Exploring film heritage and imagined territories… | Little White Lies

Festivals

Explor­ing film her­itage and imag­ined ter­ri­to­ries at DocLis­boa 2018

05 Nov 2018

Words by Matt Turner

Silhouetted figures of two people wading in the waves, with a distant rocky island visible in the background.
Silhouetted figures of two people wading in the waves, with a distant rocky island visible in the background.
This year’s fes­ti­val includ­ed a focus on films that chal­lenge our per­cep­tion of place and belonging.

Art has tak­en a dis­tinct car­to­graph­ic turn’ in the last cen­tu­ry,” writes Cather­ine D’Ignazio in her essay Art and Car­tog­ra­phy’. Artists have made maps, sub­vert­ed maps, per­formed itin­er­aries, imag­ined ter­ri­to­ries, con­test­ed bor­ders, chart­ed the invis­i­ble, and hacked phys­i­cal, vir­tu­al and hybrid spaces.” This tra­di­tion of artis­tic appro­pri­a­tion of car­to­graph­ic strate­gies” may have informed the think­ing behind the Trans­mis­sion, Imag­ined Ter­ri­to­ries’ focus at Lisbon’s DocLis­boa, an intrigu­ing­ly wide-reach­ing curat­ed pro­gramme includ­ed in the festival’s most exper­i­men­tal sec­tion New Visions’, com­pris­ing films with artis­tic map-mak­ing at their centre.

In two Tai­wanese titles, var­i­ous char­ac­ters are seen set­ting off with­out a clear map. In Yao-Chi Chen’s The Moun­tain, three art stu­dents ven­ture into the moun­tains of Hsinchu, Tai­wan, talk­ing deject­ed­ly about the state of the nation they find them­selves in, their lack of free­dom and what nature offers them in its place. Chen’s Through the Years sees a jour­ney of a dif­fer­ent order, com­bin­ing footage from Hol­ly­wood fic­tion films with doc­u­men­tary land­scape mate­r­i­al and mis­matched audio to speak about America’s west­ward ter­ri­to­r­i­al expan­sion and its human cost on Chi­nese labourers.

Like­wise, in Philip Hoffman’s great The Road End­ed at the Beach, a group of men head west, not know­ing where they might be going or what they want to achieve. Track­ing three trips the film­mak­er took with friends across Cana­da over a num­ber of years, this delight­ful­ly deft, diaris­tic exer­cise explores the dis­tance between expec­ta­tion and real­i­ty, and between nat­ur­al occur­rence and man­u­fac­tured mem­o­ry. Beau­ti­ful­ly pho­tographed moments, cap­tured in the instant of their enjoy­ment, are con­trast­ed with ret­ro­spec­tive record­ed obser­va­tions of rel­a­tive dis­ap­point­ment, over­lain as sound­track. If any­thing, the cam­era got in the way,” Hoff­man ulti­mate­ly concludes.

Anoth­er jour­ney film, Dominic Gagnon’s Going South – the sec­ond in a planned tetral­o­gy of cam­era­less films’ plot­ting imag­ined geo­gra­phies for each of the four car­di­nal direc­tions – charts the hacked phys­i­cal, vir­tu­al and hybrid spaces” D’Ignazio men­tions, map­ping the post-inter­net age entire­ly from found sources. Com­piled from a vari­ety of vlogs, video odd­i­ties, com­put­er gen­er­at­ed images and video games, Gagnon’s world – packed with storm-chasers, gun-lob­by­ists, hyp­no­tists, flat-earth­ers, para­noiacs and con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ists – is a weird one, as strange­ly com­pelling a reflec­tion of our vir­tu­al and actu­al worlds as any that could be imagined.

