Jornal da Mostra
Nº 358 > 28ª Mostra > 06/09/2005
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Venice 2005 - Paranoia extends to Venice; few films detect the signs of the new times
The security paranoia (industry) has taken hold also in Italy. The 62nd Venice Film Festival is blocaded with fences, a police force of 400, and metal detectors. The security industry has opted to market the concept of the ironclad. Barbarism advances and, up to now, few films in the festival selection have been able to detect the signs of these new, darker times. Some do go back into the past, in an endeavor to pinpoint those errors that bequeathed to us these times of disquiet.The Russian film Pervye na Lune/ The First on the Moon, by Alexei Fedortchenko, is sheer cinematographic anarchy, in trying to subvert the very origins of their language - the documentary. Fedortchenko builds a false, debauched documentary, with images of the thirties, of pure socialist realism, with statements that are made up concerning an obscure fact that occurred in the megalomaniac days of the Soviet Empire.
Fedortchenko recounts, in detail, a state secret of the times that could well trigger the collapse of the socialist regime that, at that stage, sold superiority, as one might sell toilet soap or cigarettes (or political parties and candidates today) as a state of the soul. The false documentary, more true than many documentaries based on observation, is revealing in telling of a Soviet space program that failed: an attempt to send a manned rocket to the moon and the crash of the spacecraft, soon after, in a sparsely inhabited region in Chile. The failure of the mission is a forewarning of failure, too, of a regime built, as was the false documentary, on a complex chain of lies.
Naboer/ Next Door, by Norwegian Pal Sletaune, delves into the dangerous mysteries of the imagination. David Lynch would seem to provide the inspiration. But Sletaune has proved that his is a name to be remembered since his troubling first film Junk Mail, of 1997. Naboer is a disquieting film on gratuitous violence - on the state of competitivity, on modern life translated in loneliness and claustrophobia. When he loses the companionship of his girlfriend, a man builds his lunacy and creates unimaginable paths for his paranoia, by materializing two schizophrenic neighbors and nonexistent persecution.
Workingman's Death, an excellent documentary by Austrian Michael Glawogger, forces us face to face with four situations of extreme hardship for human survival on a spent planet. Just as does Alexei Fedortchenko, he produces images from the archives of the ex-Soviet Union on the glories of collectivism and of socialized superman to ironize the conditions of extreme hardship for survival, an end to hope and even to the former concepts of the working classes.
His contemporary ghosts are documented in chaotic work camps in Ucrania (in deactivated coal mines), Nigeria (in promiscuous animal slaughterhouses), Pakistan (in oil tanker cemeteries), and China (in steel mills), in counterpoint to images from Germany where a former deactivated steel mill is transformed into a post-modern installation for an amusement park where youngsters enjoy themselves without the slightest awareness of the significance of their painful past. Or that this industrial cemetery, with all of its pain and filth, is alive today, only transferred to a world that is 'less good'. His film ridicularizes the demagogy that flutters in the banner of modern antiglobalization brigades that a better world is possible. Possible indeed in the rich countries that push their industrial waste away to as many places as there are in this documentary, where survival is a must at any cost. And the industry of the ironclad wins the day.
