Creative churning inside dark halls

It is only an abstract sense of aesthetic enlightenment that I feel at this moment, in the midst of being constantly bombarded with revelatory images from across the world. It will take some time for my subconscious to process all this. Yet, there are certain moments that have done the equivalent of holding me by the scruff and pulling me closer to some higher truth.

There is one in the Iranian film ‘Immortal’ (competition film) where a boy carrying a pillow drags his paralysed grandfather down a barren rocky landscape, sits him upright and ties him to a rock. From there the old man, a stick-thin man who is barely alive, can see a truck that had fallen deep into the ravine. The boy walks down to the fallen truck, dumps the pillow his grandfather had obsessively preserved over the years on top of the destroyed vehicle, and sets them to fire. As the fire rages, this ghost of a man held erect by a piece of rope lets out a beastly scream.

The old man had hoarded the pillow like a secret treasure. Occasionally he is seen taking it out of a rusted chest, holding it close and smelling it. It was the one on which his dead wife had slept. There is something less visible, that he caresses; few strands of hair, his wife’s. Both of these, his most beloved possessions, are now being devoured by the flames.

If Immortal drained me emotionally, two other films – Victoria and Shadow of the Moon (competition film) – stunned me by their technical virtuosity. Both are taken in a single unbroken shot. While Shadow deftly explores a complex three-way relationship that keeps changing its shape in the most bizarre manner like a mimic octopus, Victoria has the flamboyance of a thriller.

While the events in Shadow takes place in and around a shack inside a forest, Victoria seems to spill out everywhere. I was particularly impressed by the way Victoria was lit up.

It begins at the break of dawn, and the director and cinematographer channels the gradually rising sun into the frames. The last moments, when a man bleeds to death inside a hotel room with his lover at his side, the room is slowly filled with the soft expanding yellow of the rising sun.

There was also a sequence in the Turkish film Entanglement, a triangle love story of two brothers and a woman, which made me want to stand up and applaud. It is night, the camera is right outside a room, and we see a man, the younger brother, lying on his side, his back to the camera. Suddenly we hear a knock on the door. When the man rises, we see his elder brother’s lover sleeping beside him.

Tension builds up, the elder brother might have returned. The knocks grow incessant. The camera pulls back as the younger brother shuffles out of the room and into the corridor that leads to the front door.

As the camera pulls further back to reveal the dining room on the other side of the corridor, we find the elder brother sitting on a chair. He was there all along. It was someone else knocking at the door. This is what I would call a directorial flourish.