VanPou Reviews

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

A Kaurismaki classic, full of his absurd realism

[9/10 · 18 October 2017]

The Other Side of Hope is a Kaurismaki classic, full of bittersweet sarcasm and existentialism, if by the latter we mean an honest reflection of what is. It also contains some great music, although I sometimes think that it is how he lets music exist in his films that makes it great, rather than the music per se.

By centering his story around a Syrian refugee in Helsinki, the film brings forward the view of the migrant/refugee, and that is very important,because we do not only see the European view of the Other; Kaurismaki enters the Other's reality in modern fortress-Europe. It helps us think what it really means to be a young man/woman stuck in these postmodern concentration camps, waiting for some bureaucratic agency to review your asylum application and define, from some thousand miles away, whether the hell that you fled from can be officially called "war" or whatever. Or what it means to carry this burden and walk in the same streets with the "true Finns" or other nationalistic, xenophobic scums. It also depicts the power of solidarity, albeit in Kaurismaki's typically sarcastic manner.

Anyhow, Kaurismaki always seems to take a certain distance from the things he narrates (some call him a snobbish filmmaker, others may claim that he makes a caricature of his characters), but his magic lies on the fact that it is precisely this distance (plus tons of alcohol, apparently) that makes his films so honest and humane. There is always a certain absurdity in play, yet to me Kaurismaki does realism in the most accurate meaning of the word. You exit the cinema and you see (and hear) this absurd realism applied all over the city. This film is no exception. It may not be his "magnum opus", but his kind of artists doesn't need this bourgeois terminology at all. It is what you make of it.

Tales by Light (2015– )

The western professional and the objectification of the Other

[4/10 · 12 September 2017]

Haven't seen the whole series, to be honest. But the "tribes" episode was quite disturbing at times. How I see it, there were some serious issues concerning the objectification of the indigenous people ("my subjects", as the photographer -Art Wolfe- calls them). Some scenes in particular (but certainly not solely) where Wolfe was setting the "stage" for his photograph, i.e. the indigenous people, asked to perform their tribalism in front of the western audiences ("my audience", as Wolfe describes). There's your scent of cultural imperialism (and of an overambitious western professional), or of the colonization of the Other, if you prefer, the Other who is, only when in contact with the western and only as the western wishes to see her.

This objectification, however, is well disguised by Wolfe's ambition to keep a record of vanishing cultures for mankind, there is even a manifestation, where the photographer realizes that (I quote): "the western civilization was gonna slam into their culture." Without realizing that his camera does exactly the same thing: there's your tribe, as colorful and as primitive as you expect it to be.

There are of course some really powerful pictures and a very professional approach through every segment of the film, I just wonder whether it is really necessary to make this kind of docs, if this quest for the "perfect" and "powerful" photograph is really worthy. To me it just brings afront the same old power relations between the West and its Others. I could (or rather, I'm trying to) live without them.