Everyday life is not devoid of, when conscious, an infinite diversity of repetitive formal procedures, rites, often astonishing, consciously or unconsciously linked with the personal and collective imagery and symbolism of myths. We will talk about mythologies only when the myths are binding for a certain society.
In praise of diversity, some everyday things are admired, others tolerated, and there are those who are forced to resist in hiding, due to a logic of survival. This was, for example, the case of the Moors of Granada in the 16th century. Today, almost 500 years later, there are unfortunately still similar conflicts in our world, if possible even more painful because they are anachronistic and absurd.
No strangers to dystopia, in our Western societies the use of social networks configures an everyday life, as false as it is hegemonic and current, in an often aggressive and perverse mosaic of voyeuristic banalities, which remind us of Georges Perec, when in 1978 he referred in his novel “Life: Instructions for use”: “I imagine a Parisian building whose façade has disappeared (...) so that, from the mezzanine to the attics, all the rooms in front are visible instantly and simultaneously.”
Already in 1944 Georges Bernanos spoke about the dictatorship of technology, and our admired filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, whom we honored in the last edition of the festival, dedicated his last film to this topic: “La France contre les robots” (2017) .
What to do then in the face of the pressure of the media proposal that, through the apparent innocence of the continuous and forced downloading of applications, daily includes the submission of humanity to a renewed and global dictatorship of technology?
Perhaps it is worth considering today the added importance of revolutionary everyday life, as a silent daily rebellion carried out by the individual. For each individual, for the people, each for their reasons and with their personal style, with audacity, discretion and mischief. These intimate micro revolutions, even the secret ones (they are the best), when exercised ritually and daily, can convey respect, truthfulness and deep attention towards the closest real, towards what is operationally close, without losing the holistic sense of the universal.
The fact that Chantal Akermann's film “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1976), portraying the daily life of a prostitute mother, has recently been awarded by one of the most influential association of film critics in all the world (Sight & Sound), as the best film in history, should be considered an indicator of the collective feeling of necessary cinematographic return to everyday life and its rituals. A commendable option from our point of view, quixotically confronted with that of the dominant and insatiable consumption of audiovisual eccentricities.
In the history of ethnographic cinema, attention to rituals, myths and everyday life has always allowed, both from an anthropological and simply human point of view, a potential for artistic creativity in the filmmaker's gaze. The anthropologist and father of “cinema-vérité” Jean Rouch, in his “Chronicle of a Summer” (1961) proposed with Edgar Morin that such ethnography could avoid the temptation of the exotic and colonial sentiment, to situate itself very interestingly in our own context. urban social, in our apparent normality.
The device of collective film projection, in itself, undoubtedly constitutes the last great Western rite, with impunity on the way to extinction: A group of spectators, people unknown to each other, gather in a dark room, in silence. Soon a ray of light passes over them, in the tantric space of the movie theater, above their heads: it is then that said light projects on a canvas, initially white and that regardless of its dimensions will become immense, the dreams of a demiurge (the filmmaker) come true. After this collective ritual (with or without a cinema-forum type discussion), all participants will return to the outside world, which we will possibly find changed, since so will we.
It is also necessary to remember here that everyday life is one of the stages described by the referential work of Paul Schrader (1974) regarding the style of transcendental cinema in Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. An everyday life that speaks to us and questions us, and even astonishes, in the same sense that the alchemist of Granada cinema Val del Omar told us in 1954, when he stated that “The extraordinary is found within the ordinary.”.
For all these reasons and others that we will discover during the development of the festival, in this 2024 Cinemística chooses to place itself at the rear of the film avant-garde of the international festival framework, a bit in the sense that Alice Letoulat has recently highlighted in her study “Archaism and impurity” (2022) on the cinema of Paradjanvov (this year is his centenary), Pasolini and Oliveira.
An exciting rearguard because, without ceasing to belong to our world/time, which by definition is avant-garde, we do not wish to be part of its devouring current affairs, but rather to live somewhat backward, in the innocence of childhood, and in that of a world at risk of disappearance, which we must try to retain and express poetically. As Sartre said about Baudelaire: “Advance backwards as much as possible, in the back seat of a car that is taking us away, trying to fix our gaze backwards and forwards, on the road that leads us away.”
Although by academic convention we are taught that there was a "passage from myth to logos", the myth never left and continues to accompany human beings. The story according to which Philosophy emerged from the “passage from myth to logos” implies a Eurocentric point of view about what is considered rational, which has permeated all Western thought with tragic consequences for other cultures. However, in a certain way, myths continue to fascinate us beyond a mechanized and commercialized life to the extreme, with a certain balsamic character that comforts and connects with that human part of passions, dreams, desires, fantasy, mystery, the mystical, the inexplicable or unspeakable of the existential story.
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6.44€
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