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.
The Asthenic Syndrome begins as a black-and-white drama about a woman who, after losing her husband, falls into a state of despair and becomes a danger to herself and her surroundings. When the images turn to color, it becomes clear that the first part was in fact a film-within-a film, screened in the classroom of a disillusioned school teacher who barely manages to stay awake, let alone capture his students’ attention. But the teacher and his students are not the only ones who got caught in a continuous oscillation between melancholy and indifference, the asthenic or ‘weakness’ syndrome, the film suggests, is symbolic of Russian society on the eve of Soviet apocalypse.
EN
“I could dedicate this film to Tolstoy. This is the key to my film. He says things about the naivety of the intelligentsia who believe culture and art can transform the world… I believe we can only draw attention, provoke, make people think. Try to refine the soul and raise the mental level. But the essence of what is inside cannot be changed. This film is a tragedy consecrated to that fact.”
"I undertook Asthenic Syndrome in the hope of freeing myself from certain obsessive ideas and motifs, from my own gloomy state concerning this life. But I only dove once again into the horror of the existence of every living creature on this earth… That vulgar swearing at the end of the film…was a kind of ‘political meeting’ in the subway. After that I have nothing more to say."
"The central poetic vision of The Asthenic Syndrome – as relevant to America in 1996 as it was to Russia in 1989 – is that two basic, debilitating forms of compulsive behavior are loose in the world today, extreme aggressiveness and extreme passivity: either people walk down the street picking fights at random with other people, or they go to sleep at a moment’s notice, regardless of what’s happening around them. ‘Asthenia’ is defined in the American College Dictionary as ‘lack or loss of strength: debility,’ and some critics have given Muratova’s film an alternate English title, The Weakness Syndrome. Apparently Muratova connects the syndrome to both kinds of behavior. Both, after all, are ways of being ‘out of control.’ It might be said that formally speaking The Asthenic Syndrome is ‘out of control’ as well. It’s a film that alternately assaults you and nods off – usually without warning and often when you’re least expecting it. Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life."
Convinced of his irresistible appeal to women, Texas dishwasher Joe Buck quits his job and heads for New York City, thinking he'll latch on to some rich dowager. New York, however, is not as hospitable as he imagined, and Joe soon finds himself living in an abandoned building with a Dickensian layabout named Enrico Ratso Rizzo.
EN
“A band of shaggy anti-war demonstrators are parading in the little park that is kitty-corner from the Plaza Hotel, just north of the fountain where Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald used to splash. They carry the usual assortment of signs in the midday heat, including (girls) ‘We Say YES To Boys Who say NO’ and ‘Bring the Universal Soldier Home.’ All of a sudden Dustin Hoffman pushes his way through the crowd, brushing aside the peace pamphlets proffered him. He looks like hell. (It has nothing to do with his nose.) His long, greasy hair is slicked straight back from his forehead, giving him the appearance of a drowned rat, and he sports a stubby, three-day beard. His teeth are brown and rotting, like those of a Georgia teen-ager who grows up swigging cola morning, noon and night. His shoes are falling apart at the seams - Bowery style - and, underneath, his toes are on the verge of bursting through his sox.”
“Joe Buck is 6 feet tall and has the kind of innocence that preserves dumb good looks. Joe Buck fancies himself a cowboy, but his spurs were earned while riding a gas range in a Houston hamburger joint. Ratso Rizzo, his buddy and part-time pimp from the Bronx, is short, gimpy and verminous. Although they are a comparatively bizarre couple, they go unnoticed when they arrive at one of those hallucinogenic ‘Village’ parties where the only thing straight is the booze that no one drinks. Everybody is too busy smoking pot, popping pills and being chic. Joe Buck, ever-hopeful stud, drawls: ‘I think we better find someone an’ tell ‘em that we're here.’
