Quodlibetica

Wilderness in the Cinema

Written By: Staff Constellation 04 9.23.09

We asked several cinephiles – historians of film, artists, film makers, and other aficionados–to send us their picks for films that engage with the idea of wilderness and the wild. Films criticisms are linked to other related articles throughout the magazine. Use the comments section to add more films that you think should be on the list.

Mothlight (1963) D: Stan Brakhage. Legend has it that at some point in 1963 Stan Brakhage was so broke that he couldn’t afford film stock.  He had light, to be sure.  What he needed was something to project it through.  When dining outdoors with his wife and her parents he was distracted by a sizzle and a zap—a bug zapper, one of those mechanisms that lure little creaProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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res, like moths, with ultraviolet light and electrify them on the spot.  ZZZZ.  Once dead, the moths he saw were stuck to a grid of wire mesh, wings spread, filtering the light. This filtering, they say, is the genesis of Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963).  Mothlight is a three-minute film made without a camera.  Instead, putting a spin on the photogram (or Rayograph, as in Man Ray’s Retour à la raison of 1923), Brakhage gathered dead moths, dead flies, dead leaves, seeds, stems, and so on—the detritus of the earth—and arranged this material in between two pieces of transparent editing tape which was perforated, measured to 16mm, and was therefore capable of running through a projector.  The collage film he produced is a film about light, color, rhythm, movement, projection, life and death, and the raw materials of the earth, and it may just indicate the cinema’s most direct engagement with the wilderness. – Jonathan Thomas

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) D: Werner Herzog. A fine telling of the story of Pizarro’s doomed search for the golden city of El Dorado in the 16^th century. Herzog is not interested in heroism or even tragedy. Rather, he fixes his unblinking camera on his vainglorious characters as they drift through a wilderness whose staring indifference to them presents humiliating ends for their quixotic adventure. Perhaps this is why, even as he presents starving, raving lunacy, Herzog seems to be holding back a case of the giggles. – Collier White

Visa de censure numéro X (1975 ) D: Pierre Clémenti. By the end of the 1960s, the actor Pierre Clémenti had worked with Luchino Visconti, Luis Buñuel, Bernardo Bertolucci, Philippe Garrel, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.  In 1967, high on LSD, he began directing his first film (finished in 1975): Visa de censure numéro X.  If one enters the wilderness to seek visions or mystical vibrations, here it is.  Set to Dionysian rock music by Ivan Coaquette and Cyrille Verdeaux, the images are an ode to ecstasy.  Indeed, the piece opens in high ritual as Clémenti himself, buck naked, surrounded by a circular blue light, exits a cave and climbs onto a rock where a woman (perhaps a witch?) sits in front of a burning fire.  Blue turns to a florescent pink.  Colors palpitate. Superimpositions abound.  Music swells.  It’s psychedelic.  It’s about sensations. In short, it’s one of the wildest films I know.  - J.T.

Two Solutions for One Problem (1975) and Orderly or Disorderly (1981) D: Abbas Kiarostami. In 1970, in Tehran, Abbas Kiarostami started his career as a filmmaker at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.  His first films were short, poetic, and designed (as the name of the Institute tells us) for the edification of children.  Many of these films are gems.  But there are two that I would highlight here, for their thematic affinity is marked by a performed distinction between structure and chaos—an antithesis that effectively operates as the conceptual basis of the wilderness.

Dow Rahehal Baraye yek Massaleh (Two Solutions for One Problem, Abbas Kiarostami, 1975) introduces us to two young boys, Nader and his friend Dara, alone in a classroom.  Dara returns a book to Nadar, the lender, but the book has been torn.  The film proceeds by acting out, first, a tit-for-tat resolution as the two boys, rather than communicating and fixing the book, take turns inflicting damages on one another: Nader responds by tearing Dara’s book, Dara breaks his pencil, and so on and so forth.  This—wildness—culminates in loss, misery, a black eye and a wounded forehead; nobody’s happy.  Kiarostami then starts over.  We’re back in the classroom with the two boys, as we were at the start, only this time, when Dara returns the book, the damage is immediately addressed.  The boys remain calm and cooperative, Dara glues the book back together, and in the end they’re pals on the playground.  Lesson learned.

Be Tartib ya Bedoun-e Tartib (Orderly or Disorderly, Abbas Kiarostami, 1981), adapts the same formal principle.  Here, instead of one, he takes a series of scenarios and shows them twice, once disorderly, once orderly, to examine how they play out with and without structure.  For instance, shot one: a group of school children all rush to get onto the school bus simultaneously.  The result: chaos; the door is clogged, and everyone argues.  Shot two: the children line up and things seem to work fine.  Or again, shot one: a traffic intersection in Tehran without traffic signs and without a traffic conductor.  Wilderness.  Shot two: a traffic conductor orchestrates the flow, and everyone moves along.   (Paging Dr. Freud…) – J.T.

Never Cry Wolf (1983) D: Carroll Ballard. Never Cry Wolf set the bar for wilderness escapism in the “me” decade. This beloved film uses Farley Mowat’s memoir of his Arctic lycanthropy expedition to create the ultimate myth of the white man gone native in a designated wilderness. Hiro Narita’s expressive photography oozes romanticism as technique. While Mark Isham’s throbbing score opens the empathy receptors, Narita lowers his camera to show only the shadows of dogs, wolves and men as they cross the tundra. Want to understand the myth that drives middle class white men to hurl their bodies recklessly into the wild? This is your movie. - C.W.

