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TWO LANDMARKS
Al-Ahram, Egypt
Sept 12 2014
Samir Farid reports from Venice
One of the greater aesthetic questions in cinema since its emergence
as an art form is philosophical expression, for how can you express
abstract ideas in an essentially photographic medium? Answers have
been provided by a whole clan of film philosophers from Carl Theodor
Dreyer and Robert Bresson to Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky,
Theodorus Angelopoulos, Terrence Malick -- and the Swedish filmmaker
Roy Andersson who, born in Gothenburg in 1943, has directed seven
films since 1970, five of them long features. Andersson made A Swedish
Love Story, which won four major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival
in 1970. Giliap was screened in Cannes's Directors Fortnight in 1976.
Twenty-four years later, he made Songs from the Second Floor, which
won the jury prize at Cannes in 2000 and was the first part in the
trilogy "Being Human".
[parts omitted]
Also in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival this year
is the Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin's The Cut, which though,
in contrast to Andersson's film, is an epic, is a landmark of equal
lasting value. Akin, who at the age of 30 won at the Golden Bear at
the Berlinale for Head-On (2004), was born in Hamburg in 1973. He
also won the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival for Soul Kitchen
in 2009. For its part The Cut coincides with the 100th anniversary of
the outbreak of the First World War, the 99th of the Armenian Genocide
that remains officially unacknowledged by Turkey, in 1915. Here as
elsewhere Fatih displays the uniqueness of his power as a German who
has nonetheless not lost touch with his Turkish roots, able to embody
the complex relation between east and west, Islam and Christianity,
something that reaches a new peak in The Cut, whose script he wrote
together with the veteran screenwriter Mardik Martin (who wrote several
of Scorsese's films). The film stars Tahar Rahim as Nazareth Manoogian,
the young Armenian ironsmith named after Jesus' birthplace.
The Cut is a 20th-century odyssey expressing a positive view of
the essence of Islam as it shows how Nazareth's life is saved first
by the Turkish Mehmet (Bartu Kucukcaglayan) and then by the Aleppo
soap factory owner Omar Nasreddin, played beautifully by the great
Palestinian actor Makram Khoury. Filmed in colour for cinemascope in
line with its epic brief, the film opens with a map of the countries
that took part in the First World War, before the titles, showing
the alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire which fell after
the war and Germany's defeat. It uses titles indicating the dates
and places of events throughout, spanning war's end in 1918 and the
declaration of the Turkish republic in 1923, enabling the viewer to
follow the hero's journey from Mardin in Turkey to Florida, Minneapolis
and North Dakota in the United States, past Aleppo and Beirut.
The beginning and the end are closely linked at the intellectual
level, with the same horrific events in Ottoman Turkey repeated in
America or the New World. Like Jesus, who was a carpenter, Nazareth
works with his hands.
A religious man despite the blow his faith receives when he is
subjected to the horrors of the genocide, he lives with his small
family within a much larger extended family between the house, the
workshop and the church. When the genocide occurs Nazareth is away,
having been forced by the Ottomans to pave a road in the desert. In
the event his wife Rakel (Hindi Zahra) is killed, and so are his
twin daughters Lucinée and Arsinée (Zein and Dina Fakhoury). The
cut of the title is a reference to beheading, to which all those
who participate in paving that road are subjected though Nazareth is
spared by Mehmet with the knife only cutting his vocal chords and so
keeping him silent till the end of the film, regaining his ability
to laugh only when he sees the similarly silent figure of Chaplain
in the film The Kid in Aleppo. Having escaped Nazareth finds out that
the survivors of the genocide are in Ceylanpınar (Syrian Ras Al-Ain),
where he goes looking for his family.
In one of the film's greatest scenes, the viewer sees the remains of
the tents and the burned up corpses with the injured in the last stages
of death. Nazareth locates his sister in law, who tells him that the
entire family has died and asks him to relieve her of her pain -- and,
in the film's first closeup of her face, Nazareth suffocates her --
with the precision of a great film evident in the choice of angle. Here
as elsewhere, in the fact that the call to prayers is only heard once
when Omar Nasreddin opens his factory in Aleppo to take in Nazareth,
for example, the film is a miracle of precision. At the end of the
war the residents of Aleppo are seen pelting the Turkish soldiers
with stones while they withdraw.
When a child is hit in the eye Nazareth moves away and refuses to take
part. By coincidence he meets his former assistant Levon (Shubham
Saraf), who informs him that his twin daughters are actually still
alive, his wife having handed them over to a Bedouin family.
Thus begins Nazareth's search for the twins, a picture of whom he
finds in an Armenian church in Beirut, where he finds out they have
been married and moved to Cuba. The father holds onto the picture,
a tribute to photography like that to Chaplain. On arrival in Havana
Nazareth is told the girls have moved to Minneapolis, finally finding
Lucinée in North Dakota. Arsinée, she tells him, has died; and
together they go to her grave. By then the message of the film is
clear: hope must remain so long as the subject is still alive.
