ŽIURI

Bypasses of Time

Auridas Gajauskas

Do admit that more than once you have caught yourself in a situation where night turned into a bypass of the everyday highway. A bypass is a road that helps you to escape day jams – you can think of how to solve love or work problems, analyse memories, meet new people or just gaze at an empty city. A screenplay of a Jim Jarmusch’s film Night on Earth, for instance, is a perfect example of a map of everyday bypasses of a “global city”. What would happen, though, if this time “circuit” was so long as to not only prolong the journey into the day, but make it last for 10, 15 or even 20 years? This is what Jacqueline Zünd's film Goodnight Nobody is about. Made in 2009, the film captures the lives stuck in the zigzags of a never-ending bypass of time. In the film, the reality of insomnia (in this particular case it is a severe sleeping disorder when a person ceases sleeping whatsoever) reveals itself little by little among television broadcasts, school grades, breakfast table and early street buzz of the day but eventually it overwhelms all the space and replaces everyday life. Insomniacs remind us of a species of whales – seen during the night and yet never asleep they float in the metaphysical ocean of everyday life: being active all the time they are lonely. In Jacqueline Zünd's film we see those “never-sleeping people” wandering across the everyday horizons of Shanghai (China), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Kamin-Kashirsky (Ukraine), and Tucson (Arizona). It is, indeed, a very interesting road movie invoking the feeling of a parallel life between a bypass of insomnia on the one hand, and the everyday life of a spectator on the other.

Do you remember a Bible story of the prodigal son? If you asked high Tibetan spiritual master Yeshi Rinpoche about his journey to becoming a Dzogchen teacher you would find out that for more than twenty years he was moving circles around the point where the beginning and the end of his life coincide. According to Dzogchen teaching, a highest Tibetan Buddhism path to enlightenment, every journey of life is a bypass except the one that leads to enlightenment. A Jennifer Fox’s film My Reincarnation has, in the full sense of the word, “straightened out” Yeshi Rinpoche’s bypass of his journey to himself into a 100-minute-lenght documentary. There are several aspects to mention: the film is a set of two documents of Rinpoche’s life and the distinctive features of Dzogchen; it is a narrative relevant not only for its historical account of Tibetan Buddhism but also from the psychoanalytic standpoint of a father and son relationship. The strength of the film, however, lies elsewhere.

Just imagine one of those niches for various posters of marketing or political campaigns, for instance, an outside gallery of a shopping mall or a wall in a market square. Places like these are indistinguishable from the posters hanging there. The niche of My Reincarnation is a metaphor of life’s journey. If a bypass of a path to spiritual rest is the one that leads to material, sexual satisfaction and popularity then walking this path you will, sooner or later, start noticing posters inviting you to reach spiritual wellness of life. J. Fox documentaries are, indeed, such posters.

By the time when Yeshi Rinpoche’s father Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche left his fatherland due to China’s predatory actions and came to Rome to work as a professor of Oriental studies, the first collections by Yves Saint Laurent were already a talking-point among fashion-lovers in Paris and all over the world. Both the elder Rinpoche and Yves thought that their life goal was to make people happy. In 2002, Y. Saint Laurent said: “Making women more beautiful wasn’t my only aim; I wanted to also calm them down, inspire confidence and encourage them to express themselves.” When Pierre Thoretton was shooting his film Yves Saint Laurent: L’Amour Fou, Yves Saint Laurent had already passed away. The main witness and teller of the artist’s life is his long-term life and business partner Pierre Bergé. When the film hit the screens many critics wrote that although it was mentioned in the film that Yves was sad nearly all the time, the genetics of this mood was left hidden beneath his works and good looks. But this is how it should have been. Judging from his interviews and P. Bergé’s musings, Y. Saint Laurent most probably was an observer of the inner side of life and its gentle and sensual mirror. (Let’s remember that he was the first to invite models from other continents or to introduce male costumes for women.) As all saints are, he was sad and happy, which makes up the essence of any sacred image. The documentary Yves Saint Laurent: L’Amour Fou is by no means interesting in the director’s technical decisions or exploratory depths but nevertheless is appealing for those who want to learn about the life and works of the fashion designer.

