Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).
I’ve always known that the context of any screening affects our response to a film, but I think I came to understand this on a gut level only recently. It’s only when you travel to a different landscape that you can really comprehend—in your body as much as in your mind—how much your environment shapes your aesthetic experience. I was at the Locarno Film Festival in August, for instance, and I found myself drawn to movies that wouldn’t normally have moved me, the type of slow cinema that’s popular on the festival circuit but which sometimes leaves me cold. Maybe I was more open-minded about this kind of film because of my unusually relaxed surroundings. Maybe it was the psychic energy of the location itself—Locarno, nestled on the shore of Lake Maggiore, surrounded on all sides by steep, lush mountains—that made me swoon for thorny, opaque films that focused on the water and the land and themes of travel and transnationalism.
When I bumped into other critics and cinephiles between screenings or in bars late at night, we often found ourselves rehashing the topic of film criticism’s intrinsic subjectivity, and I kept insisting that since objectivity is a fiction, we should not just acknowledge but foreground our own subjective experience, treating it as what Walter Pater called the “original facts” and the “primary data” of any critical endeavor. Like most major film festivals, Locarno is intimately bound up with the tourist industry, and living for those ten days in Locarno and its neighboring town of Ascona, where I was staying, riding a bicycle back and forth across the river that separates them, marveling at the spectacular landscape, only intensified my feelings about how our physical environment influences our aesthetic experience. In the movie theaters, I began to suspect that my own “original facts” and “primary data”—the subjective romance I’d been having all week with the lake and the hills—may have been the primary reason that Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Matter Out of Place—which were both as enamored with the water and the earth as I was—became my favorite films of the festival.
It was easy to be aware of my own idiosyncratically subjective response to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh because it was, far and away, the strangest and most difficult film that I experienced in the festival: at the screening I attended, for instance, at least half of the audience walked out—not out of anger or disgust, but from a sense of fatigued confusion or confounded resignation. The film was mysteriously engaging—but also quite boring for some—because Wittmann organized it not around a typical narrative but instead—as she did with her previous, equally abstruse and gorgeous feature, Drift (2017)—around the mood and temperament of water, both as a concept and as a sensual phenomenon.
Wittmann’s film reminded me that water imposes upon us contradictory impulses. On the one hand, water’s mesmerizing physicality inspires us to see and to hear it on its own terms in all of its sensual splendor. On the other hand, water nurtures the need to deploy metaphor to make sense of its inherent inexplicability. Metaphor, like montage, compares two unlike things to create a new idea, and metaphors are especially appropriate for water, after all, since one of its primary functions is to suture gaps, to nurture travel, and to make connections between distant lands and remote communities. At the same time, water also creates boundaries and divisions—between nations and people—and metaphors simultaneously reinforce ideas about division because of the very improbability of their poetic juxtapositions.
In the morning and at night, I often found myself sitting alone along the shore of Lake Maggiore, studying its surface with a level of attention I usually reserved only for the movies. And I began to think about water—or perhaps merely to sense it—differently. The more I studied the lake, the more I came to feel that its physical and intellectual qualities were inextricably linked. I became fascinated with the way the stippling of the lake’s surface glides and rotates in vast, mutating configurations: shifting parallelograms of a bruised purple and slate gray, dappled by triangles of reflected sunlight, slivers and crescents of dancing baby-blue flecks off in the distance that pushed against each other at odd angles, across which an occasional rowboat or paddleboard might trace one long line that bisected and reimagined these geometrical patterns like knife strokes in a tub of softened butter or the crests of icing in a painted cake by Wayne Thiebaud. At other times, the lake’s veneer struck me as a series of ridges, or scars, or parallel pencil lines, or wrinkled patches of felt cloth, or mottled shadows of leaves sinking into drifting scraps the color of pallid charcoal, or serrated blades of azure and forest green that cut rippling borderlines, spiked with crowns of pure brightness devoid of any color.
