Reseñas de la crítica

Geyrhalter piques the imagination with images of decay: towns, malls, theaters, and hospitals, all deserted, unnamed, and overrun by foliage and wildlife. The opening shots of rippling water reflected on crumbling mosaics are mysteriously exotic; not until later, in wider shots, can one recognize murals of the former Soviet Union. Through another slow reveal, a Japanese ghost town turns out to be Fukushima. In this feature-length memento mori, humanity is evoked by its absence.

Geyrhalter's film, while documenting the present world, also seems to be taking place in the aftermath of devastation. It thrums with a sense of absence and the finiteness of humankind.

If we want cinema to look forward, and not merely function as a diagnostic tool for our zeitgeist-focused selves, we must ask it to conceive of contemporary life both beyond the present and with a clear view of the past. Such is Nikolaus Geyrhalter's achievement in Homo Sapiens, a futuristic-seeming document of dilapidated vistas from across the globe that forgoes time stamps, title cards, and explanations of any sort.

Homo Sapiens displays the Our Daily Bread director's usual screamingly high-def clarity, geometric framing, and interest in systems (albeit broken ones here), as he multiplies the visuals of abandonment seen in his 1999 Chernobyl tele-doc Pripyat. But far from being voluptuous studies in decay, Geyrhalter's deep-focus postapocalyptic images radiate loneliness by dwelling on the utter indifference of time.

Geyrhalter's isn't tied to a particular place and doesn't rely on voiceover, instead leaving it up to the viewer to step into the role of a visiting intelligence, differentiating between species of spaces and assessing the cumulative damage with each new disarranged tableau. Its portentous title notwithstanding, the knockout Homo Sapiens often plays less like a post-apocalyptic vision than a weirdly consolatory thought experiment.

The film contains no music. It contains no camera movement. There is never any hint of mankind within the film, neither visually nor aurally... If all of this sounds intimidatingly austere, the truth is that Homo Sapiens is oddly viewer-friendly, with its soundscape of thunder and rain, wind and crickets, giving the film a serene, meditative quality that casts a very seductive spell.

Viennese documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter finds movement and honesty in stillness. His subject in his latest film is abandoned structures and the absent creators who left them to ruin and overgrowth. The more he tours the graveyard of our stunted ambition and our lazy idea of progress, the more the film begins to feel like silent science fiction.

Geyrhalter has made some more conventional documentaries, but his work has always had a spookiness to it. Here, he's thinking spatially, using the screen to create an unsettling place where the audience can probe what the world created around them means and what matters, if anything. One might argue that 20 minutes or so is enough, but what Homo Sapiens offers in its succession of carefully framed shots is sometimes too tantalizing to resist.

In a way, the images are reminiscent of the empty, haunted spaces associated with the art cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr. But Mr. Geyrhalter's method is more austere, and the effect produced is subtly different. Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie's title.

There is a tragic beauty to it all... Above all, Geyrhalter discovers that the places we built to learn, to make, to eat, to sleep, look like the art of Anselm Kiefer when reclaimed by fire, water, air, and earth. Instead of uncovering artifacts from long ago, Homo Sapiens shows us our own relics in the making.

Each location is rendered as a tableau of breathtaking precision, augmented by a sound design so immersive you can feel each of the spaces extending outward way beyond the frame. Even if every image shares the same essential lack, this doesn't mean that they're necessarily similar, as Geyrhalter is continually able to find new, equally ravishing permutations of emptiness.

The film's ruin-littered landscapes... don't offer the kind of certainties demanded by the chattering classes; besides, it's too beautiful, disturbingly so (like the often hauntingly Malickian Letters from War). The Geyrhalter offers a sensation, a way of posing a question or idea those folks seem to abhor, and it conceives its audience as vast and united in common interests (such as global survival), and not just a bunch of people with problems to talk about.