I am remembering just enough of my notes from Wroclaw. I was going to avoid writing about this film but then — for whatever reason — I changed my mind. I felt insufficiently equipped to really be fair to the film (which I didn’t like very much), but I have a just-about coherent image of it in my head, and that might be enough.
Related, but the next episode of Muub Tube is dropping later this week — a special on Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. Ralph and I will be talking about his latest (Enys Men), but also some earlier films. Keep an ear out.
— We are going to nature. We are going into nature. We are — all of us; friends, lovers, people we admire and people we merely abide — in a state of disgust at the hollowness of our modernity. There are rivers and lakes and we are going to go to these rivers and lakes and we will drop acid there or take designer psychedelics with indexical string names and there, in the odious largess of nature, we will unburden ourselves: piss among the moss, ejaculate among the trees.
— We have brought our decontextualization machine with us. It is an engine — an intangible engine — which pulverises history and dials in to the spruce and larch and pine and oak, and we grovel (as if in prayer; slack mouthed) for mushrooms, plant food, and then maybe we fuck or ejaculate or piss, giving back something to nothing. We feel good to have absconded the city and with us we have brought our decontextualization machine. It is like a wood chipper or an engine that crushes us and feeds us into the outdoors. Really, we are like Ansel Adams or Walt Whitman but when we yell (which we don’t; we speak quietly, fumbling with our tents) we find our mouths are stopped up with mud, just mud — it is merely dirt, matter out of place. We swim (naked) in the water and rashes form on our skin, and this is a kind of dark ecology and — regarding the monoliths and decayed stone circles and runes and beliefs that have been piled into this forest/lake/river — we feel nauseous actually. There is nothing here, except bodies (us; we) and foliage.
— I don’t know what to say about Afterwater. It felt like a very hollow and unriveting attempt to declare a new ecology in which bodies — abhorred of modernity — seek simplicity, a return to nature. But the film is mostly very hollow, very beautiful in the way that the city (a dead mushroom of third-wave coffee bars and exposed Edison bulbs and natural wine bars) is tastefully beautiful, and therefore not very beautiful (only tasteful, which means it deflects away from our eyes).
— The film is good when it bends and even disorders its optics. There are sections shot in a kind of fuzzy, handheld VHS, and sections shot (blooming, futzed) underwater, among unknown/unidentifiable crops of willowy organic matter, but — for the most part — the film is just pairs and sometimes trios of people who, wordless, look and move around the forest in very precise and emotionless ways. They have dragged all of their Kondo-minimalist bullshit with them, their evaporation; and they fondle this handful of moss as if it is a penis and then they remove their clothes unsexily and float in water. It is not even pagan. It sort of alludes to the biome. It steadfastly refuses to unburden itself of its prettiness. Really it is like a screensaver. The film describes itself as a ‘geography of miracles’, but I felt utterly underwhelmed and bored. Its sublimity was unintentional, being so faced with the grandeur of nature that it failed to convey anything. Shrinking back toward emptiness.
— For a while I left the cinema. I got up and wandered around and accidentally stepped in a puddle and smoked for a bit, and then I came back and the film had entered a new ‘vibe’ — sort of like a slowed down Holly Blakey dance thing, people dressed in crinoline (gold; peach; blue), touching each other sort of. You feel like in the Geneppian sense that liminality should be optically disorienting, that — as a space of transgression/transformation/alterity — it should abide in a kind of difference, but really the film felt very by the numbers, a sort of fugue of accidental loneliness, a bereftness of ideas. You feel the same tugging with Ben Rivers and his A spell to ward off the darkness, but there his brashness and noise and intimacy at least convey a sense of derangement, a kind of ontological excess and revulsion that comes with our retreat into wilderness. I really wanted to sleep. There are — in its folds — bits of people reading texts from their phones, and this felt very ‘intellectual’ and slightly pompous. Was that the point — that we’re so cleaved from nature that we cannot encounter it without bringing all of this baggage along with us?
— The forest speaks. There are muffled rumbles, a kind of pre-linguistic utterance. But the filmmakers chose to subtitle these remarks and ejaculations (the voice of the forest), worried (I think) that it (the forest) would be misunderstood, which seems to admit a kind of failure on the film’s own terms. In trying to escape language it ultimately sublimates the wilderness to language, to an architecture of received knowledge that we bring with us into the forest, to the lake. I found myself desiring incoherence, something unintelligible. Instead, the film seemed very anxious to footnote and intellectualize its derive into the wilderness; reducing the wild to an academic proposition, a sequence of footnotes that refer (or defer) toward everything that is not the film. The film struggles for attention in the thick of its own context.
— There are many artist films which have bent their bodies toward landscape. Tacita Dean is among those who do it well. The landscape is an artistic legacy. It has always been there, but now — under a new duress — it has gathered again at our feet, like a kind of rug. Does this landescapism come from a kind of climate angst (pre-figuring an apocalypse), or does it come from elsewhere, a kind of post-historical retreat into the unctuousness of nature (pre-verbal, runic, mythical)? James Benning, who I wrote about recently, is a landscape filmmaker. Really he is more concerned with duration, with weightiness and time. Landscapes are places in which things happen. Structures of history. What history is playing out in Afterwater? I cannot see that history. It felt abstracted to a point of disintegration, a kind of stage.
— They (those who retreat into the forests and the lakes) read from Miguel de Unamuono’s san manuel bueno, martyr, and I don’t know why exactly — a hidden city submerged within the stomach of a lake, something about reflections and the city (which is not its reflection), and there is a (very brief) moment when these figures (dancing, slowly) move into a kind of turbine hall or factory and fondle the dials, and this felt like the film was winking at me and I didn’t know why, exactly. There are more and greater films about our torturous confrontation with nature, like Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961-1964), which feels revelatory and dangerous and disorienting, whereas here I felt like I was reading a lot of gallery wall text. Is this touching grass? Peter Hutton feels more wrapt and sublime, because Hutton refused to sublimate the natural world to any kind of index or intellectual footnote. Nature isn’t clever. It is very stupid, and therein — probably — lies its revelation.
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