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”. The second part, You, the Living was screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2007. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence completed the trilogy at the Venice Film Festival this week. A Pigeon is the trilogy's remarkable conclusion and it is the peak of Andersson's vision of life and the world and human history, accomplished in a purely cinematic, purely Swedish and purely philosophical way: a true landmark in postmodern art. In it Andersson moves through space and time with complete freedom, visiting Gothenburg in 1943 as well as the 18th century. Despite the persistence of the two itinerant peddlers Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) as central characters, Andersson also moves with complete freedom in terms of the film's structure, presenting separate scenes linked only by the abstract philosophical ideas. He also moves with the same freedom between day-to-day realism and intense imagination. He induces in the viewer meditation and thinking, moving between melancholy and joy in 100 minutes of selected anonymous folk music. Jonathan and Sam might appear somewhat like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet they are in fact closer to Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, or even Cain and Abel except that neither of them kills the other. As in Beckett's play, the viewer laughs but only to avoid dying of pain. In the soundtrack one sentence recurs throughout, across places and times, connecting the various scenes: “I am happy to know you are alright.” The film opens in a museum of mummified birds and animals. One of them is contemplating a mummified pigeon perched on an artificial tree branch “reflecting” on existence. This is followed by a sequence of three scenes entitled “Meeting with Death” I, II and III. In the first a man dies while opening a bottle of wine as his wife prepares dinner in the kitchen. In the second, a mother holds onto her jewelry case while she is dying in hospital, her two sons trying to snatch the case away from her. In the third a man has already paid for his meal at a fast food restaurant when he falls dead, and the question is who will have the free meal. Jonathan and Sam sell curiosities that are assumed to be for fun like Dracula dentures and monster masks, but it is in Andersson's images that the true curiosities show up: a female trainer unable to contain her desire for one of her male students even though she is as old as his mother; the king of Sweden unable to contain his desire for the young waiter at the bar where he stops with his army for a drink of water on his way to invade Moscow; a monkey in a laboratory, wrapped in wire, shrieks out as it is zapped with electricity. In one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema, the artist philosopher summarises the industrial revolution in the 19th century in the sight of a machine at which British Army soldiers stand, pushing chained black men and women into it before they light up the underside of the machine so that it moves, burning its cargo while old men and women come out to watch as they drink champagne: an elegy for humanity as much as western civilisation. The last scene is at a bicycle rent shop, where a group of people stand as if mummified. One asks, “Is it Tuesday or Wednesday?” At last he looks up at the sky, and the cooing of an unseen pigeon is heard. The directorial style ingeniously expresses the same meaning from beginning to end without a single closeup shot but rather wide-angle and medium shots to encourage contemplation and thinking rather than reflexive emotion. The camera never moves, with the choice of angle showing incredible precision with the invading army setting off with arrogant pride only to return through the same angle of view defeated and humiliated. Most scenes take place inside closed rooms that in practice turn into graves. The colours are pale, the lighting even without night or day or sun or moon. In short Andersson has absolute control of the cinematic language in which he expresses his vision. If Beckett were alive he would invite Andersson for a drink and say nothing at all for the duration of their time together.
*** 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 Küçükçaglayan) 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.
