“Western 4.33”
This masterpiece by Aryan Kaganof takes its name from the combination of the word “Western” and John Cage’s composition “4.33”. In this way, its director makes a reference to the marriage of popular and avant-garde cinema. I was lucky enough to present this film at its first showing in Paris (though not its first in France) in the presence of its author. Having been awarded prizes in international festivals, it has been officially selected for the 2004 Berlin festival. And it’s not over yet!
On one level we have the interior monologue of a lorry driver who tells us in Zulu of how his girlfriend has left him. We see his girlfriend in slow motion, walking alone in his village. This short scene (to which we return) is the only one in colour, and is filled with pieces of music by Schumann, Alec Empire and Macy Gray. On another level there is a longer theme – that of the country’s colonial barbarism by the Germans at the beginning of the twentieth century. The local Herero population who had risen up against the Germans had been taken by force to concentration camps that existed between 1904 and 1907. Most of the detainees perished there under the worst detention conditions possible.
With these anguished images, oblique angle shots and solid sonorous sculpture, Kaganof surprises us yet again, drawing our attention to this delicate subject which is still relevant today. Avoiding the clichés of the “militant” documentaries of the past, he gives us his fresh humanist vision, which is, above all, aesthetic.
“In ‘Western 4.33’ we find outlined the terrible counterpoint between the tragedy of a near past and the inexorable forgetfulness of the present, thus making actual the horror permanently fixed in the immobility of the past, in reminding us that the past is always present like an accusation…Kaganof’s purpose was to show that the recurring dream pattern is the most convenient image to describe the structure of the memory and to facilitate its understanding…Kaganof’s spectator is asked not to reconstruct a story coldly from the outside but to live it at the same time as the characters and from the inside.” (Immanuel Stammelman, from an unpublished text).
Aryan Kaganof is the leading force in international cinema today.
Dionysos Andronis
translated from the french by lucy lyall grant
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