Yesterday GirlWe are all to blame for everything: 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Joshua Bogatin January 2025 Festival Reports Issue 112 “We are all to blame for everything, but if everyone knew it, we’d have paradise on earth.” – Alexander Kluge, Yesterday Girl Flying from my native U.S. to Estonia a week after the most nauseating election of my lifetime and amidst an ongoing escalation of the conflict in Ukraine closer toward nuclear war, I couldn’t help but wonder what use a film festival could provide. I was on my way to attend the 2024 Black Nights Film Festival (or PÖFF, as it is colloquially known), and even if it promised to be one of the cosiest and most convivial festivals around, the existential dread was still piling high and I couldn’t stop thinking of the why of it all. The simple ability to escape from one’s problems, of course, isn’t anything to be trifled with, but as someone who is professionally tasked with diagnosing the state and character of the cinematic art form, its larger ability to affect society is often on my mind. Film festivals as well, by dint of their focus on the new and cutting edge in cinema, are especially conducive to these sorts of questions. What are curatorial decisions if not implicit statements on what is important, on what we should take seriously and examine closely in the landscape of cinema? These can easily take on the air of aesthetic or political positions and the atmosphere of hype and consensus-building, where being quick on judgement and interpretation are assets, predisposes one to view films with an outsize sense of importance, as if each frame hid some grand pronouncement on the world or art form. Watching Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966) in the Estonian city of Tartu, Alexander Kluge’s quote struck me as the perfect mission statement for the 21st century international film festival. On the ground, film festivals can feel like paradise for film lovers: an endless parade of interesting and novel films buoyed by a communal atmosphere full of shared passion. They are one of the few places where I feel any optimism over this art form. Yet, to put a pin on the typical festival film is to find a contradictory vibe: the message movie, a misery-laden view of some of society’s many ills, often looms large. Outrage against war, patriarchy, racism, poverty, and whatever other bad juju is going around dominate the screens, lending an air of self-importance to the movies in a way that feels almost in contradiction to the rosy carnival going on after-hours in the festival around them. While at PÖFF, I couldn’t help but wonder if knowing, or at least acknowledging and taking blame for, our own culpability in the world’s problems is less a precondition for “paradise,” than an excuse for pretending like paradise is attainable at all. At least in Kluge’s time and place, a post-war Germany filled with ex-Nazis, there’s a decent argument for the importance of publicly-stated guilt. In 2024, where it feels like the more we are bombarded with protests against climate change, war, and political malpractice, the harder it becomes to change anything, how can cinema move beyond simply naming wrongs. What genuine provocations can it provide? How can it meet the moment? Thinking about provocation, one of the first films I saw at the festival, Kurdid armastajad (Deaf Lovers), managed to generate a minor controversy. Directed by a Russian dissident director currently living in exile, Boris Guts, the film follows the romance of a deaf Russian man (Daniil Gazizullin) and a deaf Ukrainian woman (Anastasia Shemyakina) in Istanbul where they have both taken refuge from the war. The offending incident was a phone call between the man and his mother where she tells him his brother was castrated by Ukrainian soldiers while in captivity. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign affairs both expressed outrage in a joint statement deriding the film for its “post-truth methods” and calling for it to be pulled from the festival. It didn’t matter that, aside from the brief mention of Ukrainian torture techniques, the film was filled with reports of Russian atrocities (allegedly the Russians were equally dismissive of the film, but that’s not really news), but the festival refused to ban the film, even as it removed it from a festival sidebar labelled “standing with Ukraine.” Deaf Lovers During a post-screening press conference focused on defending the film, Guts’ allegiances took precedence over the film’s artistic merits and the first question posed to him was blunt: “is Russia the aggressor in Ukraine right now?” His affirmation was unsurprising even if he did follow it with a surly, “is there another option?” More insightful were the remarks by Ukrainian documentarian Anton Zharov who had been brought along to add a Ukrainian perspective and endorsement of the film. “War is unfair,” Zharov said, adding later, “We have to get out of propaganda terms. If we’ll not be honest with each other, who will?” To me, this process of avowing or denying depictions of atrocities would seem to be only a losing game where the stakes are low and inconsequential: what’s being debated is not human life, but self-image. For Deaf Lovers, a film co-financed by Israel, catching flack for referencing the wrong kind of atrocity feels like a good example of how hypocritical and low-stakes any festival film is bound to be. Deaf Lovers is not an offensive film. It is, rather, frustratingly inoffensive and