff\u2014the fugitive smiles and the color-tinted flowers. It does not purport to rescue these long-since-memoried people, but it does resuscitate them, and let their phantom gestures move in the imperfect tempo of living instead of the perfect rigidity of archival entries.
Samsara is aesthetically remarkable, and filled with classically excellent photography. A couple of long shots\u2014of monks scattered about a waterfall, of shadowy figures strolling along a beach in crepuscular light\u2014rework visual ideas from early films in the Distance-Landscape and Duration-Landscape series. Certain moments approach the rapturous spiritual experience the film aims for, as when the diaphanous fabrics of a dreaming monk\u2019s bed are overlaid with beautiful, multicolored mosaic tiles, or when a uniformly blue exterior shot provides a small window into the vivid colors inside a temple. As the film\u2019s transitional segment concludes, the audience is \u201Creborn\u201D into a bedchamber washed in ripples of glowing amber and scarlet. Despite overall mixed results, these dazzling highlights take Pati\u00F1o\u2019s work in promising new directions. \u2014Alex Fields
Taken as a whole, these subjects represent what we might describe as three kinds of imperialism\u2014the conquering of the woman and her image; the gentrification of artists\u2019 living space by developers; and, most literally, the United States\u2019 propagation of human rights abuses in a foreign nation. but Rainer is only partially interested in tying these threads together. By taking us on detours through political issues and structuring her film according to three voices\u2014the seen, verbose man (played by two different actors), the unseen woman, and her own\u2014Rainer is frustrating the viewer\u2019s (frequently subconscious) attempts to identify with any one voice or thread in particular. This refusal of conventional methods of spectatorship make for an unlikely echo of Rainer\u2019s earlier artistic career as a choreographer strongly associated with minimalist art. As her famous \u201CNo Manifesto\u201D might have declared, The Man Who Envied Women brings us into a space of \u201Cno representation.\u201D
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