A collection of still shots, portraits, of the Russian countryside and some of its inhabitants.
EN
“In Portrait Loznitsa goes even further in his experiments on time, space and continuum. The film is basically a series of long still shots of Russian villagers, but the stillness of images is reinforced there by the physical stillness of characters, who stand or sit in front of the camera without even a slightest movement. The combination of static bodies and static space provides a different sense of time, which is moving and static at once. Loznitsa removes the difference between movement and stillness, thus removing the difference between time and space and taking both of them out of an actual, “documented” continuum. Life presented in Portrait has its own category as well as dimension of time, which is neither the present, nor the past and most certainly not the future. In a similar way the time in Landscape is locked in a perpetual loop, or closed circle, formed by the series of panoramic shots which follow the line of people waiting for a bus, rendering both the waiting process and the line itself endless.”
Evgeny Gusyatinskiy1
- 1Evgeny Gusyatinskiy, “Vertigo of Time,” Sabzian, 11 December 2024.
FR
Serge Meurant : Il existe dans ces portraits des éléments extérieurs qui viennent donner vie à l’immobilité des personnages. Il y a, par exemple, un homme assis au bord de la rivière en compagnie d’un chien... Ou alors le vent soulève un manteau…
On songe à d’anciennes photographies...
Sergei Loznitsa : Oui, on retrouve dans les anciennes photographies un long temps de pose qui produit un effet semblable.
Enfin, j’ai éprouvé le sentiment que dans ce film (Portrait) les personnages filmés debout manifestent une sorte de vibration qui correspondrait à l’énergie de la terre.
Oui, c’est vrai. Il y a une tension. C’est ce qui m’émeut le plus quand je m’apprête à tourner un film. C’est ce que je recherche...
Sergei Loznitsa en conversation avec Serge Meurant1
- 1Serge Meurant, “Entretien avec Sergueï Loznitsa,” Sabzian, 4 décembre 2024. Publié à l’origine dans Images Documentaires 50/51 en 2004.
