HELSINKI, FOREVER (FINLAND/2008/PETER VON BAGH)

In the tradition of films such as Of Time and the City and My Winnipeg, Helsinki, Forever is a sedate mood piece paying tribute to the Finnish capital through fragments of the country’s visual arts. More than just a bricolage piece, the film takes on the structure of a metaphysical journey, links being made between shots, locations, time periods – trams enter screen in the 1930s and leave it in the 1960s. Commentary from a man and a woman (the man’s voice is director Peter von Bagh) propel the visual essay through its twists and turns, only interrupted by smatterings of Finnish pop music.

Peter von Bagh is better known by some as a film historian, and this project displays as deep a love for cinema as it does for Helsinki. Many of the films shown share superficial elements in common – long shadows, minimal movement – and while technical aspects of the film are never brought up, the film functions as a history of Finnish cinema. The one issue here is in the editing – given von Bagh’s access to previously unfamiliar films, one wonders if we’re seeing the clips that best fulfil the film’s intent or if the visual connections are too enjoyable to pass up. In this sense, Helsinki, Forever falls short of the likes of Sans Soleil in creating a compelling film essay, but it nonetheless manages to hold one’s attention. Wistful at times, joyful at others, Helsinki, Forever manages to brim with vivacity through a reconnection with the past.

OWN DEATH (HUNGARY/2008/PÉTER FORGÁCS)

In multimedia artist Péter Forgács’ fiction film Own Death, the protagonist is heard and often not seen, presented to the viewer through found footage and photographs as he describes his life after the near-death experience of a heart attack. The protagonist, assumed to be a publisher or printer, is very aware of his physical vulnerability and often refers to his reaction to his environment (sweat and muscular pains being particular favourites). But as he unravels each moment of pain or suffocation, the images suggest a secret joie de vivre, a longing to fulfil the dreams he had almost lost forever. Occasional segments of text, echoing the narration, appear across the screen in a typewriter serif.

Forgács’ interpretation of Péter Nádas’ novella is reminiscent of Peter Greenaway, creating a new text from several existing texts, and the bricolage of dozens of people’s lives hint at reincarnation or a desire to be anyone else. Newly shot footage flows adds motion to an otherwise sedentary slideshow, and intimacy is afforded to images of fingers and faces through use of gentle musique concrète, care of Béla Tarr’s frequent collaborator Mihály Víg. Whether deliberate or not, the narration is frustratingly anodyne and monotone, and one wonders if we are meant to celebrate the protagonist’s ability to articulate his pain, or to merely suffer with him. Moreover, the man’s thoughts often feel repetitive and steal the footage of some great mythic potential. An intriguing experiment, but one that never leaps off the screen as it should.

23 ZOOMS (GERMANY/2004/GREGORY BÜTTNER)

In documentaries like Capturing the Friedmans, The Devil and Daniel Johnston and Must Read After My Death, home footage and audio recordings are used to emotive, and frequently disturbing effect as they add another dimension to the personal histories of their subjects. In Gregory Büttner’s 23 Zooms, no one person is the subject – in fact, the artist has no connection to any of the people featured. Büttner compiles a selection of twenty-three found photographs and, with no provenance for any of them, composes a piece of music to complement their presentation. Each photograph is scanned over, certain details zoomed into, before fading to black.

While his ambition may not have been to create a tribute to these strangers, Büttner manages to tap into the pseudoscience of nostalgia to give the viewer little shivers that may represent a superficial connection to each photo. A proponent of musique concrète by trade, Büttner has a clear understanding of the synaesthetic possibilities of film, and the lack of movement in each image suggests that audiovisual memory is freed of temporality. Each musical composition feels diligently constructed, and clear references are made to the iconography in the images – a photograph of an old man with canaries is scored by a slightly tropical composition, while a scratched record accompanies Christmas picture. Büttner’s work is very consciously experimental, and ultimately the film showcases the artist’s music over his filmmaking abilities (one wonders why each picture has to seem so sinister), but it is definitely worth a watch.

MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH (USA/2007/MORGAN DEWS)

In the same vein as Capturing The Friedmans, Must Read After My Death is a documentary which tells its story through family footage and recordings. The focus here is the faltering relationship of Allis and Charley, the deceased grandparents of director Morgan Dews. Dews came across the recordings in his grandmother’s house shortly after she died, and came to truly understand their issues through the editing process. Charley, suave but troubled, worked in Australia for a third of the year, leaving Allis at home with their four children, and it becomes clear that this is what put a strain on the relationship. Through Dictaphone correspondence, we learn of Charley’s alcoholism and popularity with the women, as well as Allis’ struggles to keep her family happy.

Though clearly meant as a tribute to his own grandparents, Dews has essentially created a moving portrait of any American family striving to keep up appearances. Inadequacy is a frequent topic, as if Allis and Charley lived their entire lives benchmarking themselves against ‘the American dream’. What is fascinating about the film is what isn’t shown – Allis talks a little about her first marriage but Charley avoids discussing his. Whether it was Dews’ decision to exclude any reference to these issues or if there simply wasn’t any discussion of it, it contributes greatly to the viewer’s understanding of this couple as human beings. A daringly personal project, Must Read After My Death is a beautiful, caring tribute to Dews’ grandparents, brimming with love and nostalgia.

LYRICAL NITRATE (NETHERLANDS/1991/PETER DELPEUT)

In his 1991 found-footage project Lyrical Nitrate, filmmaker Peter Delpeut strings together an abstract ode to cinema. The footage, culled from various turn-of-the-century films from the collection of distributor Jean Desmets, had originally been printed on coloured nitrate film stock which has left the images in some way deteriorated. Delpeut arranges his film clips into categories which evoke the experiences of watching film. For example, the first segment, ‘Looking’, sees actors in various films addressing the camera with their gaze, accompanied by a frenzied attack of intertitles in different languages. The film doesn’t follow a strict narrative, although a basic sense of mortality is echoed in its structure.

Though some might say that the similarities between Delpeut’s process and the one Bill Morrison used for his 2002 film Decasia are so close as to suggest plagiarism by the latter, such a question ignores the nature of the found-footage genre. As Jean-Luc Godard once noted, “it’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to”. This however does not excuse the two films from comparison. Whereas Decasia creates controlled chaos through its presentation of odds and ends of unknown films, most of them damaged beyond recognition by natural causes, Lyrical Nitrate honours cinema through identifying patterns. Montages of similar clips from different films suggests an element of collective perfectionism, as if filmmakers were constantly collaborating to document life as best as possible. The film’s everchanging colour values have a hypnotic effect, rendering the film a gentle, ghostly experience.

ONE MORE EFFORT, CHINAMEN, IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES! (FRANCE/1977/RENÉ VIÉNET, FRANCIS DERON)

Collaging archive footage from assorted sources, infamous Situationist director René Viénet portrays a darkly humorous vision of China as a political minefield. The film seeks to expose a long-running counter-Maoist tradition by ironical veneration of the icons of Marxist China. Introducing the main players – Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping – as if they were glamorous actors, the film is mostly free of narration, an eclectic soundtrack coaxing diverse film clips together. For example, a montage of Chinese women is accompanied by an instrumental version of Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus. The sequence is repeated immediately after, this time with a commentary that describes the case of a schoolteacher who had raped six of his female students, painting him as a bourgeois challenge to the Chinese Communist Revolution in the forties. Later descriptions of real-life struggles are attached to equally discordant images, such as kung fu movies and colourful Chinese musicals.

Viénet, well-known for his studies on China and intentionally humorous use of détournement (the art of using pre-existing cultural items as a basis for new works that subvert them), lived in China briefly in the sixties, and was actually exiled for his anti-Maoist beliefs. His two earlier films, Can Dialectics Break Bricks? and The Girls of Kamare, dubbed existing Chinese and Japanese films with new dialogues recognising the potent violence of language. Here, the process is marginally less farcical, and Viénet’s controversial juxtapositions create meaning rather than destroying it, but generally the product is too haughty for its own good.