Programme 4

New worlds are founded by plants without the need for violence. Sometimes, a human accompanies them and is inspired by their genius for shapes (they give shape and give themselves shape). For those who go about distracted or in a hurry, the conclusive proof of this is in flowers. Sapovnela is a film filled with them, or in other words, it is erotic. Flowers relate with the sun, with the bees and with the cows; Iosseliani relates them with an almost hundred-year-old florist and with music. The filmmaker plays with the floral arrangements of the florist and the open flowers, like open mouths, sing. What have the sudden plough, asphalt and steamroller got to do with anything? What relation could there be between the lilies of the field and that black, abrasive and foul-smelling layer? Faced with the swindle of progress the first to rebel are the senses.

Fire, although it also destroys, does relate with plants. Some trees await it, even favour it, to reproduce themselves better. As if we had not left Georgia, Small Smoke at Blaze Creek starts with a flower. But we are in British Columbia and that flower is called “fireweed” because it grows in abundance after fires. A forest of Douglas firs burns. It is a forest and, at the same time, a timber factory; we have seen how they took the dead trunks away in a truck. The flames get inside the living trunks, the fire taking hold. The firefighters do their job (small planes, retardants; hoses, water; chainsaws, firebreaks) and the filmmaker does his, which consists of deploying an extraordinary sensitivity towards the figures created and left behind by the fire.

Another coniferous forest: black pines, cedars of Lebanon, junipers, and Taurus firs, like the Taurus mountains of Turkey where they live and to which they are endemic. Also living there, part of the year, are the Tahtacılar, which means “carpenters”. In the film they are woodcutters hired by the state, proletarianised nomads. The girl Fatma and her not much older brother work in the forest with axes and chainsaws; except for the babies everyone works. The chainsaws are transported by mules. There is still some correspondence between the harshness of the work and that of its result: Fatma and company suffer, they have a right bunch of scars and no health cover, the centenary trees fall. And there is also, still, some correspondence between the beauty of the forest and that of these people, their faces, songs, dances. A tree is a person, a forest is a people.

Fatma dreamt of living in the city and the Finnish woodcutters now live in cities. They learn the trade with rubber chainsaws and then they drive to work, an hour away. They join trade unions, use helmets. They handle heavy machinery (of a different weight to a 20-kilo chainsaw held by a child), they are the brain of prodigious metal monsters that cut, prune and segment trunks in a single continuous movement. They have a sense of rhythm, a musical streak. The Finnish woodcutters work in private and cultivated forests. They log during the winter and replant spruce or pine saplings during the summer. Someone said that “if the silk-worm’s object in spinning were to prolong its existence as caterpillar, it would be a perfect example of a wage-worker”. These spruce or pine saplings grow without knowing it to become timber, not trees; their destiny is written in account books. They are the perfect example of wage-workers.

Another playful filmmaker: Amy Halpern. In cinema, like in forests, dead trunks can rise again (of a different resurrection, against time and, therefore, impossible). The resurrection is the doing of the editing, but the film also documents and we see, more prosaically, how an urban tree is cut down. A palm tree. It is not allowed to fall, because it would fall on top of the cars, ain’t that a shame, so the cutting is done from the top, it is disassembled. If only the happiness one feels, in solidarity, from living being to living being, when Halpern assembles it again, were to spread and reign. If only we desired with all our strength the possible resurrections.