Review: MIFF ‘10: Nénette, Rabbit à la Berlin, Honey
Nénette
Dir. Nicolas Philibert
Nénette is a film that only ever contains within its frame a small number of actual subjects, or things to look at: three orangutans housed within a zoo, their artificial habitat. Now and then we see reflected in the glass wall behind which the camera is positioned the visitors at the zoo, most remarkably when they are revealed in the darkness that the orangutans’ bodies cast upon the glass, forming a composite-image containing both the seer and the seen that makes more explicit the presence of the glass wall itself.
The glass wall’s presence is rendered even more explicit in the moments where we see it fogged up, or else soaped up and wiped clean, as well as when the orangutans actually touch or press themselves against its surface. It becomes clear in these moments that Nénette is not simply a film about what we see through the glass but a film about the glass itself and, by extension, all the other glass-like layers that cordon us off as spectators from the things these layers permit us to see: the lens of the camera, the lens of the eye, the prism of consciousness. It is within each of these layers that the image of Nénette the orangutan is somehow filtered, translated and reformed.
In a more accessible way, the film draws out its documentary concerns about ‘seeing’ through its audio track with sections demarcated by different kinds of audio: the cacophonous, excited crowds; the perspectives of zoo keepers on Nenette’s history in the zoo’s breeding program; zoologists on orangutan behaviour; a sketch artist on the peculiar grace of the orangutan; and children on what they see as the excitable or shocking or intriguing nuances of Nenette’s form. By canvassing the thoughts of others in this way, and structuring the film around varying kinds of voiced perspectives, the film creates a palpable sense of how our understanding of what we are given to see is always refracted through the understandings given by others, and how our own ability to actually describe and elucidate what we see also helps structure our sense of vision. Of course, the very subject of a contained, captive animal goes a long way towards evoking the ethical complexities underlying cinema’s involution in the anthropological, ethnographic and zoological fields, and the various ways they impose upon and translate the world.
That Nénette is an orangutan (a primate and a mammal) and we can sense and perceive within her (even beyond the genetic proofs offered by science) a physical kinship, enables the film to confront the limits to our ability to apply readings of mood and psychology to the gestures of hands, faces and bodies. Indeed one of the moments of the film I found most compelling was when the zoo-keeper called Nenette a “star”, likening her to the more common primate we are more apt and used to reading through the cinema.
- Alifeleti Brown
Rabbit à la Berlin
Dir. Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski
Let me begin by saying the short film truly is the middle child of cinema: always forgotten, mistreated and unacknowledged for its effort. It is a rare (and happy) occasion when the feature film viewer has the opportunity to view a short before the ‘main’ show. Screening shorts before a feature was a longstanding (and regularly enforced) practice that has since been replaced by advertisements. It is time to realise our ignorance, and bring back the short film!
Rabbit à la Berlin by Bartosz Konopka is a 39 minute Polish film that screened before Nénette. It offers a clever, multi-layered approach to the story of rabbits who lived along the grassy no-man’s land behind the Berlin Wall. We are directly positioned in the view of the rabbits who – like a camera lens – are a passive viewer to a violently changing social atmosphere. The rabbits first see an alteration to their open meadow when soldiers move in to build the Wall. Historical footage of the brutal confrontations that followed is interspersed with images of rabbits. A voice-over tells us how the rabbits came to terms with their changing environment; as in most stories about animals, human qualities are projected onto the creatures’ experience. We are told that they became passive beings, happy to live in an enclosed environment – safe from predators with plenty of grass. Perhaps what sets this little film apart is the layering of metaphor; we are simultaneously given the story of the rabbit and the story of the East German people, whose plight is displaced onto the animal. Juxtaposed with this are interesting facts, pieces of information like the visual cues from famous photographs of the Berlin Wall – nearly every one has a rabbit somewhere in the background (who knew?).
Like the best documentaries of its kind, Rabbit à la Berlin dignifies its provocative message. We are forced to reflect upon the troubles of those who experienced the era, via a silent witness: the humble rabbit. The film is eccentric, but provides a depth of inquisition upon an otherwise timeworn topic.
- Lauren Jayne Bliss
Honey
Dir. Semih Kaplanoğlu
This film, the last in Semih Kaplanoğlu’s ‘Yusuf’ trilogy, is undeniably beautiful. Returning to the childhood of Yusuf (whose adult years were explored in the first two films, Egg and Milk), Honey could be described as the cinematic equivalent of the six-year-old Yusuf himself: quiet, reserved, intelligent and eternally connected to the rainforest. The first shot of the film is a remarkable long-take held for at least five minutes that powerfully grasps the spectator’s attention. At one time, the only movement within the frame is the gentle swish of a donkey’s tail. It is a long while before a word is spoken, and soon after, the voice is shaped into a whisper: Yusuf’s father suggests to his son that he whisper his dreams rather than speak them out loud. It is at a whisper that Yusuf is able to speak most confidently.
Even so, some of the most important sounds in Honey are non-verbal: the comforting, gentle tinkle of a bell whenever Yusuf moves, and the unsettling, occasional buzz of a solitary bee. Without a score, it is such sounds that are our woven anchors into Yusuf’s world. Flowing between clear blue skies and heavy rains, the clear sound of the latter becomes an important experiential link. The only time when this connection is no longer sustained occurs at a loud, crowded fair that overflows with signs of modern civilization—the bucolic stillness of the deep Anatolian forest is interrupted in an unnecessary addition to the film.
Listed in the final credits (which are accompanied only by the continuous sound of Yusuf’s sleeping breaths) is the poem ‘Sensations’ by Arthur Rimbaud, whose father disappeared when he was six, as does Yusuf’s in this film. In ‘Sensations’, Rimbaud declares that he “shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy through the countryside.” In Honey, Yusuf does the same, his physical and spiritual connection with his land becoming as closely woven as the bee to its honeycomb.
- Eloise Ross
