Now that we have to maintain physical distance, our experience of cinema has become a solitary delight. But in this time of confinement, we can find our cinephile community in the non-endemic space of the online environment. In the next weeks, Sabzian will select three films a week, available on online platforms. You can find more information about our online selection here.
This sixth week, we would like to direct your attention to Western, a film by Valeska Grisebach which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, starring Meinhard Neumann in his first acting role as a German construction worker in Bulgaria who finds himself in the middle of a clash between the local community and his compatriots. In February 2019, Sabzian’s Gerard-Jan Claes and Arthur Theyskens had the honour to speak with the director about her work. In the conversation, she says: “For Western, I was very interested in what was written in the bodies, in body language, and how you behave in a certain space or during an interaction with another person. Like in westerns, the behaviour of not being allowed to show emotion while there’s at the same time a lot of emotion behind that façade. To approach masculinity in this way, related to the western genre, was very interesting to me.” Read the conversation ‘Old and New Stories’ here. Western is available for rent on the website of the British Film Institute.
The second choice is the much-discussed project by Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovskiy called DAU, which is inspired by the life of the Russian physicist and Nobel prize winner Lev Landau. The film-project runs from 2009 on, when the director built a 12,000-square-meter set known as “The Institute”. In this setting, hundreds of participants lived for several years separated from the outside world, plunged back in the past to a period between 1938 and 1968. The 14 separate films are now available on a new website.
We close this sixth week with À propos de Nice by Jean Vigo (1930), a playful and unruly portrait of the French seaside town Nice. According to Vigo, it is a “simple rough draft” of a work of cinema that he describes as “social cinema”, in which we “witness a certain world on trial.” In the text ‘Toward a Social Cinema’ that derives from a lecture he gave at the time of its release, which you can read here, Vigo strives for a new cinema practice, which is both audacious and perceptive. “And the goal will be attained if one succeeds in revealing the hidden reason behind a gesture, in extracting from a banal person chosen at random his interior beauty or caricature, if one succeeds in revealing the spirit of a collectivity through one of its purely physical manifestations.” You can watch the film here free of charge.
Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017) | Watch here
DAU (Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Jekaterina Oertel, Ilya Permyakov, 2019 - 2020) | Watch here
À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, Boris Kaufman, 1930) | Watch here
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