My second day in Locarno I've shamefacedly dedicated to what some of the critics here call "the old movies. The 35mm films in Locarno are obviously therefore a much more rarified commodity and experience, something David Bordwell testified to in his report from the nearly all film and certainly all "old movies" festival in Bologna in June: namely, the increasing popularity of festivals which cater to these now-unique celluloid experiences, rather than festivals who solely focus on premiering films in theatrical experiences that mimic digital viewing one can adequately replicate at home, on an airplane, on your computer, and so on.
This doesn't just include revisiting familiar faces and films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers ; one always hopes that of film history's million and one films you haven't seen, there are still countless special artists and movies that the right circumstances available materials, subtitles in your language, smart curators, adventurous venues will arrange themselves so that you may discover.
Peckinpah, okay sure, I know him well albeit from my teenage years , have seen many, and essentially look forward to seeing a bunch in a row to form a better understanding of the director's art as well as see movies on film I grew up watching cropped on warbly VHS. But Georgian director Marlen Khutsiev is another story. I had never heard of him 12 hours ago. And I did so; and I admit it: Boris is right, damned be my ignoranceβKhutsiev is essential.
The six film retrospective here began with his last completed work, 's Inifinitas , a bizarre choice considering the film's minute wanderings of a middle-aged man through his life and memories is even to this uninformed viewer clearly autobiographical, and, after next viewing Khutsiev's masterpiece variably known as Fortress II'ich and I Am Twenty , it is clear that Infinitas is also a continuation or sequel to that semi-autobiographical film, picking up his year old self and throwing it into the passive body of a bearish, middle-aged schlump.
So why show it first? Perhaps it was a Proustian gesture. Loose or handheld camerawork evoke not naturalism but the fluidity of time folding and merging and morphing. In a characteristic scene of our dignified but nearly somnolent male protagonist's passivity before this unfurling, in the film's brilliant opening scenes he takes endless phone call after phone call as in some kind of domestic nightmare comedy, and inadvertently agrees to sell all his flat's possessions, stripping him of his home and leading him free-wandering across landscapes and towns meeting what seem to be a mixture of people from his past including, I think, a version of himself and, simply, people It's a languid reverie, often dappled with extraordinary lighting, particularly of Russian streets, and while for me too many of this wanderer's meetings were vagueβwho is this person and why is he or she important to him or to us?
