Night Without Distance
Few films at the festival could match the potency of this 23-minute experimental short by Lois Patino. Filmed in Galicia on the Spanish-Portuguese border, Night Without Distance uses a distinctive combination of negative photography and colour treatments to transform the world into a hauntingly strange landscape. Patino’s human subjects are smugglers (portrayed by actors, it should be noted), but he captures them in abbreviated moments, in mid-conversation or simply standing watch. Motionless, they resemble less human beings than trees transplanted from another world. An opening epigraph speaks of “souls in landscapes,” and the abstract beauty of the film does indeed destroy the distinction between human and environment. Nothing captures this leveling effect quite so forcefully as the image of the distant landscape billowing like a sheet in the wind, whose persistent howl defines the soundtrack more than any of the human voices heard. But look closer, and you see that the movement comes from tiny figures seeming to emerge out of the waving grass. In this strange night, the people flow from one country to another like water. Borders, of course, are nothing but imaginary lines on a map, and Patino’s film is a poetic assertion of their permeability.
Topophilia
The uneasy relationship between industry and the environment forms the foundation of Peter Bo Rappmund’s Topophilia, which follows the Trans-Alaska pipeline—and by extension, the oil moving within—across the continent. Notably, the film actually begins in Long Beach, California, where the oil ends its journey. Focused on the monumental machinery of the coastal port, these early moments are almost entirely devoid of any signs of nature, save for the sea: no trees, no grass, no undeveloped space, and just a handful of humans buried beneath coveralls and safety gear. From there, the film leaps thousands of kilometres to a drill site on the Arctic tundra. Using time-lapse photography, Rappmund follows the line south as it cuts through the seasons; humans and animal appear occasionally, but the focus is always on the pipeline, which carves out abstract compositions on the canvas of the northern landscape. The accompanying field recordings meld the sounds of the pipeline—groaning metal, oil humming as it rushes by—with the crackling of leaves shuddering in the wind. Industrialization disfigures everything around it, until all of nature begins to seem like a massive grinding machine. Even the shimmering surface of the sea takes on the appearance of television static.
Tharlo
It does not bode well for Pema Tseden’s Tharlo that one of the funniest sequences in the film scarcely even involves the titular character, a rural Tibetan shepherd visiting the city to get his first-ever official identification card. The scene comes as he waits in line at a photographer’s studio, nursing an orphaned lamb while a middle-aged farming couple stiffly poses against painted backdrops depicting everything from Tiananmen Square to New York City. Dressed in ill-fitting western garb, the pair try to make themselves a little more at home by borrowing the animal, resulting in an absurd photo of two Tibetan farmers bottlefeeding a lamb against the iconic outline of the Big Apple. The image aptly conveys the sense that we’re watching the old ways slowly eroded under the pressures of modernity, but it also speaks to Tseden’s conservatism, which ultimately turns this gentle comedy of manners into a sour polemic. Stories of farmers seduced by the big city are certainly not novel, although they surely must resonate more in increasingly industrialized Tibet than the western world. Tseden’s film even adopts the familiar stock villain of the money-grubbing woman exploiting the naïve country boy to carry out Tharlo’s corruption. Between the narrative clichés and dour traditionalist view of women, the film fails to interrogate just what might actually deserve to be left to the past.
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