THE MORNING LIST
It’s often said that extremes collide and that’s kind of what’s happening with this week’s releases. On the one hand, Avatar: The Way of the Water, the highly anticipated second part of James Cameron’s technological saga, where the armada of special effects is used to recreate a threatened natural Eden. The other, Poet, a sober and restrained film by the Kazakh master Darezhan Omirbaev, who worries about the future of poetry with a remarkable economy of means. From heavy artillery to craftsmanship, however, a similar story of resistance to the order of the world emerges. Sometimes David and Goliath are looking in the same direction.
“Poet”: the loneliness of the muses
Here, a Kazakh film! Whose main character, as if that were not enough, is a poet. Its director, Darezhan Omirbayev, leader of a Kazakh New Wave that emerged in the 1990s, has only made five feature films in thirty years. A trained mathematician, fine scholar, disciple of Robert Bresson, this admirable man distills in his work a fundamental animosity towards the neoliberal drift of post-Soviet societies.
The action takes place on two parallel planes. Here and now, the destiny of Didar, mastic trench coat and threadbare moccasins, penniless poet, father, journalist out of necessity. And, two centuries earlier, that of Makhambet Utemisov (1804-1846), a great figure in Kazakh literature and companion of the nationalist hero Isatay Taymanov (1791-1838), who, in 1836, revolted both against the power Russian imperialist and that of his native cronies. The film recounts their double solitude, their awareness of being of so little weight in the face of the erasure of their culture, rolled away by the language of empires and by the furious madness of consumerism. Jacques Mandelbaum
Film kazakh de Darezhan Omirbayev. Avec Yerdos Kanayev, Gulmira Khasanova, Klara Kabylgazina (1 h 45).
“The Super-8 Years”: Archeology in Writing
In front of the super-8 camera, which arrived in middle-class homes in the 1970s, one could only be happy. It was necessary to look good in front of the lens since it was, most of the time, to capture special, striking moments, supposed to be happy: a birthday, a Christmas party, a sea trip… These images of happiness apparent, in the form of a silent film, constitute the material of the feature film co-directed by Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, The Super-8 Years.
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