Week 42/2024

This Friday, Sabzian’s Johan van der Keuken retrospective opens with two films, The Filmmaker’s Holiday and Time, both about family and the intertwining of past and present in a reflection on death. Alain Bergala observed: “there’s something of Ingmar Bergman in Van der Keuken’s photographs though there’s not the slightest trace of Bergman in his films.” Van der Keuken’s photograph of his sleeping girlfriend, taken from behind a window, made Bergala think of Bergman as the filmmaker who best captured the sudden strangeness of a hitherto familiar body.

In Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, screening at CINEMATEK, two sisters return to their childhood home to be with their sibling who’s dying of cancer. Memories of their past and their mother return with them. Opening with shots of a statue of Orpheus and ticking clocks, the film shares an investment in the tension between time and stillness with The Filmmaker’s Holiday, but also echoes another van der Keuken film only appearing in Part II of the retrospective, Last Words - My Sister Joke (1998), where the filmmaker speaks with his sister days before her passing from cancer.

Van der Keuken conceived Time from the perspective of duration, which for him also touched upon the non-genetic family one chooses during life. In Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, the monk walking extremely slowly through today’s world is played by Lee Kang-sheng who’s appeared in every one of Tsai’s features. Ever since the filmmaker saw him outside a Taipei video arcade and cast him in Rebels of the Neon God (1992), they’ve become like family. This tenth collaboration in their Walker series, screening in its entirety at SMAK, is whispered to be the last and crystalizes Tsai’s lifelong observation of Lee’s body moving through time and space.