Equal­ly odd is Rocío Barbenza’s Yasiree Trance, a bor­der-break­ing film that bridges var­i­ous divides. For the first half, it’s a queer sci-fi odyssey, ener­get­i­cal­ly and inven­tive­ly chart­ing a trans woman’s imag­ined jour­ney towards a new life, arriv­ing at an idyl­lic island with its own rules and rulers. Mid­way through it switch­es to a clas­sic doc­u­men­tary mode, with droll nar­ra­tion detail­ing the real world real­i­ty behind the fan­ta­sy. The island is Apipé, a small ter­ri­to­ry split between Paraguay and Argenti­na that is dom­i­nat­ed by a hydro­elec­tric plant that pro­vides pow­er to both; and the woman is Male­na, who lives an ordi­nary life there while dream­ing of more. How­ev­er wild the ini­tial fic­ti­tious sce­nar­ios might have first seemed, by the end it is the real world vari­ant that seems the most off. Bar­ben­za imag­ines a utopia before col­laps­ing it into reality.

Stranger still is the car­to­graph­ic turn’ seen in Antoni Collot’s Paul is Dead, a film that also visu­alis­es the imag­i­nary in pecu­liar ways. The film’s title is also its first line, announced flat­ly by Brune, the wife of the recent­ly deceased over the phone to an unseen inter­locu­tor. This announce­ment ini­ti­ates a series of events – imag­ined and actu­al, with no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between the two – that depict her new life, post-Paul. Informed by a philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ry which fea­tures (“modal real­ism”, in which any pos­si­ble world is deemed as real as this one) in the film, Paul is Dead takes slip­pery, sur­re­al, and per­sis­tent­ly som­bre turns at will, map­ping the imag­ined ter­ri­to­ries” that a new­ly griev­ing mind can take.

In Pang-Chuan Huang’s slick short Return, the film­mak­er makes a map through his­to­ry, trav­el­ling on a train, cross-coun­try and through-time, start­ing in his home in France before even­tu­al­ly arriv­ing to his grandfather’s birth­place in Tai­wan. Two con­trast­ing image sets – one show­ing the black-and-white win­dow views of his jour­ney, the oth­er slow­ly reveal­ing the con­tours of a sepia-toned pho­to­graph – share cryp­tic nar­ra­tion that reveals the dis­guised premise of the film, the line that is being drawn between the two men and their shared past. Behind this innocu­ous pho­to is a squalid sto­ry, its pow­er ampli­fied by the trail traced to get to the truth of it.

Offer­ing a dif­fer­ent sort of his­tor­i­cal trace, the ter­ri­to­ry cov­ered by Kid­lat Tahimik’s absur­dist adven­ture Who Invent­ed the Yoyo? Who Invent­ed the Moon Bug­gy? is the most wide-reach­ing, see­ing the film­mak­er trav­el from the Philip­pines to Upper Bavaria, before set­ting out for space. In this inven­tive, unpre­dictable and con­tin­u­ous­ly enter­tain­ing essay film, Tahimik plots paths that link the USA’s inter­galac­tic exploits back to its earth­ly ori­gins. America’s space race suc­cess is indebt­ed to Fil­ipino inge­nu­ity, argues Tahimik, and the yo-yo, invent­ed in the Philip­pines, lies behind it all. Look­ing to cor­rect the record, he scram­bles to become the first man to play the yo-yo on the moon”, and claim for the Philip­pines its place in space spec­ta­cle history.

Abder­rah­mane Sissako’s sub­lime Life on Earth is a film that man­ages to cross con­ti­nents with­in a straight­for­ward sce­nario, a por­trait of Mali at the turn­ing point of the mil­len­ni­um. While on the radio the rest of the world enters a fren­zy over the turn of this new era, in the small town of Soko­lo, life car­ries on. Observ­ing the ordi­nary with focus and finesse, Sis­sako depicts the town’s unhur­ried, rhyth­mic activ­i­ty through crisp, eco­nom­i­cal imagery – each shot com­posed with clear con­sid­er­a­tion, with sequences cre­at­ing con­trasts – while inter­ject­ing mut­ed reflec­tions on the evolv­ing rela­tions between Europe and Africa, along­side point­ed quo­ta­tions from Aimé Césaire’s Dis­course on Colo­nial­ism’. A pre­cise, poignant pic­ture of post-colo­nial Africa is drawn. Com­plex car­togra­phies can be plot­ted through the sim­plest setup.

For more on this year’s fes­ti­val vis­it doclis​boa​.org

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