La casa (Namai) - Sharunas Bartas

sono matti, sono idioti, sono liberi o rinchiusi, sono sogni, sono nobili decaduti, con i servitori, cosa fanno, aspettano, e che cosa?

e l’unico nero (Alex Descas) che viene ammazzato, e il cane sulla tavola, e i soldati, assediano o aspettano l’uscita, la resa?

i libri vengono bruciati, pagina dopo pagina, è un mondo che finisce?

mille domande, senza risposta, e senza parole.
musica bellissima, come pure le immagini.
buona visione, e buone domande - Ismaele

QUI il film completo con i sottotitoli in inglese

…L'atmosfera è straniante e oscura, dominata da un silenzio che non è mai stato così disturbante. Ancora una volta la parola è assente, ad eccezion fatta per l'incipt e il finale; due minuti in tutto in cui la voce narrante del protagonista parla della madre, unico punto d'appiglio per una tentata chiarificazione degli eventi.

- Madre, spesso avrei voluto parlare con te di tutto, ma non l'ho mai fatto... Ogni volta che vengo quì ad ascoltarti non posso più parlare con te e rimango in      silenzio... Nel futuro io sono libero, libero perchè ancora non esiste. Il presente è così sfuggente, non sono certo che esista.
- Madre, il tempo è passato e sono distante da te. Ciò che è importante per me, è credere che queste cose non svaniranno... Per noi non sono altro che anime morte. Anime malate, sfinite, semplicemente questo. E soprattutto, quasi prive di speranza, ma non stiamo per sparire...

da qui

…Sussulti, deboli, all’inizio e in particolar modo alla fine con la crocifissione del bambino che getta un barlume di significato sulla vicenda. Alcune opzioni visive hanno un discreto impatto sullo spettatore, prendere la sala piena di corpi nudi o il cane in controluce come esempi. E pure un paio di espedienti tecnici sono interessanti come la presentazione degli abitanti attorno al tavolo ben accompagnata dalla musica, o il sordo dialogo fra due sofferenti che esprime tutto il mutismo di The House.
Che immane fatica, però, cogliere queste sfumature sulla tela nera di Bartas…

da qui

This is tricky to write about.  It’s my first Sharunas Bartas film (I have others on my watchlist).  From what I’ve read, it’s something of a culmination of the work done in his prior years and not the best one to start with.  Kind of like trying to start Tsai with Visage.  The film opens with the image of a mansion, as voiceover reads a solemn letter to “Mother”.  As I understand it, “Mother” in this case represents Lithuania.  So does the mansion.  Apparently all (most?) of Bartas’s movies are about Lithuania and its relationship to the Soviet Union.

We see a man exploring the house.  We can only assume the man is the voice who read the letter.  There are no other spoken words (sort of… more on that in a minute) in the film, until the end when the letter continues.  He wanders from room to room, with a sadly nostalgic look on his face.  He sees things that strike us as odd, but don’t seem to faze him.  A man playing chess by himself.  A dog nursing her puppies.  A woman alone, performing a sorrowful show with hand puppets.  A fir growing in the middle of a room, with Christmas lights and people wearing animal heads marching around it.  A man (who happens to be Leos Carax) wearing a suit made of books, doing strange things with books.  A room full of naked children.  A room full of naked women who caress the man.  A naked woman who studies herself in the mirror.  A whole lot of naked going on.

There are three dining scenes.  In the first, the residents sit there barely acknowledging each other, tentative glances around the table.  The second is lively, with people strolling in and out, conversation buzzing (none of it is subtitled, so perhaps it’s gibberish, or just inconsequential).  In the third, they are all asleep in front of their plates.  Is it the cycle of a culture?

There are no answers forthcoming.  Although it took an outside source to tell me that there is something specifically Lithuanian about all this, it is clear that it is an exploration of a country or a culture or a history.  There are obvious connections to be made to other purveyors of “slow cinema”… Tarr and especially Tarkovsky come to mind.  But Bartas obliterates any notion of a narrative.  It is a series of bizarre tableaux that don’t appear to be connected, but may be thematically.

I have said recently that I can enjoy movies I don’t quite understand.  That is definitely the case here.  It appears that the film is swimming with symbolism, but a lot of it was lost on me.  However, you get the vibe of certain scenes quite readily.  Lost innocence, cultural isolation, censorship, military conflict.  More importantly, the images are fascinating.  Beautifully composed scenes with unexpected sights, studies of forlorn faces, crumbling interiors and stark iconography.  There are scores of intriguing screenshots I could have taken.  Every room contains something to chew on in your mind, and Bartas takes the time to let them sink in.  The soundscape is rich with heightened ambient noise or snatches of folk music… memories interweaving with reality.

I don’t know exactly what Bartas is getting at, but I get a very strong feeling from it.  It’s an entrancing world to spend time in.  And I also get the sense that one shouldn’t over-analyze it, that the symbolism is not as obscure as it seems (the ending is pretty clear, for sure).  I’m looking forward to more of his work

da  qui

The House (1997) opens to the image of a mansion as the narrator reads a confessional letter written to his mother about their inability to communicate with each other. The house and mother are, of course, metaphors for the motherland that would be explored in the two hours that follow. It seems to me that The House is the film that Bartas finally comes to terms with the trauma dealt by the country’s recent past that he has consistently expressed in his work. Consequently, the film also seems like a summation of the director’s previous films (One could say that the characters from Bartas’ previous films reprise their roles here) and a melting pot of all the Tarkovsky influences that have characterized his work (especially the last four fictional works of the Russian). Shot almost entirely indoors, The House follows a young man carrying a pile of books as me moves from one room of the Marienbad-like mansion to the other, meeting various men and women, none of whom speak to each other and who might be real people of flesh and blood, shards of memory or figments of fantasy. The house itself might be an abstract space, as in The Corridor, representing the protagonist’s mind with its spatial configuration disoriented like the chessboard in the film. Furthermore, one also gets the feeling that Bartas is attempting to resolve the question of theory versus practice – cold cynicism versus warm optimism – with regards to his politics as we witness the protagonist finally burn the books, page by page, he had so far held tightly to his chest.

da qui