I came across a lovely film today that has been making the
rounds since it was completed in 2011. It is a German, Chilean, Argentinian and
Dutch co-production, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky, who had the strange idea
of matching points on the globe that are exact antipodes. The film is called Vivan Las Antipodas! (Long Live the
Antipodes), and it is at once a geography lesson and wonderfully inspiring
testament of faith in people and their societies.
This sounds portentous, but the film is not like that. The
solemn-sounding idea is worked out with charming humour and modesty to such a
pont that although there is no plot or even much of a storyline, one’s interest
was caught in the first frames, and continued for the whole 108 minutes.
The eight locations chosen, matched four against four, are
a small settlement called Entre Rios in Patagonia and Lake Baikal in Russia;
another small place in Chile matched against the hustle and bustle of Shanghai,
one of the world’s biggest cities; the Big Island of Hawaii, notable for its
persistent lava flows, against Botswana, notable for its huge herds of
elephants, the largest land animal; and a small beach in the North Island of
New Zealand on which has washed the largest sea animal, against the coastal town of Miraflores, Spain.
Because so much of the Earth is covered with water,
Kossakovsky figured that only four per cent of the earth’s surface has a direct
antipode, a spot anyone would arrive at if they drilled a hole right through
the centre of the Earth. When he explained his idea to a Patagonian shepherd,
asking him to think of a woman asleep in Russia directly opposite him, the man
said immediaely, “so we are kind of sleeping together.” Which, I suppose one
could say, joined together as they are by their common attachment to the Earth.
Praised for the skill with which he illustrated his
unusual theme, the film-maker said it made him think of the statement that is
so often attributed to artists, “it’s not me, it’s my hand.”
He added: “It’s such a privilege to be a film-maker, to
see such things, to meet such people” as he met in the making of his unusual
film.
Although the camera does catch the great beauty of this remarkable
world in many sequences, the people and their rich characers are every bit as
much of a focus as the different landscapes. The film opens with a couple of
people in South America who have built a small bridge over a tiny stream, and
who talk to each vehicle that comes through with the bject of getting them to
pay their toll fee. Mostly, however, they find some way of either postponing the payment or forgiving it. And
it is at about this point that the film-maker pulls his major stylistic trick,
rotating his shot, placing it first sideways, matching it with the location he
is moving to on the exact other side of the world, and then showing us them
together one on top, one beneath. Then the location he is moving to has the
screen to itself, but at first, everything is upside down. The people, dogs,
and animals walk upside down, and only gradually are we allowed to think this
isn’t actually how it happens: like us up here, they, too, are right side up.
(I thought that was how I would come out, because I was
born down there, and never had the feeling I was upside down.)
The most startling images in the film, apart from the
purely scenic, of which there were a few, but certainly not too many, were in the
last two episodes. On the Big Island of Hawaii, a man wanders over the
landscape most of which is covered in huge lava rocks, and sinewy strings of
lava that have simply cooled down when in their natural state as they flow down
the hill. A man picks his way across the rocks, looking for his dog. Suddenly,
like a slow-moving river, we see a sream of lava, headed by a big pile of it,
still glowing with its natural fires as it finds its place among the rocks deposited
in previous flows. It was a scary image, but not quite so scary as a few
moments later when the man stands close by as a huge lava flow, towering above
all the rocks previously deposited, agonizingly makes its way downhill. Eventually,
this image too is turned upside down, the film-maker managing to show in one
memorable shot how similar the texture of an elephant’s skin looks to the lava
bed the man has been walking over. The elephant is in Hawaii’s antipode,
Botswana. And the final pairing is a coastal point on the east coast of the
North Island of New Zealand, where a huge whale has washed up on the shore and
is just breathing its last as local people come with their earth-moving
equament, tractors and big mechanical shovels in the hope of movng the carcass
to a place where it can be safey buried. No hope, however: the animal is far
too heavy for our machines, so after standing around a lot, they decide to cut the
carcass into manageable lengths and then bury it further up the beach. A final
image that is memorable in the film comes when the shot of the immense carcass
is paired, upside down, against a volcanic landscape that looks almost exactly like
the whale.
I thought this was one of the best-achieved “art” films I
had seen in a long time. It is easy to get an idea for a film that should
attract attention and hold interest; but it is fiendishy difficult to actually
turn that idea into a film. Kossakovsky has managed it with small human touches
throughout, like the Latin American shepherd, living alone in a tiny house in
which he is baking bread while he tries his best to keep his seven huge cats
from burning themselves on the oven, as they march in and out, round and about
the little room.
You keep smiling to yourself at the infinite variety,
resourcefulness, and careless decency of people everywhere. And that puts you
in the mood to wonder at the splendour of the landscape around Lake Baikal, the
mountains of New Zealand, the power of Hawaii’s lava landscape.
At the end of this film one wants to shout, “Hurrah for the
human race! Hurrah for this beautiful Earth.!”
No comments:
Post a Comment