In the Realm of the Existential Arthouse: Eastern European Short Movies under 20 minutes
04.01.2024
Arthouse — Far from Hollywood
Arthouse is a film artistic genre that includes the achievements of the seventh art in which the expression, content, style and technique are recognized for their uniqueness and artistic experience. An independent, artistic and auteur film, usually with subtle production sets and less-known actors, has vigorously opposed the rules of the mainstream since the very beginning of the development of film art. Through a high level of symbolism and a multitude of metaphors, experimentalism in existentialism, images of the liminal space behind the breached fourth wall are displayed. The director’s creativity concentrates on the exposition of internal, psychological special effects and an aesthetic sense for the visual experience of essence. Ambient sound, the perception of silence or absurd dialogues in the film narrative, in opposition to the linear structure of telling the plot in the film, is complemented by the absence of a defined end. All of this represents a cinematic cross-section of the arthouse and brings the artistic vision of the author of the film, his most perfect proportion of form in cinematic reality.
Kyiv Frescoes 1966 — A Cinematic Relic
Watch online “Kiev Frescoes” 1966
A work of general cultural studies that crosses ethnology, painting and literature with film, directed by Sergei Parajanov, brought a film language based on the static frame and the absence of speech. The solutions used by the author were more painterly than cinematic. The film corresponds with the audience from the point of view of semiotic codes and mythologies. It focuses viewers’ attention on objects or parts of the composition, prompting them to interpret symbols, metaphors and allegories.
Fresco is an ancient technique in painting, dating back to prehistoric times. Memories are translated into pictures, which become a work of art, which becomes part of mythology. This artistic archetype is developed on the film screen in the preserved fifteen minutes of recorded, but forbidden material called “Kyiv Frescoes“. The film image of natural colours directly applied to fresh plaster tells about a family destroyed by war and places a young woman alone in front of her memories and her fantasies. An angel with a Barrel organ, a collision of modern and old beliefs, and in this film, Parajanov shows deep artistic poetics and philosophical abstraction.
Condensed films, the so-called “collages” of Parajanov, indisputably create, with their synchronized movements and within the framework of literary templates of folk traditions artistically shaped, a mosaic of divine motifs. The ruddy apple, the fighting suit, the long hair and the spindle of folklore contrast with the new tunes, the Singer sewing machine, the rigid statues and the colours of the twentieth century. Symbols unravel life to the boiling point. The roar of the wind and the smoke from the lanterns as harbingers of the black wedding contributes to the oneiric and transcendental experience. The fairy-tale atmosphere and dreamlike cinematographic reality shown by the static position of the camera create a tense inner mental movement. The collision of Slavic folklore and folk mythology with landscapes and portraits of exotic imagination and the details of reality reaches its peak of purity and artistic nobility in awakening the deepest personal and collective knowledge.
* * *
And Miss Sonia Henie 1971 — pure provocation
Watch online “I Miss Sonia Henie” 1971
The challenging request took place during the Belgrade International Film Festival (FEST) in 1971. Slovenian director and cinematographer Karpo Aćimović Godina set an unusual task for his colleagues (Buck Henry, Dusan Makavejev, Frederick Wiseman, Milos Forman, Paul Morrissey, Tinto Brass). The rules were simple. Everyone had the night to shoot a film shorter than three minutes with static shots in the same attic room and must include the line “I miss Sonia Henie” in its creation. This is how this film was created, the author’s work of seven directors.
The work is a reflection of the Yugoslav New Wave, which was born like a phoenix from the ashes and survives eternally. The film is a coherent whole composed of various artistic expressions and is characterized by incredible diversity. With its impressive originality and unpredictable sequence of scenes, it overcomes the limited time and space. Hypersensuality in one director, explicit humour in another, dark reality in the third, bizarre dialogue rhetoric in the fourth… merge into an indisputable and virtuoso appearance of the seventh art held together by the personality cult of the Norwegian figure skater and actress (Sonia Henie). An unusual, very successful film experiment.
* * *
As You Like It 1976 — All the world’s a stage
Watch online “As You Like It” 1976
It is mainly an abstract adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Fin de siècle under the auspices of symbolism, modernism and mysticism. The work opens up new perspectives of an old artistic movement. There is an absolute degradation of hope and a complete illusion of a new beginning. The film was made under the direction of the Hungarian director Zoltán Huszárik through the modernization of the pastoral drama. From the pastoral, a romance-adventure novel developed. With Shakespeare, the drama within the drama and the theatre in the theatre figure, with Huszárik we have the concept of film on film.
The film creation shows life as an imitation of art — painting, literature, cinematography, music… The Ardenne forest has been replaced by landscapes from Hungary, the whole world is a stage, every man is an actor, but both man and the world are dead. That is why, on the film screen, images of cemeteries alternate and collide with scenes of eternal nature and art. The poetics of sound in this film are extraordinary. The impression is made. Emotion present. Catharsis achieved.
Emilija Kvočka