content to play it safe even as it seems to aim for a Gaspar Noé-ish sense of transgression. Filled with casually framed handheld cinematography and shots of Istanbul that look culled from a guide book, there’s little poetry or inspiration in the film’s portrayal of star-crossed romance. After the couple’s first night of heavy-drinking and copulating in front of TV war footage, we’ve essentially seen all that the film has to say in its aggressive portrait of nihilistic love and national trauma. This is transgressive cinema for people who’ve already compartmentalised transgression as just another form of allegory, and the film provides far fewer shocks than it appears to be aiming for. With the central romance being emotionally uncompelling, one is left to wonder what this film offers besides a ready-made allegory for a current crisis and what value even that provides. Are we supposed to learn something, change our minds about something, feel something? Or is it just tawdry entertainment gussied up in self-importance so we can enjoy our base pleasures under the guise of high art and political righteousness? Luckily, another movie I saw that day, Seitsemän laulua tundralta (Seven Songs From the Tundra, Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio, 2000), reminded me of what can be compelling about politically engaged cinema. The first narrative film in the Nenets language, Seven Songs portrays various hardships of the indigenous Nenet peoples of Northern Siberia under Soviet rule. Told in vignettes, the film traces historical patterns of violence, first through animal sacrifices and inter-tribal conflicts, and later through violent Soviet repression and Russification. Each vignette is defined by a song that simultaneously speaks on the loss and loneliness we witness as well as giving us a vivid view of a rarely seen people. Seven Songs from the Tundra One of the film’s many remarkable features is the way it manages to merge Robert Flaherty-like ethnography with historical fiction and a sharp sense of dramatic tragedy that evoked the communal myths of John Ford. In one of the film’s most moving episodes, a young girl, Syako, struggles to resist the state’s mandate that she attend Russian boarding school. Between scenes of Syako arguing with her parents and hiding from the school teachers, the film also affords us long glimpses of Nenet children playing western games and views of Nenet domestic rituals. In one lengthy scene, a Russian inspector comes for Syako, only to get outraged that Syako’s father has his portraits of Lenin and Stalin locked in a trunk. Lapsui and Lehmuskallio weave the personal into the historical, creating something that is as casually informative as it is deeply felt. Complementing all of this is the wonderful cinematography by Johannes Lehmuskallio (the son of the two directors) whose wintry vistas of blinding, all-consuming snow strike a beautiful balance between natural and man-made environments, underscoring the ways landscapes, individuals, and social history all define one another. Seven Songs foregrounds poetry and the aesthetic experience in ways that only strengthen its political force. Another movie that mined the ravages of history and progress was Maciej J. Drygas’ Trains which played in the Doc@PÖFF program. Consisting solely of archival footage and ambient music, the film is a long black and white reverie exploring the interrelationships between trains, cinema, war, and industrial progress. Opening in a factory where we begin by watching oblong pieces of steel thrust into industrial fires and slotted together to create the hulking, terrifying mass of a train car, the film works to create a sense of scale that feels like it’s swallowing the whole 20th century in its grasp. Trains As the movie leaves the factory and journeys through rail yards, platforms, and mountain passes, we’re given brief, uncontextualised images of various markers of history: bombs and soldiers being transported for world war 1; both Chaplin and Hitler posing with fans; masses of migrants moving after the second world war. At one point, the camera enters a train car converted into a cinema and, onscreen, a train barrels down a mountainside. The camera approaches the projected image until our whole field of vision is swallowed up by it, merging the live moment and the recorded moment into a mise-en-abyme where the constant rush of technological progress and our ability to freeze it into understanding are forever grappling with one another. Trains is a film that feels defined by phantoms of history, technology, and modernity, filled with images at once immediately recognisable and completely opaque that ask us to question how all of these 20th century spectres inform one another. The film opens with an epigraph by Kafka, “There is an infinite amount of hope. Just not for us.” If the film has a thesis, it might be stated as a question: why do these tools of infinite progress result in little more than barbarity? This, however, is far from posed directly; largely, the film is reminiscent of the work of Bill Morrison, where long montages of archival materials and ambient music give way to vibe-heavy abstraction. It seems to welcome zoning out in a trance-like state almost to a fault: it’s pleasant and fascinating, but plays best when you turn your brain off. It’s easy to argue for the film as an implicit critique of modernity, but harder to grasp a larger point to the exercise beyond the simple sense of curiosity it evinces toward a handful