Interview with Sarunas Bartas

Interview with Sarunas Bartas

„We don’t actually live in a real world, but in one we quietly agreed to call “real”. It’s limited by what we saw and heard. Or, more like, what we allow ourselves to see and hear. So, it turns out each of us constructs his own internal reality.

„By the way, I am trying to avoid the word “narrative” – I think it has become outdated in relation to cinema.“

another short comment on life: http://fresques.ina.fr/europe-des-cultures-en/fiche-media/Europe00236/sharunas-bartas-about-few-of-us.html

A HOUSE 1997

KORIDORIUUS 1994

SEVEN INVISIBLE MEN 2005 THREE DAYS 1992 

FREEDOM 2000

Seven Invisible Men, Sarunas Bartas – 2005

a group of four unknown people steal a mercedes in a city. the police comes looking for them in their hide out. so they leave the city torwards the countryside, some poor place in ex USSR. they split for a while. whilst the main character, a blonde man with blue eyes who never smiles, hides in a poor farm with some women he seems to know from earlier in his life. he seems to have a special relation to one of the younger women. maybe once his love or maybe his prostitute. in the first scene when they meet at the farm, she says “that she is on vacation now”. He replies that he has money and has always had money”. At the end of the film she asks him “what he wants”, he replies that “he wants everything and that it is never enough”. during the film they seem to have one single dialogue which is scattered though time and never ends. in the mean time the rest of the group from the beginning join at the farm. they have a rather pathetic as much as touching party with a lot of booze and retro pop music in a tiny room around a poorly lit table. Bartas seems to have directed these scenes by putting some vodka on the table and ordered everybody to get drunk. this is when you get stuck in this uncanny small house together with drunken men, half naked children and melancholic and hysterically crying naked women. these creatures seem to live from nothing else than cigarettes and misery. the best part is during something like a love scene where the naked woman is lying on the bed and turned to the opposite direction of the camera. at first she shows her middle finger, then a V for victory and then a closed fist. Was it for us or was it for Bartas? there is no escape. at the end everything burns down and everybody dies, only the sad and crazy survive. a great film told with few words rather than with beautiful landscape scenes and a very special feeling for poetry in film.

 

for further reading: http://www.screendaily.com/seven-invisible-men/4023669.article

RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES, Haus der Kulturen der Welt 25.-30.6. Berlin

Internationales Filmfestival mit Beiträgen von:

Anna Ådahl, Sandro Aguilar, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Rosa Barba, François Bucher, Daya Cahen, Clément Cogitore, Tony Cokes, Pedro Costa, Peter Downsbrough, Redmond Entwistle, Johan Grimonprez, Crispin Gurholt, Marina Landia, John Menick, Christian Merlhiot, Aurelia Mihai, Eleonore de Montesquiou, Charly Nijensohn, Dirk Peuker and Bettina Nürnberg, Sasha Pirker, Katja Pratschke and Gusztáv Hámos, Nada Prlja, Nicolas Provost, Lina Selander, Tejal Shah, Sarah Vanagt, Phillip Warnell, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Myriam Yates, Tobias Zintel and others.

FREE ENTRY!

FILZ SPECIAL – FUCK FOR FOREST

JOHN SMITH Lecture at The Glasgow School of Art 2008

‚Om,‘ 4 min – 1986, ‚Gargantuan‘ – 1992 ‚The Girl Chewing Gum,‘ 12 min – 1976, ‚Blight,‘ – 1996, ‚Worst Case Scenario,‘ 18 min – 2001-3, ‚Pyramids‘ – 2006, ‚Skunk‘ – 2007

55th Venice Biennale: RICHARD MOSSE The Enclave 2013

 

http://www.richardmosse.com/works/the-enclave/

SHARUNAS BARTAS: Trys Dienos (Three Days) 1991

Three Days (1991), Bartas’ maiden feature length work, unfolds in a harbor town in Lithuania where two men and a women search for a shelter in the largely uncaring place, possibly to make love. The first Bartas film to feature his would-be collaborator (and muse) Yekaterina Golubeva, Three Days plays out as a post-apocalyptic tale set in an industrial wasteland, complete with decrepit structures and murky waters, where both positive communication (Even the meager amount of dialogue in the film turns out to be purely functional) and meaningful relationships (Almost everyone in the film seems to be a vagrant) have been rendered irrelevant. Every person in this desolate land seems to be an individual island, stuck at a particular time in history forever.

http://theseventhart.info/2010/04/24/the-films-of-sharunas-bartas/

FILZ empfhielt: LEVIATHAN Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel 2012

Leviathan organizes many entities, both concrete and intangible, as opposing forces—first and foremost the communication between man and nature, but also the battle between the vulnerable and the impervious, the recurrent and the unchecked, and the fine line between heaven and hell on Earth, aggravated and antagonized by human interference or not. Throughout a lifetime of labor (or, in a more micro sense, on a day-to-day level amid life’s many universal concerns), there’s no escaping certain inevitabilities, and Leviathan enshrines both the forces of the environment and the men and women who attempt to physically interrogate the component parts of such a god-like fury—appropriate for a work of such Biblical proportions and consequence.

JORDAN CRONK

IM KINO:

http://www.cinematheque-leipzig.de/index.php?seite=Start&film=4352

FILZ Spezial: polnischer Dokumentarfilm III : KRYSTZTOF KIESLOWSKI

The Office 1966, 5 min.

 

‘The Office’ consists of a few minutes of film in a social security office, but says a lot about the system as a whole (though as it happens, social security may have been one field where Poland was not so different to the capitalist world). This film made Kieslowski a legend among his peers, for while it is very brief, the appendage of words and images is striking and there are definite hints in the style of his later work (one thinks here of the scenes in the Post Office in ‘A Short Film About Love’, or in the cinema box office in ‘A Short Film About Killing’). Worth five minutes of any Kieslowski fan’s time.

(Source: IMDb)

FILZ Spezial: polnischer Dokumentarfilm II : KAZIMIERZ KARABASZ

Muzykancki 1960, 9 min.

Muzykanci is a film about ‚common‘ people for whom music has grown into a passion. The heroes of this film are streetcar conductors, mechanics and blue-collar workers. They meet twice a week to play music together. The 84-year-old conductor, Leon Cymmerman, has been leading this group of musicians for 60 years.  (http://www.dokweb.net)