Landscapes of Stillness
A note on Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (2012), the collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain
By Gianluca Pulsoni · 2012
Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days is an engaging work emerging from a vital strand of recent European film production and research: that of Ireland. More specifically, it is a remarkable achievement by its authors, the Iranian filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of the Experimental Film Society (EFS), and the Irish filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, who is also a film critic and editor of Experimental Conversations, the journal of Cork Film Centre.
Produced with the support of The Guesthouse, Cork, and announced by an online trailer, the film is a four-hour feature composed of two parts of equal length. It consists of a chain of potential, floating micro-narratives centred on different human figures, their actions, interactions, and relationships. These are framed and juxtaposed within dreamlike imagery, forming a continuum defined both by a precise soundtrack—which isolates, shapes, and abstracts the realism of the filming—and by rhythmic editing. This editing often establishes, and at times accentuates, a kind of binary language between intensities (underlying visual patterns) and discontinuities (regular cuts functioning as punctuation marks).
It may be said that Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days entails a cultural undertaking whose theoretical ambitions appear close to a phenomenological approach. Like entomologists of movement, Rashidi and Le Cain search for and record the “appearances of stillness” by reframing its degree-zero state in life, thereby revealing possible kinetic representations and signs: landscape. As rectangle, painting, and schema, landscape is the “field” in which the boundaries between time and space collapse; it seems to be the “key” with which the filmmakers open the gates of perception, much as poetry does.
Indeed, what emerges visually from these segments is the framework of a fascinating and highly personal landscape that binds and hybridises figures and environments. It configures, or simply unfolds, geometric and abstract forces, thereby defining a viewpoint through which all the places filmed by the authors throughout Cork—buildings, harbour, countryside, and so forth—gradually acquire an anti-naturalistic impression of reality. This impression may be unwittingly influenced by certain renowned movements in the visual arts, including Minimalism, Hyperrealism, and even Suprematism, and is enacted through scattered gestures, temporary postures, and anonymous poses.
“Everything looks as though it were stationary”: this is the immediate impression produced by the staging. “But in different ways”: this is what might be added to the more profound expression revealed by the filmmakers’ observation. Here, Rashidi and Le Cain emphasise nothing more than the materiality of the elements involved in cinematic staging—image, sound, acting, and editing. Each of these elements resonates autonomously through its own volumes, tones, variations, and rhythms; together, they shape an open structure, a work in progress that is fully evoked in the second part, Still Days.
At once an artistic experiment and a possible manifesto, the film seems, through its compelling exploration of the arrest and fluctuation of particular cinematic dynamics, to achieve nothing less than a surprising series of landscapes of stillness.
Preservation copy. Reconstructed from the author’s original Word document, supplied by Rouzbeh Rashidi. The document’s own metadata records Gianluca Pulsoni as author and 1 October 2012 as its creation date. The article’s original online location is no longer available.
