The pun in the name of Nyon, Switzerland’s documentary-heavy festival Visions du Réel contains a few ironies, not least of which is that the movies shown there are generally neither shot nor projected on film. Another irony may be that, at least to a visitor, the festival setting feels rather removed from reality, with its picturesque view of the French Alps across Lac Léman, overlooked by the modest but romantic Château de Nyon.
The slight aura of the fantastic that greets those who are unfamiliar with this area might make Nyon the perfect home for a festival focused on contemporary documentaries. The movies featured at this year’s Visions du Réel exhibit contemporary documentary’s increasing willingness to play with, trouble, complicate, and otherwise violate the boundary between the presumed unreality of the fiction film and the presumed veracity of documentary.
The slipperiness of the term “reel” thus points to cinema’s complicated relationship to the reality of what it shows the audience. The camera is a machine for making things visible, but cinema also depends on and revolves around absence. This is true on the level of an individual image, which derives much of its power from the fact that what it reveals to us isn’t actually there. But it’s also true for the story worlds of both fiction and documentary. A movie’s story isn’t “in” any of its images, but in between them, absent from view.
It may not be incidental, then, that so many films from Vision du Réel’s 2022 slate, whether fiction, documentary, or somewhere in the middles, center around absent objects or people. In See You Friday, Robinson, for one, director Mitra Farahani documents the leadup to a meeting between Iranian writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan and the legendary Jean-Luc Godard that never comes to pass (shades of Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces/Places).
Shot largely in Golestan’s estate during the last years of his life, Farahani’s film playfully appropriates Godardian aesthetics—intrusive title screens, erratic music cues, citations of other films—to capture a string of communications whose substance is as elusive as one of the French New Wave maverick’s films. After a kind of “missed connection” message from Golestan (the two were supposed to meet up at a film festival in the 1960s but never did), the men strike up a correspondence that largely consists of exchanging quotations.
See You Friday, Robinson unabashedly romanticizes both Golestan and Godard, perhaps attempting to establish the recently deceased former as a peer of the New Wave, and as such worthy of more recognition in the West. Farahani finds some interesting visual means of emphasizing the two men’s simultaneous closeness and distance, such as having Golestan stand in front of a large screen and speak to footage of Godard in his home in Rolle.
However, the film’s uncritical reverence toward both men can also feel outmoded, made to appeal to the most traditionalist cinephiles. We also spend some time with Godard in his comparatively modest home, and such moments as him watching Johnny Guitar, sipping a wine spritzer, and slowly ascending stairs often come off as fannish gawking, as if impressed merely by the fact that Godard wears slippers. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t several moments of refreshing honesty in See You Friday, Robinson. To wit: “He’s so pretentious,” Golestan complains at one point of Godard’s obscure, fragmentary emails (and films).
Elsewhere, the International Feature Film Competition slate offers a global body of new work that runs the gamut from the personal to the political, often within the same film. Gregoris Rentis’s Dogwatch takes a subtly sardonic look at the practice of hiring mercenaries for international maritime shipping. The threat of piracy having receded after its height a decade ago, three such individuals are on a ship off the coast of Somalia in the Beckett-esque situation of awaiting pirates who will never come. These private soldiers spend the empty time on board texting with their girlfriends, giving needless pep talks to the crew, and running dress rehearsals for boarding scenarios in which they fire live rifles at an absent seaborne enemy.
Steel Life, by Manuel Bauer, offers perhaps the most memorable image of the festival, a shocking jump cut to a drone shot over the city of Cerro de Pasco, Peru, which reveals the yawning abyss at the very center of the city. Buildings and streets are built just along the edge of this man-made hole in the earth, a lead mine that dominates the lives of Pasco’s residents—as well as the numerous other Peruvian workers that we encounter as the film descends from the Andes toward Lima, following the journey of a shipment of metal powder.
If what we perceive in Steel Life without being its actually being shown is the complex, global network that determines Peru’s place in the world, All of Our Heartbeats Are Connected by Exploding Stars moves from a much smaller-scale conception of absence to probably the broadest imaginable evocation of the unseen. Jennifer Rainsford’s film telescopes out from bereaved residents of Fukushima, Japan, searching for the loved ones that were swept away by the 2011 tsunami, to the formation of the Earth that began with the collision of two giant stars billions of light years away from our current position in the universe.
From galactic paroxysms to plankton and ocean trash, the film struggles at times to cogently connect its threads, but its tour through different scales of existence—in particular that of ocean life—is often visually arresting and unnerving. (Google-Image “Eurypharynx” if you dare.) On its human scale, the heartbreaking search for loved ones lost a decade ago resonates with a film playing in Visions du Réel’s National Competition section: Filipe Monroy’s Sons of the Wind, which foregrounds the stories of people impacted by the Colombian Army’s indiscriminate killing of young men in their fight against the rebel group FARC.
Monroy, who has lived in nearby Geneva since 2007, follows a small group of mothers and sisters, along with one Colombian Army trooper whose conscience has led him to take a stand, as they attempt to find the bodies of those they lost. Monroy mixes straightforward interviews and over-the-shoulder visits to the fields where unrecovered bodies of the women’s sons and brothers still lie with more allegorical representations of the women’s loss and pain. A stirring opening features one of the women singing a mournful tune in silhouette, and immediately after the film’s screening at the festival the women appeared on stage, singing the same tune.
This surprise appearance by women we’d just seen on the screen served to undermine whatever comfort the audience might have been able to take in the sense of absence inherent to the cinematic image. Rather than conveniently dislocated in space and time, there were the subjects of the documentary right in front of us, their struggle still unresolved. It was a reminder of both the capabilities and limitations of the cinema: By giving us views of things we likely would not have seen anyway, it may be said to enhance our reality, but it can’t replace it. This year’s Visions du Réel proves that even though our world couldn’t be contained within an infinite archive of film canisters, cinema retains its ability to redraw its horizons.
Visions du Réel runs from April 7—17.
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