We suffer the diseases of our times. Kira Muratova directed a film set in the eleventh hour of the soviet era. Her film The Asthenic Syndrome was released in 1989, showing a society in which a strange disease is going around. The sufferer of the asthenic syndrome is caught between melancholy and indifference, a state that is endemic in the crumbling Soviet Union.
The second film of this week marks another decisive moment in history. Midnight Cowboy by John Schlesinger was released in 1969 and shows the other side of the iron curtain, where the dream of capitalism is slowly eaten up by disgracing precarity. The naïve Joe Buck leaves his job as a dishwasher in the American heartland to become a hustler in New York. The reality turns out to be different than imagined. He finds himself in a soiled room that he shares with his verminous buddy and part-time pimp, Ratso. In his text ‘New York Hollywood’, Dirk Lauwaert notes how Schlesinger films the environment of his characters in “an authentic, that is, reportage-style way”. He states: “Very important are the bridges that can be built between the environment and its residents. After all, how do you express this osmosis, at what level do you situate it, in what way do you let it become visible?”
In Kosmos (2014) by Ruben Desiere, set in the Brussels squat Gesù, the world floods in. Whistling through their fragile walls, a biting draft affects the dozens of families that live there. The inhabitants try to solve the cause of some mysterious incidents, a puzzle that is overshadowed suddenly when the building is evicted by immense police force in the dead of the night. Today, ten years later, Gesù still lies vacant. An uncanny wind grazes these cities and their ruins.
