I was warned that Where is This Street? would make little sense to someone who hadn’t seen Rocha’s film, but having resolved to seek something other than sense in the Locarno lineup (sensation, perhaps?), I delved in-and was richly rewarded. A tribute to Paulo Rocha’s seminal Portuguese classic The Green Years (1963), parts of which were shot outside the apartment that Rodrigues now lives in, the documentary revisits locations from the older film in a COVID-19-stricken Lisbon. This unique ability of cinema to reify the immaterial-and to make specters out of the material-is also at the heart of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s Where is This Street? or With No Before and After. At one point, Denis Lavant appears in the film, dressed as a French Legionnaire, and it’s as if Human Flowers has stumbled into the orbit of Claire Denis’s 1999 exemplar Beau travail: Ida (and the film) bends toward Lavant like a magnet toward iron. As a character reads aloud from Marguerite Duras’s novel The Sailor From Gibraltar (1952), his words lap against the roar of the ocean, and the pages of the book flutter in the dim light of the boat. Wittmann’s audacious gesture in Human Flowers is not to eschew narrative, but to deploy it for tangible rather than hermeneutic effects: references to books, movies, and legends enter the film like debris, producing material collisions.
A review in Screen Daily, for example, accuses the film of having “the superficial contours of a profound and intelligent enterprise” but not the “actual content.” What, however, do we mean by “content”? Too often, we forget that cinema is not an empty vessel for story or meaning filmic material is content in and of itself, a dance of light, sound, space, and screen that impresses upon us sensorily before it does rationally. Our collective discomfort with this embodied mode of attention is evident in the confused reactions that Wittmann’s film has generated, even in the press. When we suspend the urge to understand, in what other ways might our bodies and minds perceive the world around us? As the clock ticked on, and we battled exhaustion and tedium, it wasn’t that our attention waned it shape-shifted, from an active to a more passive form of awareness. If this setup sounds sacrilegious for a film festival-a concession, perhaps, to the kind of distracted viewing popularized by Netflix-it in fact yielded radical insights for film spectatorship. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, and even sleep in the audience as and when they pleased others tuned in and out via Twitch from all over the world. Titled “The Future of Attention,” the event assembled three moderators-including yours truly-and a rotating cast of more than two dozen guests to hold court for 24 unbroken hours.
My conversation with Wittmann took place as part of an experimental event, co-organized by the Università della Svizzera italiana and the festival, that devoted itself precisely to this exercise. “Where’s the blue?” might have been the rallying cry of this year’s Locarno, where the best films were those that-like Human Flowers-invited contemplation rather than mere comprehension. “But where’s the message?” Later, one of Wittmann’s actors told her that his response to most movies is the other way around: “I get the message, I get the story. “There’s all this blue, she swims, that’s all very nice,” the woman had said. Wittmann told me that one opening-night attendee was puzzled by the film’s indulgence in elemental surfaces at the expense of meaning. Narrative dissolves into the rhythm of the ocean and the pull of a longing gaze, which guide the characters from Marseille to Corsica to Algeria, accumulating myths, histories, and 16mm images of aqueous sensuality. The film returns to the sea-setting of Wittmann’s debut feature, Drift (2017), with the tale of a ship’s captain, Ida (Angeliki Papoulia), and her crew of five men as they sail across the Mediterranean Sea, loosely tracing the path of the French Foreign Legion. In a conversation at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the filmmaker Helena Wittmann told me about a fascinating exchange she’d had with a frustrated audience member at the premiere of her new feature, Human Flowers of Flesh.
#Free people around the clock free#
This article appeared in the Augedition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing.
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