of capital-i Ideas. Intercepted Two other documentaries I saw also used formal and aesthetic experimentation as a means of addressing political problems. Both Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted and Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion sought to craft contemporary portraits of the war in Ukraine through ambient cinema aesthetics meant to openly invoke contemplation. In Intercepted, the less successful of the two, Karpovych pairs intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers and their family members back home with drawn-out views of the destruction in Ukraine. Asking us to listen to Russian soldiers denigrate Ukrainian soldiers as Nazis, complain about eating dogs, and get off on torture stories, Karpovych leaves little room for any emotions besides abject horror and disgust. This overwhelming audio evidence is complemented however by a somewhat washed-out approach to the film’s images. Consisting primarily of static wide-shots of bombed-out ruins and lengthy tracking shots surveying vast stretches of destroyed houses, the visual texture of the film is quiet and subdued, lending the stories of depravity an ambient listlessness. A generous reading might call these audio-visual tensions dialectical, generating a sense of dissonance that underscores the violence which permeates both audio and visuals, without ever being directly represented. Unfortunately, however, the visuals are too monotonous to generate much curiosity or emotion of their own. If anything, the film reminded me of what I often don’t like about many pieces of video art where aesthetics and emotional engagement are often treated as afterthoughts. This leads to spotty, disengaged viewing that makes it easy to know or understand the purpose of the piece without ever internalising its emotions. One can glance at Intercepted, watch it for five minutes, and largely get the same political, intellectual, and emotional takeaways you’d receive if you watched the whole thing. While it is interesting to get some semblance of the Russian experience of the war, the film never suggests anything that would be provocative to a non-Russian audience. Its ending dedication to “ordinary Ukrainians who fearlessly resist the Russian imperial war machine,” make its propaganda goals explicit, but as propaganda it’s ineffective unless you already agree with it, which leaves the whole exercise feeling largely self-serving. The Invasion Sergei Loznitsa’s The Invasion, on the other hand, is much more coy about any propagandistic aims it may have. While there is an emphasis on Ukrainian solidarity and the need for resistance, the film’s approach to its content is generous and non-didactic. The film focuses on contemporary life during wartime in Ukraine, bouncing between schools, churches, Christmas fairs, bomb sites, maternity wards, and more to create a panoramic view of a precarious society. Loznitsa favours durational, long tableaus of social scenes that are adept at capturing masses in motion. Fond of well framed medium-wide shots, Loznitsa keeps the environment in equal balance with individuals while often letting a shot run just long enough for us to get lost in it. Opening with a military funeral, the film captures the rhythms of the mourning crowds and their hypnotic, quasi-mechanized motions in one overwhelming sweep, yet as each one pauses momentarily to pay their respects by the casket, we are granted a brief moment to take in the unique flush of character and emotion on their faces before they once again recede into the crowd. Balancing the universal and the specific, Loznitsa creates something that is at once ambient and hyper-focused, ethnographic and humanistic, conceptually ambiguous and politically-pointed. Scenes of crowds shouting jingoistic slogans like “glory to the heroes” resonate emotionally as personal and political rallying cries, even as they leave room for doubt and criticism. In one of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes, Loznitsa traces the journey of a stack of Russian-language literature from the basement of a bookstore into the paper grinder. There is something inherently upsetting about watching thousands of books being destroyed en masse and the taciturnity with which Loznitsa approaches the subject allowed me to generate my own line of moral questioning around art, war, nationalism, and the appropriate response to savagery. These questions stuck with me longer than any moral and out of all of the politically oriented films I saw at the festival, The Invasion challenged me the most. Engagement, provocation, and curiosity are some of the best metrics by which to judge a film festival and it’s no small testament to the curatorial talents of the Black Nights’ team that I was able to walk away from my week in Estonia filled with questions. With a reputation as one of the smallest of the A-list film festivals there’s also something about the atmosphere of the festival – its intimacy, lack of blockbuster premieres, and penchant for picking works that fall off the beaten path – which make it an especially conducive place for critical insight and reflection. Tomorrow might not be better than today, understanding may lead only to more misery, and paradise could be less likely than apocalypse, but Black Nights, ironically, offered a light in the darkness. Here’s to hoping the world will still be around next year for another one! Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 8 – 24 November 2024 https://poff.ee/en/
