Francofonia

1395‫ اردیبهشت‬6‫دوشنبه‬
‫ویژهنامهجشنوارهجهانیفیلمفجر‬
Francofonia
Storyline : A history of the Louvre
during the Nazi occupation and a
meditation on the meaning and
timelessness of art.
Arash Vahedi
R
eview: Imagine a Night at the Museum
film, but one that depicts time as a
great, always-ebbing metaphysical
tide, and the artefacts and artworks it leaves
behind as the flotsam of civilisations past, in
place of Ben Stiller playing fetch with a CGI
dinosaur.
That’s more or less Alexander Sokurov’s
Russian Ark: a wondrous, one-take cinehappening from 2003, in which the Russian
master sent his Steadicam snaking around
the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,
capturing in a single 96-minute shot the swirl
and sweep of 300 years of history and
beauty.
Francofonia isn’t a belated sequel to that
film, but it is something of an answer to it. For
one thing, it centres on another great
repository of world art: the Louvre Museum
in Paris. For another, it has weighty issues on
its mind that aren’t easily expressed in words
alone. The film is almost impossible to
categorise – it falls somewhere between
documentary, essay film and video art
installation – and Sokurov deploys a mixture
of audio-visual forms, including archive
footage, both authentic and manipulated;
still photographs; paintings; diagrams and
voiceover, as well as the expected sinuous
Steadicam glides around portraiture and
sculpture, over the course of its limber
View
France , Germany , Netherlands
Directed by : Aleksandr Sokurov
Written by : Aleksandr Sokurov
Cast : Louis-Do de Lencquesaing , Benjamin Utzerath , Vincent Nemeth , Aleksandr
Sokurov (Voice)
87-minute running time.
The film’s theme is the nature of museums
themselves: what they tell us about our
grasp of time, their historical function in
empire-building, the way in which they
foster the harvesting and hoarding of
culture, and how those very acts alter our
understanding of power, both personal and
political. (I did say that it wasn’t easily
expressed.)
Sokurov talks his way through these themes
in a voiceover that suggests he’s turning
them over in his head while he speaks. But
in addition to the director himself, five further
key characters appear on screen. The first
pair are art-historical ghosts: Napoleon
Bonaparte (Vincent Nemeth), whom we see
basking in front of official portraiture, and
Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes), the
symbol of the French Republic seen in all
kinds of patriotic artworks, including Eugène
Delacroix’s iconic Liberty Leading the People
– which can of course be found hanging in
the Louvre. They drift through the galleries,
offering observations on the art and ideas
they encounter there: in one memorable
sequence, they reach a kind of aesthete’s
stalemate while arguing over the meaning
of the Mona Lisa.
The second pair are real-life historical
figures: Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do De
Lencquesaing) and Count Franziskus Wolff-
Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), the
director of the Louvre and the Nazi officer
who took charge of it during the occupation
of Paris – and Sokurov uses these sequences
to explore the ways in which even ideological
rivals can find meaning and purpose in the
same artworks.
The fifth, and by far the hardest to decode, is
the director’s friend, a sailor called Dirk, who
is shipping museum artefacts across a
churning ocean, and occasionally pops up via
a Skype video-call to fret about the waves
that threaten to haul his priceless cargo down
to the sea bed. Is Sokurov suggesting that the
impulse to move art away from the civilisation
that created it deserves to end in failure? Or
is this entire thread a cosmic memento mori
– a reminder that even ancient treasures
aren’t safe from the caprices of fate?
Francofonia’s subtitle is ‘An Elegy for Europe’,
and there’s a niggling sense in the film that
civilisation itself, like the treasures washing
around on the deck of Dirk’s ship, is as good
as sunk. But the mood’s often as fun as it is
funereal, and though the film occasionally
feels clever in a way that isn’t necessarily a
compliment, Sokurov’s ideas have a
philosophical depth and richness that are
found almost nowhere else in cinema. When
he shows you a fleshy pink finger reaching
out to touch the hand of a marble statue, you
can sense time itself being short-circuited.
Shohreh Khordad- The third long film which is
directed by Narges Abyar who is the Iranian
filmmaker lady got a lot of attention. Abyar
International successfully experienced by
“Shiar 143”had high expected naturally of her.
The conversation with her is done beside Fajr
international film festival as bellow. Abyar is
ready to this art event by “Nafas” which is her
art-work.
I thought that I have to make a film which is
understanding by every one and make
correlation by all the people before I made the
first film; Nafas directed said. So I paid- attention
to international language of my art-work always.
One of an important reasons that I liked to be a
film-maker from 80s is many audiences which
I’d like to have because of that the film-maker
have to choose popular subjects what
understanding is not related to specific culture
or geographic.
Abyar said that Nafas is native and folkloric film
but also it refers to concepts which seems it can
be simple connecting with international general
audience totally.
The film-maker explained refers to “Shiar 143”
that was by war concept : I always try to take
simple and Humanitarian war subject and
avoided from confusing concept which can
limited to specific geographic or environment.
So target range is more important for me before.
Photo:Mojgan Khademi
Abyar: I thought from the beginning to global audience