Blissfully Yours (2002) D: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. A bouncy Thai samba may signal the entry of the main characters of Blissfully Yours into their jungle getaway but the wild is not so welcoming to all who come there. The jungle, as depicted in the film, operates as a kind of echo chamber for the characters’ emotional states. Two Thai women intertwined with an illegal Burmese immigrant diverge in how the pastoral affects them. In lingering takes, one woman finds rest and joy in the lapping water and bird sounds while the jungle’s quiet hum only heightens the other’s quietly despairing alienation within their threesome. Even within an idyll, things aren’t necessarily ideal. – Aaron Layman

The Time of the Wolf (Le temps du lupe) (2003 ) D: Michael Haneke. A disaster has occurred in the city, something serious, but we never know what it is.  All we know is that the film begins with a middle class family-of-four arriving to their secluded cabin, presumably in France, in a luxury SUV packed with the basic provisions: bottled water, canned food, dry goods.  They enter their home with their hands full, only to discover that others have occupied it, and that the prerogatives of private property are no longer operative.

The event that erupts in this opening scene, off-screen, destabilizes the spectator (something Michael Haneke is good at).  From here forward, once the middle class Europeans are stripped of their sense of security and cast into the harsh landscape, like refugees, Le temps du lupe becomes a film about survival, about the aggressive economics of human interaction, and perhaps ultimately about the precarious nature of community formation in the face of the will to power.  It’s about the wilderness in us all, and it’s grim.  But it’s here, precisely in its negativity, that its critical generosity can be found. – J.T.

Lost (2004 to present) J.J. Abrams’ stunning series imagines the wilderness as a laboratory for a thousand thought experiments. The unmapped island on which the castaways find themselves proves to be both Eden and Purgatory, and in the show’s first three seasons, the helpfully named characters (e.g. John Locke) are subjected to trials both natural and supernatural to test their philosophies and work out their salvation. An essay on human understanding it isn’t, but as a catalog of all the flights of imagination still possible within our millennial understanding of wilderness, the first few seasons of Lost can’t be beaten. - C.W.

Tropical Malady (2004) D: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Weerasethakul, one of the key voices in contemporary cinema, is a Thai filmmaker who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The formal procedure that characterizes his recent work is somewhat similar to the one Kiarostami deployed in the pieces described above.  Put simply, his films are marked by narrative rupture.  They begin, they break, and they begin again.  Sud pralad (Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) is a love story, although to say that his films are about story would be misleading, even if they are, in interesting ways, films about narrative invention.  Perhaps it would be better to say that Tropical Malady has the atmosphere of a love story.  The first part of the film focuses on the relationship between a young soldier, Keng, and a country boy, Tong.  But half way through the film Tong disappears.  At this point, there’s the rupture: we stare at a black screen.  When the images return, we are somewhere else.  We’re in the jungle—among the wild.  As the director explains, “In Tropical Malady, like in my previous film Blissfully Yours, I set the jungle as one of the main characters. But this time the jungle is active, reacting more to the character’s mind. This character is a man in love. He is attached to another man who may or may not be real…”  Perhaps we could say that the wilderness, here, becomes a screen for projection. Follow your desire, it says.– J.T.

The New World (2005) D: Terrence Malick. It is said that when Europeans arrived on the American continents, they perceived the natives as they did the wolves – as a part of the landscape, something to be feared, but not something worthy of human rights. In this film, Malick gives himself permission to explore the romantic possibilities of that state of mind. He is almost nostalgic for Captain Smith’s ignorance, his partial enlightenment, and the way that civilization variously ravages his Pocahontas. Flouting political correctness from its title to its final frame, The New World posits its European characters’ ignorance as endemic to their bliss – a bliss that is neither pleasure nor ease, but rife with possibilities for heroism and romance. – C.W.

Grizzly Man (2005) D: Werner Herzog and Timothy Treadwell. Of course, the most stunning images here are the ones taken by Tim Treadwell and his friend Amie Huguenard in the 13 summers they spent with the Grizzly Bears before they were killed by the objects of their affectionate mythologizing. In what is perhaps the cinema’s most complete example of bathos, Herzog takes the story of a vain, ineffectual naturalist and renders it as the tragicomedy of a mock-hero prancing with bears. Astonishingly cruel and absolutely hilarious. – C.W.

Into The Wild (2005 ) D: Sean Penn. This adaptation of Jonathan Krakauer’s biography of Christopher McCandless immerses itself in a privileged perspective on wilderness. The odyssey of the white trust-funder into the Alaskan wild – armed with much ideology and little knowledge – has Generation X written all over it. Add to that the braying vocals of Eddie Vedder on the soundtrack, and you have Wilderness 2.0. But Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch (as McCandless) are too honest to let the resonant contradictions of McCandless’s wanderlust go unchecked. The film leaves the body of McCandless as exhibit “A” in the case for a better philosophical respect for the idea of wilderness. – C.W.

The Mourning Forest (2007) D: Naomi Kawase. Over the past decade, Naomi Kawase has emerged as one of the most interesting figures in documentary cinema: her work is intimate, sometimes painfully intimate, and introspective in the diary mode.  In 2007 she made her first feature-length narrative film, Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest), which was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is subtle; it’s about lost objects and the struggle to feel alive.  As in her other films, Kawase (who was raised by her grandparents) is concerned here with aging, and with the immanent proximity of death.  The Mourning Forest examines the relationship between a young woman, Machiko, and an old man, Shigeki.  The old man is a widower of 33 years, still in grief, suffering from Alzheimer’s.  The young woman is a caretaker at his retirement home, although she too has lost someone: her young son.  Midway through the film, Machiko takes Shigeki for a drive, only her car breaks down on the edge of the forest.  Shigeki wanders into the forest, in search of his wife, and Machiko follows.  From here forward, as the two try to find their way, Kawase presents us with a beautiful figuration of the wilderness—as a place, as a relation, and as an emotional disposition. – J.T.