Lions live here — Faultline

In the frenzy of Trumpism: Elon Musk, 2024

The world is a terra incognita: sometimes a barren land, sometimes a sultry wilderness, populated by demons and powerful animals. “Hic sunt leones” (Lions live here) was written on the old maps wherever the unexplored territory began and the knowledge of the age reached its limits.

There are many such blank spots on the maps that Alejandro, a young noble courtier, repeatedly looks into while he rides from Madrid to Paris around 1650, accompanied by two soldiers. Alejandro is the main character of "Les Indes", the exciting film by the Franco-Swiss directing duo Pauline Julier and Nicolas Chapoulier in the independent section "Giornate degli Autori" at the "Mostra", the Venice Film Festival. On behalf of the Spanish court, he is supposed to deliver a portrait by the painter Diego Velázquez, which shows the future bride of King Louis XIV. The film tells of this journey across a Europe that is known today from the paintings and stories of courtly society. But the world outside is primitive and dangerous.

How can you organize and understand the world? Where is there still truth and knowledge in the post-truth world? And what's the point of cinema that's more than escapism?

The first pictures show Velázquez at work, the last ones show the recipient looking at the painting. The relationship between artist and audience and the question of the extent to which an image or a map or a work of art can represent reality are the underlying narrative threads that hold “Les Indes” together: a finely chiseled, clever, at the same time curiously observing and reflective film that is reminiscent of the work of the Catalan Albert Serra and the Argentinian Lucrecia Martel as well as the cultural stories of Michel Foucault. The title "the India" refers to the "New World", as America was initially called, and the stories about its colonization, which, somewhere between reportage and adventure novel, once kept all of Europe in suspense. In the eyes of the filmmakers and their main character, this Europe itself suddenly appears as foreign and adventurous, an unknown country that, like its inhabitants, will be colonized and civilized by the people of the courts. Alejandro represents this view of a conqueror and civilizer who is friendly and curious, but very consistent in his intention to explore the order of things, creates it and imposes it on the circumstances.

The lion is also the magnificent and playful heraldic animal of Venice, which once ruled the Mediterranean as a maritime republic and still lives very well today in the shadow of its former glory. The beauty of this city represents the greatest competition for any of the more than 120 films shown this year on the Lido, the narrow strip of land in front of the Venetian Lagoon.

In fact, many films were about the themes that are unfolded so beautifully and casually in “Les Indes”: How can one organize and understand the world? Where is there still truth and knowledge in the post-truth world? And what's the point of cinema that's more than escapism?

These questions touched on a festival that first and foremost wants to assert itself as a “brand” in competition with other festivals, before possibly also helping to shape the world of cinema as an actor. The Mostra is the clear number two festival after Cannes and has become the launching pad for the Oscars. This time, however, the number of US films fell noticeably. The crisis of the cinema, i.e. increasing standardization in terms of content and style with shrinking budgets and declining audience interest, was clearly visible.

Festival director Alberto Barbera made up for the lack of US feature films with some striking English-language documentaries. Above all, "Musk", Alex Gibney's cultural history of the digitalization of the world as a surprisingly entertaining four-hour marathon journey into the head of Elon Musk. Gibney is an excellent journalist and avoids trite polemics. But everything is getting sharper by the minute, especially since he has exciting people to talk to: Musk's ex-wife, an ex-lover, former work colleagues and Musk's father. The film becomes a profound psychoanalysis that connects Musk's digital, rocket, car, AI and reproductive dreams with the "men's fantasies" of Klaus Theweleit, who explains fascism from men's history and body theory. The digital is just an even more perfect “armouring”, the reaction to a world that is experienced as chaotic, contingent and unpredictable. And Musk is a human terminator who wants to abolish chance. The ultimate consequence of this fantasy is no longer the armored body, but the armored world.

Musk is a human terminator who wants to abolish chance.

The longest documentary project in Venice lasts around eight hours and comes from Luca Guadagnino: "Joie de vivre" is a deep dive into 20th century cinephilia and the films of Guadagnino's teacher Bernardo Bertolucci. You are quickly captivated by the images, which are reminiscent of a cinema that was committed, intellectual and sensual. In his films “1900” and “The Last Emperor,” Bertolucci succeeded in capturing the entire 20th century, with all its questions, ideologies and distortions, in one film.

Since then, perhaps no one has succeeded in this as well as the Russian Ilya Chrschanovsky, who lives in England. "Dau", the third film part of which was screened in the competition, is an incomparable project whose 20-year production history cannot be discussed here, nor can the connection with the two "Dau" films that were shown at the Berlinale a few years ago.

A tour de force through Soviet history, starting in 1928 and ending 40 years later, in two parts with an intermission. This is not the only thing that reminds us of Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist", which - after the Soviet filmmaker Dsiga Vertov - is most likely a reference and comparison film for everything here: in its basic feeling, also in a certain mania and willfulness that the director shares with his main character, the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Lev "Dau" Landau (1908-1968), whose biography serves very freely as a template, but above all in its visuality, which is repeated again and again actually conjures up new images and moments; in an attempt to bring intellectual and artistic, especially creative processes, in short: the brilliant onto the screen.

In Leningrad 1928, a stream of consciousness unfolds at the start of the film that leaves you staggering through the streets with a subjective camera for minutes. You are right in the middle of the big dream of Red October, the idea of constructing the New Man through Soviet power and electrification. In streets with rats, dirt and crowds, apartments with wallpaper by Kandinsky and Malevich, plus bright colors, mirrors, triangles, distortions. Young women in fur coats quote Mayakovsky and Lenin, dashing young men in red jackets and light blue pajamas discuss their future in a hell together with Bakunin and Dostoyevsky. The noisy chaos goes on and on, always presenting new spaces and visual wonders, of which skyscraper-sized posters and six-engine propeller behemoths are just the obvious ones. The order of things can only be established indirectly.

You are right in the middle of the big dream of Red October, the idea of constructing the New Man through Soviet power and electrification

»Dau« succeeds in revitalizing cinema as a concept of the world and thus building on a tradition that, like Godard and Bertolucci, does not want to separate between art and life. And the film takes a new look at history, is a defense of its complexity and gaps, multi-perspective, structural and materialistic.

You will look in vain for simple answers and quick theses in “Dau”. This kind of simple truth is not coming back.