2. Bed of Flowers

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12 films, documentaries, erik knudsen, films

Bed of Flowers (2001) is a TV-length documentary about Lancashire theatre company Horse and Bamboo as they put on a show called The Girl Who Cut Flowers. The documentary follows the company as they put together the show, from early concepts and prop making, through various stages of rehearsal to the actual performance.

Like much of what I’ve seen of director Erik Knudsen’s work, it’s not an entirely conventional documentary, having no voice over, long sections without dialogue and no one ever speaking directly to camera. On a couple of occasions discussion between senior production staff takes place with the participants angled towards the camera as though it were a participant, albeit a silent one, in the creative discussion. Clearly the director had built up a great deal of trust with his subject by this point. There are fascinating sections as the puppeteers work to build their ‘girl’.

Early in the film there is a somewhat odd sequence in one of the workshops with the puppet girl, which is clearly a constructed sequence and the only scene to feature non-digetic music. It feels almost like a fragment of another film, a blurring of fiction and reality, which the viewer then expects to continue throughout the film but it doesn’t. It’s almost as though the filmmakers began making one type of film and then ended up making another one entirely, but kept that scene because they liked it. It feels out of place looking back on it, like it should have been discarded; yet it also feels as though it was left in purposefully, to undermine the viewer’s perception of reality and to feed back into the play itself.

Watching the film is a bit of an odd experience and I can’t help but feel that it’s incomplete without seeing the final theatre production. I suspect in that way the viewers of the play have missed something in not seeing this documentary alongside it. In that way it feels more like a companion to the theatre production rather than an entirely separate entity. Rather than being solely about the production it has become a part of the production. Given that the director has gone on to collaborate more directly with the production company, producing the audiovisual elements of another production it is possible to infer that this was, if not the intended outcome, certainly one they were aware of at the time.

This is fly on the wall filmmaking but not as we know it. Whether this is the genre at its purest and most distilled or a glimpse at the next level of its evolution is up to the viewer to decide.

Short Film Reviews: Vainilla Chip (2009), The Yoruba Tree (2005)

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cuba, erik knudsen, films, short films

The following are two short documentaries filmed in the Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños near Havana four years apart, by Erik Knudsen – the academic/documentary maker of Danish/Ghanaian origin, not to be confused with the Canadian actor of the same name. Both are short and not entirely conventional examples of the documentary genre, but oddly compelling viewing nonetheless.

Vainilla Chip (2009) is a short, only 17 minutes long, documentary. It follows a day in the life of elderly ice-cream maker Javier Rodriguez Casanova. The viewer watches him dawn to dusk, as he goes through his routine of making ice-cream and looking after his business, framed by the rituals he has developed around grieving his wife. There is no dialogue or voice-over in the film, yet there is something compulsive about watching Javier at work, his grief is etched in his face and his actions. Following a routine he has clearly followed for a long time, with an unspoken knowledge that if he didn’t his grief would consume him.

This is a film about grief and loss, and how life goes on despite it. There’s a metaphor there is you want it, but whether for Cuba or for the human condition in general is left up to the individual viewer.

The Yoruba Tree (2005) is only just over 5 minutes long and on the surface is almost as different from Vainilla Chip as it is possible to be.

Whereas Vainilla Chip is about how an individual’s story can apply to a much wider population, The Yoruba Tree is about how a big wide event, in this case the impact of slavery on Cuban culture, affects individuals. It also has a narration, which is spoken in a rather lyrical fashion, as though the narrator was reading a poem, or perhaps recounting a story that has been passed down through many generations. It seems at once like fiction and like oral history, guiding the viewer to understand the connection between past and present as embodied by the woman’s actions and the continuing presence of the tree.

What the two films have in common, other than their location, is their use of sound. The natural and human sounds of the locations are not removed or lowered in volume; instead they are fore grounded. In place of the voice of the human protagonist that we are following, instead we have the sounds of their location, placing the person within the context of their wider geographic location. It’s obviously part of the naturalistic style of the documentaries, but it also gives the viewer the impression that they are listening to the sounds they would be hearing if they were standing where the camera stands. It makes the films feel less mediated, more raw, but in a good way.