When we suspend the urge to understand, in what other ways might our bodies and minds perceive the world around us? As the clock ticked on, and we battled exhaustion and tedium, it wasn’t that our attention waned it shape-shifted, from an active to a more passive form of awareness. If this setup sounds sacrilegious for a film festival-a concession, perhaps, to the kind of distracted viewing popularized by Netflix-it in fact yielded radical insights for film spectatorship. Attendees were invited to sit, lounge, and even sleep in the audience as and when they pleased others tuned in and out via Twitch from all over the world. Titled “The Future of Attention,” the event assembled three moderators-including yours truly-and a rotating cast of more than two dozen guests to hold court for 24 unbroken hours. My conversation with Wittmann took place as part of an experimental event, co-organized by the Università della Svizzera italiana and the festival, that devoted itself precisely to this exercise. “Where’s the blue?” might have been the rallying cry of this year’s Locarno, where the best films were those that-like Human Flowers-invited contemplation rather than mere comprehension. “But where’s the message?” Later, one of Wittmann’s actors told her that his response to most movies is the other way around: “I get the message, I get the story. “There’s all this blue, she swims, that’s all very nice,” the woman had said. Wittmann told me that one opening-night attendee was puzzled by the film’s indulgence in elemental surfaces at the expense of meaning.
Narrative dissolves into the rhythm of the ocean and the pull of a longing gaze, which guide the characters from Marseille to Corsica to Algeria, accumulating myths, histories, and 16mm images of aqueous sensuality. The film returns to the sea-setting of Wittmann’s debut feature, Drift (2017), with the tale of a ship’s captain, Ida (Angeliki Papoulia), and her crew of five men as they sail across the Mediterranean Sea, loosely tracing the path of the French Foreign Legion. In a conversation at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the filmmaker Helena Wittmann told me about a fascinating exchange she’d had with a frustrated audience member at the premiere of her new feature, Human Flowers of Flesh.
FREE PEOPLE AROUND THE CLOCK FREE
Venkatesan and his six-member team form the core of Postcardsville, that the former started in 2020.This article appeared in the Augedition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. “We picked places that had reliable old photos for reference,” says Venkatesan, who is currently based in Kanchipuram. Other buildings featured include Egmore and Central Railway Stations, Chepauk Palace, Egmore Museum, Anna University, and Spencer Plaza. Others feature the towers of Madras High Court towers rising from thick tree cover the Ice House standing on a near-empty road in which a horse-drawn cart trundles by…city artist Meganath Venkatesan has sketched a city of quiet roads as well as one that has been quick to adapt.
FREE PEOPLE AROUND THE CLOCK SERIES
One of the postcards in the series depicts a bullock cart rolling by the clocktower at Mint Street. “He did so despite his age he was over 80 years old then.“ “Last year on Madras Day, he visited four post offices in the city to create cancellation covers bearing the stamp with the date,” he remembers. “He was a good friend and an inspiration and I hoped to get him to launch these postcards,“ says Venkatesh. Hemachandra, also a philatelist, had turned his house into the Maritime Heritage Museum. They are Venkatesan’s tribute to ‘Lighthouse man’ D Hemachandra Rao, who passed away recently. The postcards will be on display alongside an exhibition of vintage images and postcards titled Serving the Raj - Hired Help in Colonial Madras, curated by Venkatesh Ramakrishnan of Madras Local History Group. Photographer and creative entrepreneur P Venkatesan, who has printed them through his venture, calls the collection Reflections: Madras/Chennai, and plans to release it on Madras Day. There are 15 of them, done mostly in black and white, bearing sketches of iconic buildings from the city with then-and-now renditions. Something old, something new, and a whole lot of love for the city of Madras: this is what these postcards are made of.