Finding the Surreal in Everyday Life: A Review of Modes 2 at VIFF
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A Bird Called Memory (Pássaro Memória) (dir. Leonardo Martinelli, 2023)
“I don’t like realism.” This may be the sentiment explicitly expressed by the main character of Leonardo Martinelli’s A Bird Called Memory (Pássaro Memória), but it is also the common thread upon which the films of the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF)’s Modes 2 construct their narratives and visual styles. Adept at taking images or situations common to everyday life and lingering on them in a way that crosses over into the unfamiliar and strange, these films allow us an intimacy rarely explored in routine living that, here, borders on the surreal.
In A Bird Called Memory, we find our lead in Lua—a transwoman who restlessly searches the streets of Rio de Janeiro for her lost parrot. Lua feels unwelcome and displaced in the concrete world that surrounds her. In response, she gravitates towards the spectacle of musicals as a means of escape. The formal elements of the 15-minute short film incorporate aspects of musicals as a surrealist medium to produce a piece that imbues the cityscape with an arresting uncanniness. We watch as Lua moves through urban spaces with features that are familiar to us—city squares with monuments to long-dead military men, an empty shopping district with the corrugated metal of its storefronts rolled down, and highway overpasses—yet, the movements of the camera cause these once-pedestrian locales to take on a bizarre quality.
A Bird Called Memory (Pássaro Memória) (dir. Leonardo Martinelli, 2023)
The opening scene of the film observes the waking of a city street from the fixed point of a stationary camera. As the dozen or so actors move throughout the frame, we patiently loiter… waiting until the subject of the scene becomes apparent. After two minutes, Lua enters and pauses directly in the center of the frame. She wears a bright yellow top that contrasts with the dusty tans that encompass the street and lets out a short, melodic whistle. All of the remaining passersby turn to look at her in a strikingly incongruous display of unity. With that, Lua turns to walk out of frame, and the camera finally breaks its stagnancy by panning to follow her with a palpable purposefulness—a move that unexpectedly grips the heart after extended stillness. Later in the film, Lua sits with a transman and contemplates their position in this world by wondering out loud whether her bird would ever get the chance to land on a statue of someone like them. Though a government-funded tribute to a transperson may seem like a far-fetched dream to Lua, the space that she occupies in front of the camera and the way she leads the movements of the unnamed characters around her offers a whimsical and celebratory alternative to our conventional society—one that mirrors the magic that Lua finds in the world of her musicals.
Loving in between (Dir. Jyoti Mistry, 2023)
For Jyoti Mistry’s Loving in Between, this notion of strangeness manifests through the interplay between spoken word inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem “Advice” and archival footage from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. The product of this engagement is an expression of queerness that is at once both erotic and mundane. Opening with a portion of Hughes’ poem (“birthing is hard / and dying is mean / so get yourself / a little loving / in between”) spoken over archival footage, the film leads with images of people from the past playing on beaches. Already an air of hauntedness permeates this piece. This is because it is difficult to ignore the fact that these images–which according to the credits were largely captured between 1915 to about 1960–feature real people who, more likely than not, are no longer living. At times, the smiles and jubilance of these subjects chafe against the knowledge that they are long gone. This eeriness is thrown into even starker relief as the footage morphs into decidedly queer imagery. While we know that queer people have existed throughout time, it feels remarkable to witness these moving images not only preserved, but captured on film in the first place. Women undress each other at a 1950s dinner party, the hand of a man wearing a suit feels up the naked chest of another man, and two women dressed as nuns kiss softly. Each of these images feels almost as if they should be staged. Yet, the knowledge that this film is composed of historical footage reaffirms both the realness and uncanniness of these images. And, in turn, assigns a sense of (potentially unearned) intimacy to our watching.
Aqueronte (DIR. Manuel muñoz rivas, 2023)
The feeling of unexpected closeness is also a central theme of Aqueronte by the Spanish filmmaker Manuel Muñoz Rivas. The longest of the four films featured in this block, at just over 26 minutes, Aqueronte follows a group of passengers as they travel along a river via ferry. The camera lingers on a stretch of water shrouded in fog. The longer we watch, with sound predominantly guiding our experience, our eyes begin to play tricks on us—conjuring up shapes and faces in the mist that do not exist. This act of silent observation is most evident near the end of the film. For nearly five whole minutes, we slowly drift from person to person, lingering on the partial portraits of the passengers napping in their cars. These glimpses into a person’s life—a sleep-curled hand, eyelashes twitching against dreams, parted lips that display a child’s teeth—are ones that we may fail to notice if not for a filmmaker forcing us to. In our everyday lives, we rarely look at a single image for an extended period of time, though we could if we wanted. This film allows us to indulge in this intrusive staring. We are gifted the time to watch the play of shadows across a character’s face as the light changes throughout the late afternoon; the opportunity to briefly commune with these characters even if that is the extent to which we can know them.
Each of these films offers us a slower, more thought-provoking, and dare I say, more present mode of existing as an alternative to the frantic immediacy of our lives. Perhaps that is why they feel so surreal. Though these are images that are common to our real world, they are presented in a way that we rarely experience—unhurried and contemplative. All of the characters in these films possess an unknowable quality. We get snippets of their lives; their conversations, but never the whole story. And is this not true of our real lives as well? Just how deeply can we know the people we pass on the street or the person sitting next to us on our bus commute to work? The difference here is that we are allowed to look as long as we like and revel in the process of meeting this unknowability.
VIFF’s Modes 2 will be playing at the Vancity Theatre on Sunday, October 1 at 6:00 p.m. and Sunday, October 8 at 4:15 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at viff.org. For more information, visit here.
Kate Wise is a film studies instructor at Alexander College and a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Cinema and Media Studies MA program. Much of her research explores the popularity of the K-pop group BTS in connection with the importance of heightened parasocial relationships for fans during the COVID-19 pandemic and desires for a queer futurity. Kate has served as co-editor-in-chief for UBC’s film journal Cinephile and is currently working on her debut novel. In addition to writing, Kate enjoys performing K-pop dance covers and perfecting her homemade lasagna recipe—often at the same time.
