From What is Before (2014)

Static camera. Rustling leaves. The wind. Grass. The sky. The roaring sea. Lav Diaz' From What is Before is a film that sticks close to nature. During the 338 (!) minutes of the film I am entirely surrounded by these images and these sounds. Being a political film at heart, Diaz chooses an interesting path in making the viewing experience so sensual. The setting is an isolated village in Philippines in the seventies. Horrible things start to happen and the villagers' lives are torn apart. There is an almost apocalyptic feeling in how Diaz approaches the terror of the regime - a sense of apocalypse conjured up by an almost-static camera an sometimes extremely lengthy takes (Béla Tarr comes to mind for several different reasons). The 5+ hours of the movie makes us acquainted with the village and the routines of its dwellers. We see neighbors visiting one another's houses. A young woman takes care of her daughter who drifts from a coma-like state to a state of distress. A small boy believes he lives with his uncle because his parents are in quarantine due to leprosy. A lonely winemaker exploits the disabled girl sexually.  A female merchant arrives to the village. She tries to sell goods to the villagers in a rather aggressive way (this character adds a comic aspect to this otherwise pitch-black story). A priest warns the locals about practicing the traditional rites. Worrying things happen. Cows are found slaughtered. Huts are burnt. A bleeding man appears. These events seem to intensify an already existing unease or anxiety that shape the villagers' lives. Paranoia among the villagers and as the villagers witness a suicide, we also learn about the many lies that are kept up.

The film is shot in black and white and from very early on, even the beautiful images of nature instills a sense of dread. Several scenes are set on a shore. A woman, the thundering sea, a rock. Later on, this sense of dread becomes more concrete as the army is entering the village: these are events of invasion. Martial law is introduced and some sections of the film deal with the hierarchy among the soldiers sent out to take charge of the village. The army men try to soothe the villagers - in a very bureaucratic way - by telling them that this is just an act of precaution, a way of rooting out communist rebels.

Diaz' use of long takes does not come out as an attempt to play with the viewer or as an attempt to appear 'contemplative'. His static camera gives you time to grow into a specific location. Some have talked about an anti-colonial method: time allows you to see a place, to be lulled into a specific rhythm.

Often, humans appear from within a natural setting as ant-like figures. A person appears from a distance, perhaps partly hid by deep foliage. This enhances the overall impression I got of the story. Here, there might be some open questions with regard to Diaz' perspective. Does he set out to depict how people are reduced to pawns in a cosmic game - the perspective being that whatever people do will remain futile. Or is he rather showing a historical situation - a situation of anxiety and terror in which people's sense of activity is radically reduced? In any case, the vulnerability of human life is strikingly underscored by means of this cinematographic technique. It is important to remember that the entire film is framed as an attempt to remember. Diaz seems to deal with national trauma through individual lives. There are extremely violent and horrible scenes in this movie that evoke a sense of acute trauma. These scenes have absolutely no trace of sensationalism or exoticism. Often, the horrible things done are seen only indirectly but for all that, they are shocking and heavy to watch.

Norte, The End of History (2013)

For a long time, I've been interested in seeing some of Lav Diaz' movies. Sadly, the distribution of his films have not been wide. For this reason, I was more than happy when there was a screening of Norte, The End of History in the midnight sun film festival in Sodankylä. After having seen the film, I am even more of the opinion that the films of Lav Diaz should be more accessible.

This film is loosely based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the beginning of the film, we follow a group of law students and their "intellectual" idle chatter about postmodernism and politics. Diaz seems to make a point of their use of English. They lead a comfortable life. One of these disaffected law students fall out from the group. His financial situation is not good and he tries to scramble together the rent money. Another protagonist is the father of a family. He has plans but they are shattered as he is injured. The fates of these men are crossed when the former law student kills a heartless moneylender. The other man is arrested and put in prison, unable to prove he didn't do it. His wife tries her best to eake out a living by selling vegetables from a cart. The film takes its time to observe, survey and listen to its characters. It follows the misery of the murderer, the hostile environment of the prison and the day-to-day life in a poor neighboorhood. Dostoyevsky's story looms in the background, and as the film progresses, we are thrown into the darkness of isolation and remorse.

The cinematography of Lauro Rene Mands brilliantly creates a space for both the drudgery of everyday life and moments of despair and even moments that take us away from the basic perspectives of the film. The films thus blends the mundane with an immense sense of strangeness. The latter moments may not appear often, but they are very important for the film as a whole: moments of disorientation, perhaps.

Instead of feeling that the 4 hours spent with this film are the mark of a pretentious film maker who tries to prove his own auteur-dom, I consider the strength of the film to be that this stretch of cinematic world enables Diaz to lead the viewer deeper into his world. He has time both for the characters and their environment. This is not to say that the film contains no excesses. I found some problems towards the end where I felt that Diaz is trying to shock to viewer. These were scenes in which "darkness" turned into a technique, an attempt to elicit strong reactions.

What makes the film special is how it moves on many levels. One can read it as a story about morality and despair, but one can also see it as commentary on the history of the Philippines. This aspect is strongly present in the beginning of the film, where the group of cosmopolitan law students are given plenty of time to express their cynicism (one gets a sense for their belonging to a small group severly separated from the goings on of other people in the country).