Not as transcendental as the artist or Rinpoche but no less important a personality in his country is the president of the Republic of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili. According to a researcher of nationalist movements Benedict Anderson, the presence of the Red Army’s military bases in Eastern Europe after 1945 not only infringed the freedom of states but also “ruled out armed conflict between the region’s Marxist regimes.” In 2008 Russian president and Prime Minister commented on the invasion of Georgia on the same grounds. The only difference is that the concern for Abkhazia and South Ossetia did not have an ideological ground. A 2009 Nino Kirtadzé‘s film Something About Georgia is usually presented as a film about Russia‘s invasion of South Ossetia. But it is no less a curiously pro-Western work done from the side of Mikheil Saakashvili: the life of Georgia may sometimes look as a process of modernization and integration into the field of interest of Western countries, characterised by hurried and striking authoritarian features.

Talking about B. Anderson’s work Imagined Communities, anthropologist Akhil Gupta has once maintained that a historical process stimulates “the birth of mutually competitive nations in a world where newcomers find themselves at the beginning of a journey that had already started.” Georgia is exactly that kind of a traveller. And there are other similar films in the main program of the festival. Different stories of the modernization of a country’s culture are being documented in Leonard Retel Helmrich’s film Position among the Stars (2011) and Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer’s documentary (made together with Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste) Kinshasa Symphony (2010).

In the N. Kirtadzé’s film we see the president of the Republic of Georgia moistening his hand with drizzle through the open window of the car, ruffling up his hair and arranging street lightning in Tbilisi whereas the other two films takes us to the slum worlds of Indonesia and Congo so chaotic and yet full of good mood. In the documentary Position among the Stars grandmother Rumidjah and her family are looking for a place in the sun which is advancing and going up in price with each passing day. If the French ethnographers of the beginning of the 20th century visited Kinshasa they would have been surprised as they were when realised that cubism had first emerged in Africa not in Europe. C. Wischmann and M. Baer’s film tells us about the development and a heyday of a symphonic orchestra and European classical music in the chaotic city of Kinshasa. European classical music has always inspired other fields of creative work (a perfect example of unusual inspiration is John Barton Wolgamot’s piece of poetry In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (1944) and its follow-up by Robert Ashley) only this time the inspiration is not only mutual (music and performers) or intercultural (Africa and Europe) – through the various layers of city life a symphony is being connected to all the elements of everyday chaos.

In the 21st century’s Hollywood cinema, the different levels of social and cultural alienation on the one hand, and extreme metaphysical on the other were equalised more than once (e.g. District 9). From the standpoint of urban aesthetics and to some extent – people’s appearances, most of the scenes of the films Position among the Stars and Kinshasa Symphony could be woven into Helena Třeštíkova‘s documentary Katka (2010). If it did happen, though, we would find ourselves in one of the darkest and coldest bypasses of Prague that any human being had ever stepped into. Prostitution, heroin, homelessness, wandering around abandoned districts, squats and courtyards – all of this deletes from Katka’s face any signs of gender and turns her into a monster of desire waiting for death. The film is, indeed, more about torturing than showing or teaching anything. Fifteen-year-long H. Třeštíkova‘s observations result in a conclusion that on 24 June 2010 Katka did the same she had been doing so far. That day, the world, however, was a stage for various happenings. Cooperating with “Youtube” community and directors Ridley Scott and Tony Scott, the filmmakers Kevin Macdonald and Natalia Andreadis collected a footage of several thousand hours length made on that particular day by 82 thousands “Youtube” members from 182 countries. It became a basis for a documentary film Life in a Day – a plastic, versatile streaming capsule of time suitable to be sent to the cosmos or the zones of Katka-type bypasses as a proof of the existence of human civilisation.