When I was watching Human Flowers of Flesh, I found myself understanding the film in terms of a similar tension between water’s purely physical and symbolic qualities, and it felt as if studying the lake so acutely had heightened my perceptual capacities in the theater. The movie opens on a ragtag group clambering through a rocky, Mediterranean cliffside. Then we see a woman who feels like Wittmann’s cinematic stand-in gazing out over the ocean, so that from the very beginning, Wittmann links water and perception, water and curiosity, water and the promise of a potential journey, a mode of spiritual exploration or corporeal amelioration. And sure enough, soon they come upon a moored sailboat awaiting them. So we feel immediately that this movie will use water as an organizing principle that touches on its innate themes of travel and connection rather than on its innate conceptual counterparts of division and fear. Wittmann, it seems, will explore the ocean as a potent and luscious vastness that can nurture the drifting imagination.
And yet, Wittmann does eventually draw on water’s capacity to create divisions, in that she highlights separation and distance between shots and sequences unlike the typical editor interested in crafting coherent connections. But Wittmann is interested in the idea of division in its positive, rather than its negative aspects—not in borders or limits, but in uncoupling, disjointing, unlinking, a kind of liberating unfettering. Though the film follows a surprisingly linear development of a journey (from Marseille to Corsica to Morocco, if you’re paying close attention), she cuts up this expedition to continually emphasize all of its ambiguously remote linkages. On the micro-level, for instance, she rarely creates any direct causal connection between shots: the spatial and temporal relationships are fuzzy; the characters’ relationships are opaque. A typical sequence might include a half-dozen people eating quietly aboard a ship, a man sitting on a hillside smoking a cigarette, a close-up of an insect playing with its prey in a web, a man sharing some fruit with a woman on land and talking about flowers, another man on board ironing a shirt, another man on board rolling a cigarette, and so on. On the macro-level, she organizes the film around scenes of tedium like these punctuated now and then with breathtaking sequences that offer the promise—intentionally never fulfilled—of some sort of epiphany: microscopic close-ups of single-celled organisms accompanied by the sounds of gurgling, churning, and lapping water; underwater footage approaching a sunken vessel; gorgeously tinted blue footage of a woman showering; strobe-light flashes of fragmented bodies dancing to techno music at a club; long takes of oscillating lights and wavering shadows on the wooden paneling in the boat’s cabin; military parachutists floating like jellyfish across an almost empty sky.
This disconnected narrative construction, which often feels more like a collage than a story, forces the audience to become active participants in the meaning-making process—except that Wittmann seems to be willfully avoiding meaning-making altogether, focusing instead on the sensual aspects of the cinematic experience, the emancipating, thoughtless meditation that floating on the sea might engender. The more I tried to grapple with Wittmann’s intentional disconnections, the more I became suspicious of my own hermeneutic inclinations; the film doesn’t attempt to articulate ideas so much as it aims to suffuse the theater with a mood. Once I was able to accept the film on its own terms, I found myself sinking into it, no longer thinking about the possible meanings of water, but merely becoming one with the experience of the sea.
Matter Out of Place (2022).
When I was watching Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Matter Out of Place, I had the same suspicion as I’d had with Human Flowers that I was unconsciously imbuing the film with my subjective physical experience of Locarno. Geyrhalter’s movie was a visual panegyric to the environment—but it heaped praise upon the earth primarily by showing us the ugliness that humanity has slathered over its surface. Geyrhalter commences his analysis by presenting us with an Ansel Adams-like image of steep, rocky, snow-covered mountains cut through by a river that seems to shiver like a slowly vibrating blue glass. Pristine and majestic, it is the paradigmatic vision of nature as the sublime. But then he cuts to a closer image of that same riverbank, surrounded by those same monumental, snow-covered mountains, and it took me a while to realize—only because Geyrhalter held the image for so long, enabling, finally, my perceptions to focus—that the riverbank was not pristine at all, but was, in fact, littered with a deluge of plastic bottles, modernity’s detritus, a visual motif of nature’s splendor defiled by capitalism’s inhumane ambition that he will repeat in almost every image for the remainder of the film.