Trying to tell someone that he's there is the story of Joe Buck's life - 28 years of anxiety and dispossession fenced off by Priapian conquests that always, somehow, leave him a little lonelier than he was before. Joe is a funny, dim-witted variation on the lonely, homosexual dream-hero who used to wander disguised through so much drama and literature associated with the nineteen-fifties.
Midnight Cowboy, which opened yesterday at the Coronet Theater, is a slick, brutal (but not brutalizing) movie version of James Leo Herlihy's 1965 novel. It is tough and good in important ways, although its style is oddly romantic and at variance with the laconic material. It may be that movies of this sort (like most war movies) automatically celebrate everything they touch. We know they are movies – isolated, simplified reflections of life – and thus we can enjoy the spectacle of degradation and loss while feeling superior to it and safe.”
“In the late 1960s, films such as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) and John and Mary (Peter Yates, 1969) were already heralding a changing relationship between film and environment, between environment and actors. But both films seemed to know very well what place they wanted to give to space, in what way they wanted to approach space. Schlesinger, for instance, dropped his actors into the urban environment and turned that environment into a sort of authentic setting that he portrayed in an authentic, that is, reportage-style way. Yates filmed his love affairs in a sort of ideal interior design: the interior here became a manual for adorning your flat. The new films emphasise the osmosis between the environment and its inhabitants. 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? The contemporary figure seems to me to be: soiling. Not dirt (a visible element of the setting, painted, decorated dirt), but the soiling itself. This ranges from carelessness to apocalyptic soiling (Taxi Driver is a religious description of dirt and its cure). The dirt becomes an active principle: it stains and makes a mess, it neatly arranges the city.”
Up until November 2013, the Gesù convent in Brussels was home to around 250 people including a number of Roma families originating from Slovakia. Over the months leading up to their impending eviction, Ruben Desiere worked with a number of the inhabitans to create a film. Kosmos is loosely based on the book of the same name by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. It focuses on the family of Kevin Mroč who had been living at Gesù for three years, and also features two newcomers, Mižu Balász en Rastjo Vaňo.
EN
“It will be difficult to continue this story of mine. I don’t even know if it is a story. It is difficult to call this a story, this constant... clustering and falling apart... of elements...”
1Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005).
NL
“De positie van de film (en de maker) was duidelijk, maar fundamenteel zonder bewegingsvrijheid. De Roma die in het pand leefden, werden er op bevel van de Belgische overheid uitgezet. Zowel de maker als de personages hadden het gevoel dat hun film werd gekaapt door de inbreuk van de ordehandhavers, die zich (moeten) scharen achter het ‘er is geen alternatief’-discours dat de meest humane oplossing nodeloos bemoeilijkt.”
1Bjorn Gabriels, geciteerd op de website van Avila Film.
FR
« Ruben Desiere signe un premier long métrage troublant, où fiction et réalité se confondent habilement, apportant ainsi un autre regard sur le célèbre squat le Gesù. fragments de leur vie quotidienne: la solidarité entre habitants, les chaleureuses soirées familiales autour d’un verre ou le désarroi du père face à l’absence de travail et de perspective. Mais l’inéluctable arrive vite, trop vite. L’expulsion est immédiate, on se presse pour trouver un refuge à quelques meubles, on sauve les vêtements chauds pour affronter l’hiver. Desiere, lui, est toujours aussi proche de ses personnages mais le dispositif a changé, bousculé par l’urgence du réel. Les forces de l’ordre pénètrent dans le lieu signifiant la fin du Gesù et à la colère désespérée du père répond le calme du fils. Décrivant Cosmos, Gombrowicz disait que c’était “un roman sur la formation de la réalité”. Si la fiction finit par disparaître devant le réel, Kosmos mêle adroitement ces deux éléments comme dans cette scène où, après avoir découvert le cadavre du plus urbain des volatiles, Kevin s’interroge: “Pourquoi ont-ils fait ça? Pourquoi ne nous laissent-ils pas tranquilles ? »
