In Sharunas Bartas’ Winter Light
At Dusk by Sharunas Bartas (b. 1964) will be released as soon as the cinemas reopen. A Lithuanian village resists the Soviet occupation after the Second World War. Between daily details, historical weight and autobiographical dimension, this Cannes 2020 film confirms a development already evident in the previous works of the Lithuanian.
The violence and poetry of snowy landscapes persist.
Discovering Sharunas Bartas’s new film, In the Dusk, we find one of the opening shots of which he has the secret, which invite us to travel into his remote interiors. Here he captures the fleeting emotion of a landscape in an overall shot, there a winter composition, framed in low angle as if we were contemplating the tops of the two conifers leaning on either side of the frame, with the random floating of the flakes that melt on us. As is often the case with this powerful sensory filmmaker, the impression of glaciation, induced by the cracking of the trees, is very physical. The film that revealed Sharunas Bartas, Three Days (1993), showed another winter landscape, where a river still covered with ice was flowing, as if echoing the totally frozen waters in In Memory of the Day Passed By (1990), a medium-length “documentary” film. Corridor (1994) opened on a set of roofs from which smoke was rising. Few of Us (1996) began with a suburban landscape, all horizontal lines, with an inordinately long train. As for Freedom (2000), quite rightly defined by the film director Nicolas Klotz as “enclosed in the last minutes of the last century” and “a border between yesterday’s world and today’s”, (1) it moved this cinema from the east to the south, with a shot of a port area invaded by the blue of the sky and the sea. In short, the matrix of Sharunas Bartas’ cinema as a landscape from which figures are absent.
END OF UTOPIA
We could suppose a return to familiar territory if the following insert hadn’t previously appeared: “1948—Lithuania is occupied by troops of the Soviet army, which is ravaging the country. The citizens suffer from economic, political and social repression. Partisan resistance is underway.” Resolutely timeless hitherto, might Sharunas Bartas’ cinema has become not only historical but full of intentions, demonstrations even? No. Joining the gesture of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa in In the Fog (2013), which told another story of partisans and denunciation, this time in Belarus, in 1942, he invites us on a journey to the end of night, a twilight of humanity entirely concentrated in a small community where the tragedy of lies and cruelty is played out.
Taking on this historical weight in all its complexity is a cinematic gesture that is unexpected, to say the least, in the poet Sharunas Bartas, even if the epilogue of The House (1997) suggested the end of the dreamy utopia, in a house full of presences as beautiful as they are enigmatic, where violence arose with the shooting dead of one of the inhabitants, followed by the intrusion of a column of armoured vehicles and soldiers occupying the surrounding area, as the narrator confided in voice-over: “I want to believe that we aren’t going to disappear.” More recently, Frost (2017) brought its young drifting heroes, Rokas and Inga, to the conflict zone in Ukraine. The state of war there was made more and more tangible by the nights in hotels, the passing of checkpoints, meetings with witnesses, until the arrival at the theatre of the conflict. Shot in part on a front line still active, Frost was like a nightmare, all the
more disturbing as the border between fiction and documentary recording of a tangible, physically graspable state of war became blurred.
In the Dusk seems to be extensively nourished by this previous experience. With this wintry opening shot, it is connected to the unforgettable, vertiginous final high-angle shot which, in Frost, isolated the main character in a snowy setting where the journey ended. Furthermore, everything happens as if the dark matter of that film were a destructive force spilling over into the next.The first sequence is set in a bivouac of partisans resisting the Soviet invader. (2) In some ten silent shots, it writes a non-verbal narrative: close-ups on haggard faces with withdrawn gazes, the capture of daily gestures, fluid camera movements accompanying the rare displacements in the heart of the camp, sound of the wind and trees. One thinks of two previous works by the filmmaker, Seven Invisible Men (2005) and Eastern Drift (2010), films that could be described as “detective films” by clinging to the motifs of a meticulous description, stretched over time, of communities that have decided to stubbornly live on the margins.