Perhaps I was attuned to themes like these because over the previous days, I’d been going for some long hikes up in the hills above Ascona. And the physical sensation of moving through that landscape reminded me that the land, like the water below, has multiple aspects. We tend to think of the land as a symbol of solidity and permanence in contradistinction to water’s malleable flow, but if you spend some time looking at and sensing the land carefully, you come to see that it is just as fluid as water is, just as inconstant, elastic, and variable. Up in the hills, for instance, I was reminded that the land, if you stop for a while to live and breathe with it, doesn’t consist entirely or even mostly of what we normally think of as the land—the geological crust of rock, dirt, and soil that strikes us as so eternal—but mostly, instead, of its ceaselessly evolving vegetation: lanky, sinuous shrubs and bushes, wild tawny grasses, whole meadows of ferns and the sound of their rustling in the wind, and thousands upon thousands of trees: stunted oaks, honey locusts, wild cherries, magnolias, paper birches, slender European beeches, the surprisingly rare pine or spruce, chestnuts with their fuzzy, alien green burrs, and, here and there, an unexpected aloe or prickly pear cactus. The mountain may seem impressively immutable from a distance, but when you’re walking within it, you can understand that this entire landmass is constantly in flux and radically different from season to season.
Like Wittmann, Geyrhalter organizes his film around both the sensual and the metaphorical aspects of the land. He’s clearly in love with nature, but he doesn’t render the landscape in all its constantly evolving, manifold particulars, choosing instead to picture it at a distance as a symbol of the sublime. And he renders garbage, meanwhile—through its incessant physicality—as the symbol of nature’s desecration. It’s not just the visual horror of garbage, but the unrelentingness of the film’s dozens and dozens of scenes of garbage that engender our revulsion and become Geyrhalter’s central conceit. The film has virtually no dialogue. Instead, it’s just image after image of human and industrial debris. And to emphasize the problem’s global scope, his movie, like Wittmann’s, takes the form of a journey: from Austria to Albania to Kathmandu to the Maldives to the depths of the sea. But this is an expedition with an anti-touristic sensibility intended to reveal the transnational nature of the calamity of human waste.
At every location, Geyrhalter shows us heaps and mounds of junk: a suburban landfill dug up to reveal all the refuse that’s been there for decades and which will never decompose—shards of glass, ripped-up tires, old rugs, furniture, and a grotesquely colored and indefinable, subterranean liquid; trees along a riverbed coated with torn, faded, plastic sheets like spiderwebs in the trees; people carting their trash on snowmobiles across an idyllic Alpine ski resort, followed by the surrealistic vision of a garbage truck carried by a ski lift across a sublime winter mountain landscape; smoking heaps of garbage near a seashore erupting into smoky, red-hot flame so that the entire screen seems engulfed in this putrid burning; scuba divers on the ocean floor pulling out rags and lumber and scrap metal and tires trapped in the rocks and sand and coral reefs; and a football stadium-sized industrial garbage station straight out of a post-apocalyptic epic with enormous open pits of garbage where mechanical claws the size of pickups lift and sort through the hundred-foot-tall bed of charcoal-colored silt. Geyrhalter fashions images of the land reminiscent of photographs by Andreas Gursky, but while Gursky’s pictures present industrial machinery as a metonym of modern alienation, Geyrhalter presents these images of defiled beauty to make us feel on a gut level the horrors of our own actions.
On my last day in Locarno, I sat on the shore once again, taking notes for this essay, trying to revive the films in my memory. But even then, the movies were drifting away from me. Now back at home in Brooklyn, having traveled back across an ocean, working on this essay has only reinforced the idea that our ecosystem shapes our experience. I’m no longer surrounded by majestic mountains and lakes, but by bulky six-story brick apartment buildings, and my fascination with these movies has continued to fade. I know that if I ever see them again, New York’s environment will make me sense them differently. And that might be a great experience—to come to understand them in an entirely different context. But part of me thinks that I should never see them again. Part of me wants to know them only through the lens of these fading memories steeped in that alluring ecosystem that made me fall for them in the first place.