How to capture death on film | Little White Lies

Locarno Film Festival

How to cap­ture death on film

17 Aug 2017

Words by Ross McDonnell

Close-up of a human face lying on a surface, with eyes closed and mouth slightly open.
Close-up of a human face lying on a surface, with eyes closed and mouth slightly open.
Two prizewin­ning films at the 2017 Locarno Film Fes­ti­val – Mrs Fang and 34 – attempt to do just that.

Switzerland’s Locarno Fes­ti­val is an unpar­al­leled plat­form for ambi­tious, exper­i­men­tal and cut­ting-edge cin­e­ma. Two films rose to the fore of the 2017 edi­tion: one doc­u­men­tary, Wang Bing’s Mrs Fang, and one dra­ma, Ilian Metev’s 34. Both are straight­for­ward and acces­si­ble works that run at just under 90 min­utes. And in each, there is more than ini­tial­ly meets the eye. In fact, both are more pow­er­ful for what they don’t show: the meta­phys­i­cal ideas they ren­der, and the way in which they visu­al­ly rep­re­sent the invis­i­ble and the abstract. They share a mutu­al fas­ci­na­tion in the ulti­mate unknown – death.

Wang Bing is the Chi­nese doc­u­men­tar­i­an best known for his slow, con­tem­pla­tive cin­e­ma which focus­es on the lives and cul­ture of mod­est cit­i­zens of his coun­try. Mrs Fang (August 5 1948 to July 6 2016) is an Alzheimer’s patient Wang briefly meets in 2015. Ini­tial­ly upright, active and able-bod­ied, she becomes the sub­ject of his film, which then doc­u­ments the last 10 days of her life. Her con­di­tion quick­ly dete­ri­o­rat­ing, we wit­ness Mrs Fang as she becomes immo­bile, con­fined to her deathbed. Not lucid, not able to recog­nise the loved ones who sur­round her, Mrs. Fang can­not com­mu­ni­cate or express to us any­thing about her life.

Nonethe­less, we remain in an excru­ci­at­ing prox­im­i­ty to the sub­ject — the film’s clin­i­cal close-ups and stiff rigour-mor­tis shoot­ing style catch­es Mrs Fang’s gaze, but leaves us wait­ing, and wait­ing, to watch the light leave her eyes. The sit­u­a­tion — her con­stant phys­i­cal pres­ence, but simul­ta­ne­ous sta­sis — is so bleak that the film’s reduced run­ning time seems like some act of clemen­cy. The cumu­la­tive effect of the film’s long takes sug­gest to us the banal­i­ty of death, a process and pas­sage more exhaust­ing than it is emo­tion­al. With no grand exe­unt, no moment of deliv­er­ance, what remains is a film­mak­er inca­pable of inter­ven­tion, footage of an inevitable event his film can approach but not reach.

It was an intense endurance test for Locarno’s uncom­fort­able, impa­tient, 3000-strong audi­ence, as Mrs Fang’s only moral is a mor­bid one: that death is not some­thing to be con­tin­u­al­ly con­front­ed but rather some­thing that must be even­tu­al­ly accept­ed. The bur­den of death, and the idea of grief being trans­ferred from old to young, is implic­it­ly dealt with in Ilian Metev’s 34. This is not an avant-garde film on the after­life, but a melan­choly dra­ma, one that nev­er makes clear why the mem­bers of a dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly sud­den­ly can­not seem to adjust to one another. 

Daugh­ter Mila strug­gles in a piano les­son. While her music is imper­fect, we are made to intu­it as to why this young woman has lost momen­tum, lost her con­fi­dence. What off-screen inter­rup­tion or ellip­sis has caused this anx­i­ety? The film fol­lows Mila (Mila Mikho­va), her hyper­ac­tive younger broth­er Niki (Niki Mashalov) and sto­ic father Todor (Todor Velchev) in their last sum­mer togeth­er before Mila moves from their home in Bul­gar­ia to a Ger­man uni­ver­si­ty. It also fol­lows a metic­u­lous nar­ra­tive schema — a care­ful struc­ture that organ­is­es its a com­plete­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic style around entire­ly impro­vised film. 

We join each of our three char­ac­ters in indi­vid­ual scenes (Niki with friends, Mila with her tutor, Todor with his stu­dents) before we sub­se­quent­ly see them all togeth­er. Through­out, and from repeat­ed angles, there is always emp­ty space in the film’s mise en scène, one quar­ter of this fam­i­ly is absent – felt but nev­er seen. With a void in the left and right of the frame, the fam­i­ly din­ner table only appears to seat three. 

34 is an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film for direc­tor Metev, direc­tor of the acclaimed doc­u­men­tary, Sofia’s Last Ambu­lance (a non­fic­tion coun­ter­part to Cristi Puiu’s 2005 dra­ma, The Death of Mr Lazares­cu). With this ten­der study of a frag­ment­ed fam­i­ly, he impres­sive­ly demon­strates an aware­ness of the mechan­ics of fic­tion: a small clutch of char­ac­ters in all poten­tial com­bi­na­tions and the con­se­quen­tial ironies these pair­ings brings up. 

It’s dif­fi­cult to make a film look this easy. Some­thing in this fam­i­ly has bro­ken, but 34 favours impec­ca­ble per­for­mances (from non-pro­fes­sion­al actors) and note-per­fect dia­logue in lieu of any expo­si­tion or drama­ti­sa­tion. Tak­en togeth­er, each on either edge of the great divide, 34 and Mrs. Fang are inscrutable por­traits of how death exists among the living.

Wang Bing’s Bit­ter Mon­ey (2016) screens at Open City Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val on 9 September.Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambu­lance is avail­able through Sec­ond Run DVD.

You might like