A shot of snowy nature seems to close this prologue, so the white lettering of the title, In the Dusk, emerges and the snowfall seems to connect this space to that of an isolated farmhouse. If the sequence begins with the bathing of a young man—Ounté, the owner’s adopted son—according to a persistent principle frequent in Bartas’ work, the sequel begins a small, less usual social drama. The peasant Jurgis Pliauga seems above all preoccupied by the threat of the Soviet presence, signified by a portrait of Stalin in the newspaper, which the old man scrutinises with a magnifying glass. A whole complex scenography materialises in a process of en
closing through the shot-counter-shot system, as well as through the use of a verbal flow that is unusual for the filmmaker.
POET OF SPACE
This contrast between sudden poetic surges and the theatrical flow of dialogue as the narrative unfolds is a new tension. During a visit to neighbours, where the drama of settling scores was played out, a little girl plays with the feathers of a quilt in the winter light. Further on in the story, a long take shows two deer swimming in ice-bleached water just before the penultimate act of the tragedy is played out. Following the example of Albert Serra in The Death of Louis XIV (2016), Sharunas Bartas seems to sparingly inject the power of fascination of the long take into a tight narrative economy, of which the main subject is the adventure of a body: here the bodies of the characters as much as the dismantled body of a country.
Before Frost, another important creative turning point was achieved with Peace to Us in Our Dreams (2015), a film with a particularly moving autobiographical dimension as an elegy of lost happiness, one that united the director and the late actress Yekaterina Golubeva, his muse and wife in the 1990s. A deliberately fragile, intimate film, this opus told the story of the mourning of a man and his daughter (played by the filmmaker and his daughter), but nevertheless generated the possibilities of vitality regained despite the loss. Although it was nothing new for Bartas to assert himself as a powerful poet of space, there appeared there a form of luminous appeasement from which the filmmaker was able to draw the necessary strength to confront the harshness of the material of the last two opuses. In 2015 he confides: “As much as possible, I choose places that I like, that inspire me, that I feel like openings, and that offer the characters more resources. I never film a landscape for its own sake, what interests me are the connections between spaces and people.This gives humanity to landscapes and savagery to humans, there is a cross-over effect.” But let’s return to In the Dusk which, like Frost, seems to weave its thread in an elliptical way at first to better confront us with the emergence of tragedy. A death in the course of a stroll, the story of a personal drama that Pliauga lived through, the attentive observation by the shoemaker of the Soviet occupier’s command post are only the premises of an inexorable mechanism that will lead to the emergence of violence. Violence that can be described as terrible and obscene, even if Bartas uses the force of Bressonian metonymy during the execution of a traitor, and the force of the Rosselinian off-camera during a torture session, as terrifying as that of Rome, Open City (1946).
After having confronted the figures of Hitler in Moloch (1999), Lenin in Taurus (2001) and Hirohito in The Sun (2006), Alexander Sokurov declared: “This tragedy shouldn’t be on an historical scale, but primitive, everyday, intimate.” (3)There is no doubt that Sharunas Bartas also inscribes the tragedies of the 20th century in the primitive, the everyday, the intimate, with a remarkable sensory force. In the Dusk reminds us how much the cinema of the East remains a vast territory of creative possibilities.
Translation: Chloé Baker
(1) Nicolas Klotz, Élégie 99. Post Freedom, in Robert Bonamy (ed.), Sharunas Bartas ou les hautes solitudes, De l’incidence éditeur / Centre Pompidou, 2016. (2) The resistance of Lithuania, occupied after 1940 by the USSR, led to numerous deportations to Siberia. It was the first country of the Soviet block to declare its independence, in 1990. (3) Alexandre Sokurov, «Thèses des cours à la faculté de philosophie », in Au Coeur de l'Océan, L’Âge d'homme, 2015.
Jean-Jacques Manzanera is a teacher and a critic for the magazine artpress, among other media. He has also contributed to collective works devoted to Bruno Dumont, Roman Polanski and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Sharunas Bartas
Né en / born 1964 à / in Šiauliai (Lituanie) Filmographie (sélection) / Film work (selection):
2017 Frost (120 min) ; 2016 Watermark (Aqua Alta)
(90 min) ; 2015 Peace to Us in Our Dreams (107 min) ; 2013 Marussia (83 min), Les Salauds (100 min) ; 2009 Indigène d’Eurasie (110 min) ; 2004 Seven Invisible Men (119 min) ; 2000 Freedom (96 min) ;
1999 Pola X (135 min) ; 1997 The House (120 min) ; 1996 Few of Us (105 min)
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