Like any epic hero Nazareth comes close to death many times, but he
does not die. This Fatih Akin expresses in a purely cinematic way when
he shows Nazareth, in the imaginary realm, being called by his wife
and then by his daughters as he receives two deadly blows. The film's
various parts are linked by an Armenian lullaby sung by Rakel, which
was not translated in the screening but remains a powerful reminder
of the beauty of life. The spirit it and the film communicates is
unforgettable.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/7189/23/Two-landmarks.aspx
Al-Ahram, Egypt
Sept 12 2014
Samir Farid reports from Venice
One of the greater aesthetic questions in cinema since its emergence
as an art form is philosophical expression, for how can you express
abstract ideas in an essentially photographic medium? Answers have
been provided by a whole clan of film philosophers from Carl Theodor
Dreyer and Robert Bresson to Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky,
Theodorus Angelopoulos, Terrence Malick -- and the Swedish filmmaker
Roy Andersson who, born in Gothenburg in 1943, has directed seven
films since 1970, five of them long features. Andersson made A Swedish
Love Story, which won four major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival
in 1970. Giliap was screened in Cannes's Directors Fortnight in 1976.
Twenty-four years later, he made Songs from the Second Floor, which
won the jury prize at Cannes in 2000 and was the first part in the
trilogy "Being Human".
[parts omitted]
Also in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival this year
is the Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin's The Cut, which though,
in contrast to Andersson's film, is an epic, is a landmark of equal
lasting value. Akin, who at the age of 30 won at the Golden Bear at
the Berlinale for Head-On (2004), was born in Hamburg in 1973. He
also won the jury prize at the Venice Film Festival for Soul Kitchen
in 2009. For its part The Cut coincides with the 100th anniversary of
the outbreak of the First World War, the 99th of the Armenian Genocide
that remains officially unacknowledged by Turkey, in 1915. Here as
elsewhere Fatih displays the uniqueness of his power as a German who
has nonetheless not lost touch with his Turkish roots, able to embody
the complex relation between east and west, Islam and Christianity,
something that reaches a new peak in The Cut, whose script he wrote
together with the veteran screenwriter Mardik Martin (who wrote several
of Scorsese's films). The film stars Tahar Rahim as Nazareth Manoogian,
the young Armenian ironsmith named after Jesus' birthplace.
The Cut is a 20th-century odyssey expressing a positive view of
the essence of Islam as it shows how Nazareth's life is saved first
by the Turkish Mehmet (Bartu Kucukcaglayan) and then by the Aleppo
soap factory owner Omar Nasreddin, played beautifully by the great
Palestinian actor Makram Khoury. Filmed in colour for cinemascope in
line with its epic brief, the film opens with a map of the countries
that took part in the First World War, before the titles, showing
the alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire which fell after
the war and Germany's defeat. It uses titles indicating the dates
and places of events throughout, spanning war's end in 1918 and the
declaration of the Turkish republic in 1923, enabling the viewer to
follow the hero's journey from Mardin in Turkey to Florida, Minneapolis
and North Dakota in the United States, past Aleppo and Beirut.
The beginning and the end are closely linked at the intellectual
level, with the same horrific events in Ottoman Turkey repeated in
America or the New World. Like Jesus, who was a carpenter, Nazareth
works with his hands.
A religious man despite the blow his faith receives when he is
subjected to the horrors of the genocide, he lives with his small
family within a much larger extended family between the house, the
workshop and the church. When the genocide occurs Nazareth is away,
having been forced by the Ottomans to pave a road in the desert. In
the event his wife Rakel (Hindi Zahra) is killed, and so are his
twin daughters Lucinée and Arsinée (Zein and Dina Fakhoury). The
cut of the title is a reference to beheading, to which all those
who participate in paving that road are subjected though Nazareth is
spared by Mehmet with the knife only cutting his vocal chords and so
keeping him silent till the end of the film, regaining his ability
to laugh only when he sees the similarly silent figure of Chaplain
in the film The Kid in Aleppo. Having escaped Nazareth finds out that
the survivors of the genocide are in Ceylanpınar (Syrian Ras Al-Ain),
where he goes looking for his family.
In one of the film's greatest scenes, the viewer sees the remains of
the tents and the burned up corpses with the injured in the last stages
of death. Nazareth locates his sister in law, who tells him that the
entire family has died and asks him to relieve her of her pain -- and,
in the film's first closeup of her face, Nazareth suffocates her --
with the precision of a great film evident in the choice of angle. Here
as elsewhere, in the fact that the call to prayers is only heard once
when Omar Nasreddin opens his factory in Aleppo to take in Nazareth,
for example, the film is a miracle of precision. At the end of the
war the residents of Aleppo are seen pelting the Turkish soldiers
with stones while they withdraw.
When a child is hit in the eye Nazareth moves away and refuses to take
part. By coincidence he meets his former assistant Levon (Shubham
Saraf), who informs him that his twin daughters are actually still
alive, his wife having handed them over to a Bedouin family.
Thus begins Nazareth's search for the twins, a picture of whom he
finds in an Armenian church in Beirut, where he finds out they have
been married and moved to Cuba. The father holds onto the picture,
a tribute to photography like that to Chaplain. On arrival in Havana
Nazareth is told the girls have moved to Minneapolis, finally finding
Lucinée in North Dakota. Arsinée, she tells him, has died; and
together they go to her grave. By then the message of the film is
clear: hope must remain so long as the subject is still alive.
Like any epic hero Nazareth comes close to death many times, but he
does not die. This Fatih Akin expresses in a purely cinematic way when
he shows Nazareth, in the imaginary realm, being called by his wife
and then by his daughters as he receives two deadly blows. The film's
various parts are linked by an Armenian lullaby sung by Rakel, which
was not translated in the screening but remains a powerful reminder
of the beauty of life. The spirit it and the film communicates is
unforgettable.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/7189/23/Two-landmarks.aspx