“Like a ghost, arise” was the title of a program of short films at the Rotterdam Festival, and we responded obediently to the injunction, like an echo of Julie Pietri’s song of almost the same title. In front of the gargantuan programme, the festival-goer is always perplexed as in front of a hairdresser’s – Rotterdam culinary specialty similar to poutine (here fries covered with pieces of kebab topped with melted cheese and lettuce). How are we going to attack this? Should we try to eat everything until indigestion? But that’s a bit of the beauty of the event: ask a spectator what he liked there and no answer will be the same depending on whether, this year, we looked at the focus on contemporary Indian cinema as resonance of the country’s faltering democratic health on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of its independence, or on the retro on Judit Elek, Hungarian filmmaker known for having filmed sheep burning alive in Memories of a River (1990) as an allegory of the Holocaust.
We followed other ghosts and there were many of them. First of all, that of a return to normal, since this is the first edition open to the public after two years mowed down by the restrictions due to Covid; that of capitalism which hovers over the drastic reorganization of the festival following this hiatus and financial hole, with layoffs, budgetary tightening as well as the appearance of an accounting newspeak (“content department”, “sources of income”) on the website of a 50-year-old event whose heart is the defense of marginal cinema (the spoon-scraped film trend). On site, the sensations of yesteryear were not yet diluted in front of, in particular, the concert of The Brockas breaking the house, a group made up of Filipino filmmakers Khavn de La Cruz (keyboards and primal scream) and Lav Diaz (electric guitar in fusion) – yes, the Lav Diaz – and Rotterdam is probably the only place where you can see the champion of slow cinema performing as if he were auditioning for Sonic Youth.
Terrifying Abyss
And in the films, the ghosts of History have come to numb the present. By following the schoolchildren of a Cameroonian village for a year, the aptly named Specter of Boko Haram by Cyrielle Raingou draws the insidious shadow of the jihadist terrorist group in the north of the country. The brothers Ibrahim and Mohammed stand out, survivors of a kidnapping by the sect. The documentary filmmaker places herself at the height of a child, at this altitude where the trivial and the mystery have something dizzying about them. It maintains an unbearable off-screen violence – via shots of soldiers patrolling the edge of the frame or the free speech of the kids, suddenly authors of the film. The way in which they tell, with all the seriousness one can afford at 10 years old, a story of “witches who turn into cats, and which they would have carried out themselves during a raid, opens a terrifying abyss for a whole next generation. The film sometimes fumbles in its point of view when it wants to dramatize its material unnecessarily but is more than promising.
Question of perspective too and of a past that does not pass in the impressive the Palisiade, the first feature by Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko. It is of course tempting to read the film, shot in 2021, as a prophecy of Cassandra in the light of the current war when we hear in particular the words “dictatorship” or “Do you remember the date of independence of Ukraine?” in the mouths of the characters. Let’s take it first as a very successful thriller, a Memories of Murder filmed with a camcorder on the assassination of a Ukrainian colonel in 1996, in this gray zone of generalized corruption after the fracture of the USSR. The film sees its investigation loaded in advance (with its ideal and designated suspect, its two cops beside the plate) but constantly metamorphoses, by turns chilling, daily like a holiday movie shot by dad, and tatiesque in its humor. This is a buddy movie in a chapka where the camera becomes neutral, then voyeuristic, then accomplice in the action – and often in the same shot. One thinks of Romanian cinema, of the very dry Cristi Puiu, but filmed always too close or too far away to arouse unease.
The “crazy romanticism” of the “Guide du routard”
And then there are the surprise, unexpected ghosts. Trips to Italy by Sophie Letourneur seemed to invoke Roberto Rossellini in advance in its title to better exorcise it. After Hugethe filmmaker returns to her wandering and self-fictional vein, from her short film the masked sailor and its length the Coquillettes. She stages herself, without sparing herself as always, in a transalpine road trip with Philippe Katerine as her husband. Make way for “crazy romanticism”, not that of Ingrid Bergman in her time, but that promised in the backpacker’s guide that characters like the Bible consult. The real spectra here are those of the Chris Marker of Sans Soleil (“those memories that had served no purpose but to leave, precisely, memories”) and the anthropologist Marc Augé (author of the book the impossible journey (1997), where tourism is only images and commonplaces, an elsewhere where the French are everywhere. The film is absolutely charming in its rickety side, its way of creating the event from nothing much and absolutely hilarious in its anguish of the vacationer who has not experienced what the catalog or the story of his friends promised him . Or brought back, to quote a character, “prout madeleines”.