International filmmakers converge in Ghent.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous “Eros is sick” speech at Cannes in 1960 haunted this year’s Film Fest Ghent in Belgium, where filmmakers and composers were commissioned to collaborate on short projects: “25 composers inspired 25 directors to create new short films.” This was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Film Fest Ghent’s placing emphasis on music and cinema, distinguishing it from other international film festivals.
But even the best of these short projects — such as Terence Davies’s Passing Time — display an unease shared by the worst shorts. Film Fest Ghent is practically an exhibition of the post-Covid globalist disorder we have in common. And the prevailing style of all these partnerships among 50 artists uncannily recalls the breakthrough in visual style portraying human alienation in Antonioni’s spiritual, erotic mystery L’Avventura, which shocked the world in 1960.
Antonioni addressed the puzzlement caused by his very great film with trenchant remarks:
Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, in our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic world would not become so obsessive if Eros were healthy. But the Eros is sick, man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.
To judge by the Film Fest Ghent shorts I’ve seen, all pay tribute to Antonioni, validating his thesis, yet the collective work remains less than L’Avventura, suggesting that Morality Is Sick, though few filmmakers can say why. Think of Tucker Carlson’s recent summary of our political landscape’s “weak men and unhappy women.”
The 1814 Treaty of Ghent brought an end to the War of 1812 between America and Britain, but political unease has infected the imaginations of men and women artists from different countries around the world. The shorts at Film Fest Ghent challenge the malady of current film production — the Netflix custom of overlong, interminable content. These shorts force directors and composers to be concise and expressive. Cross-cultural pairings (Tunisian musician Amine Bouhafa composes for Japanese director Naomi Kawase in Echo, for instance, and Lebanon’s Gabriel Yared writes for Portugal’s João Pedro Rodrigues in Tempo) surpass those in the 1982 doc Room 666. In that venture, Wim Wenders rounded up filmmakers from Spielberg to Godard, Fassbinder to Susan Seidelman, and asked about the future of cinema (already doomed by Wenders’s apocalyptic snark).
Something close to social apocalypse is apparent in so many shorts that reflect today’s shallow social-justice preoccupations, especially through eros-is-sick conceptual confusion and banality.
In Gustavo Santaolalla and Jacqueline Lentzou’s Argentine/Greek film Pleiades (or Going Home), a group of girls gather beneath a planetarium, looking up through its open ceiling at constellations. It’s mundane before it starts — like a Bjork music-video version of Rebel without a Cause, which Morrissey already paid homage to in “Stretch Out and Wait.” Doesn’t Lentzou know? The gathering of helpless, hopeless women speaks for the sorry state of feminism. Santaolalla, two-in-a-row Oscar winner for music in Brokeback Mountain and Babel, doesn’t help much.
In the American/Hungarian My Fear in My Arms, Colin Stetson and Ildikó Enyedi use Fincherian mystification and dusky atmosphere to depict support-animal insecurity. There’s a rushed, nervous score for a fragile, earringed, baseball-cap-wearing hipster clone.
In the Hungarian/Georgian caprice The More I Zoom In on the Image of These Dogs, the Clearer It Becomes That They Are Related to the Stars, Mihály Vig and Alexandre Koberidze focus on a steadily disintegrating photo of two dogs on a balcony. But the single piano notes, plus viola, don’t match Vig’s unforgettable music for Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. Inspiration doesn’t strike, or did Koberidze never see Antonioni’s Blow-Up?
Patrick Doyle and Juanita Onzaga team up for the Scottish/Colombian film Sanctuary, which reminisces about a woman’s mother whose outdoor wanderings reintroduce opera into the filmmaker’s life: “Listening to it to listen to oneself. The aria arrived as a sanctuary in the middle of the jungle.” But Wong Kar-wai did this citizen-of-the-world pre-globalism thing better in Happy Together.
The U.K.’s Anne Dudley and Belgium’s Stijn Coninx offer I Love You (titled in sign language), then predictably present a sexually nondescript woman making costume changes and running lost through a forest. She changes clothes like social identity — six times — then unfurls a multicolored flag for May 17, “International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia.” Obvious redundancy in less than two minutes. This embarrasses the possibilities of the entire Film Fest Ghent program, which gave filmmakers the opportunity to rival the hallowed, perfect three-minute pop-song concept.
There are two shorts that made the grade: Tsar B and Jessica Woodworth (both from Belgium) collaborated for Fly, where teens with irregular features (not a Benetton diversity showcase) put on helmets and practice the extreme sport of grass skiing. The novelty — verdant and aspirational — speaks for optimism, effort, and promise. And Terence Davies’s Passing Time (music by Uruguay’s Florencia Di Concilio) is masterly, as expected. A single shot holds on a John Constable landscape filmed near Davies’s home in Essex. It’s a visual that portrays Davies’s own verse, in which he intones “a ‘Bali Hai’ for you and me,” mixing natural and pop-culture worlds with a serene, personally felt universal lament.
Antonioni lesson learned, Davies transcends the shoe-gazing self-pity shown by so many of the world’s woke filmmakers who suffer sick Eros and sick Morality.
