Underskog

noPlace proudly presents:

ROMANIYA

Jon Eirik Kopperud & Saman Kamyab

25.02.11 – 06.03.11

Opening: Friday 25.02.11, 19.00 – 23.00
…
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

“I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” – Kusturica

“I’m tired I’m true of heart. You’re tired you’re true of heart.” – Dave Eggers

“The man stands between life and death. The man thinks… The fish is mute. expressionless. The fish doesn’t think, because the fish knows everything. The fish knows everything.” – Kusturica

The films of Jon Eirik Kopperud and Saman Kamyab, walk the tightrope between profundity and stupidity, or rather, the characters of these films do, and by extension, so do the scripts. Tellingly, a balancing act starts it off. The floor has been removed so he walks carefully along the girders to avoid falling. (Tap tap tap tap, along the girders, drag from cigarette, tap, drag, tap, drag, wipe greasy strand of hair from down forehead to behind ear…pretend the camera isn’t there… tri-li-li…)

This casually choreographed risk-taking mirrors the process of writing a screenplay where every shot is by default embedded in reference. Here even idiocy is construed as meaningful. Add to that the absence of dramatic structure, and you’re left with a dangerously open set of compositional possibility. But this premise is also the only one where subjectivity thrives (always at the cost of “story” or a guiding convention). There is no real fall waiting for that slip. Because: Slipping from what exactly? The structure here is ad-hoc, for the purpose of his walk. A supporting beam is always underneath his foot, wherever he chooses to place it.

But however makeshift the living-situation of the two boys, their decision to stay together in this cold, decrepit house, seems crucial; and it resounds, almost to the point of pathetic-overload, with the pertinent question of: Why? Why together? Why the motions of family life: Cooking, cleaning dishes, cutting hair, singing? These gestures of sharing and catering, exchanged across the void of not belonging anywhere, stand in for the lack of functional relations to the outside. And their world-of-only-two is what prevents this act of reclusion from receeding into adolescent negation, because it embraces the emphatic principle of one human being adjusting to and caring for another (love), and therefore poises a socially viable alternative. Our inability is not to love it`s our inability to recieve it. The desire to not being a part of anything, not belonging anywhere. A protest (an objection?a revolt?) against not beeing needed. HEEDED. Which acts needs to be done, heeds to be acted upon? What words has to be uttered?

The social algorithm conjured in the edit goes: One, two, one, two, alone, together, alone, together, they alone, he alone, they alone, he alone. Alone together… This dialectic is the story’s basic conflict. To realize, like the two china cats, that of the third little cat, only its ass is left. Having laughed it off.

Purity is a defensless aestethic. Broken china breaks my heart. To underline a statement which can not be understood unless you`re in it.

Magnus Vatvedt @ Podium the same day