Once a fortnight I watch a movie with my 12-year old grandchild Simon. He has asked me to help him how to see films and think and talk about what we’ve seen. Lately we have been concentrating on the capacity of observation. It deals with having an eye for details: the sadness in a face, the warmth or coolness between people, the things not said or done. When the camera zooms in on a detail, a face or a painting on the wall or a particular object, the director probably draws our attention to something important for his or her story. The more we observe, the bigger the chance that we draw the full potential from the story.

Observation is the act of observing with one’s mind and heart. What you see raises questions and feelings. The holding on to those observations, even when we don’t understand them initially, creates fertile ground for a later, richer understanding. So it is with initial feelings: even if we consider them as unpleasant, try not to steer them off, but hold a while longer on them. We gather thoughts about this process of paying attention to something and recording in your heart and mind what you see or what you don’t understand yet. We have found out that you can work your way into the movie by expressing those observations and wonderings while watching together. Especially when it is a movie which requires the ability to notice delicate or difficult-to-analyze details. This helps especially in the beginning of the film before you have found your way into the story.

Some of the films that I have seen in the past month, have required this attention to detail and an ongoing wrestling with getting the context and its story together. My experience is that those films stay with me and keep me pondering, leaving me feeling enriched and instructed. Two of them particularly stand out:

Azor is the 2021 feature debut film of Andreas Fontana, a Swiss director who has lived many years in Argentina. The opening scenes introduce us to a Swiss banker who flies together with his wife to Argentina to investigate his partner’s disappearance during the so-called Dirty War. During the period 1976-1983 the nation’s military dictatorship waged this war against its own people. Thousands of people were murdered or disappeared. The film leads us into this labyrinth of oppression, subtle power tactics, insinuations and pure evil. Azor is a code word for ”be silent: don’t say too much”. In this world of things not to be talked about, people are dependent on hints, exclusions and subtle threats to draw their conclusions about how and when to act. This makes it truly an exercise in observation!

Memory Box is the fourth feature film by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. They have worked in partnership from the beginning of their film career, both in documentaries and feature films. Their theme is modern Lebanon and its painful legacy and unhealed traumas of the civil war 1975-1990. The film starts in the present day in Montreal, Canada, where a huge box of journals, photographs and notebooks is delivered to the house of Maia, who lives there with her teenage daughter Alex and her own mother, Teta. These items were sent by Maia to her friend in Paris while the Civil War in Lebanon was raging. The memories are so painful that Maia and her mother explicitly forbid Alex to look at them and read them. Of course, she digs into them and starts to unravel long kept secrets and traumas and to open up painful memories. The film switches back and forth between different time periods and uses elements like memory and imagining to rewrite history. Once again, this causes us to be alert and observant all the way throughout the film.

Rinus/Oct 2022

image posted under fair use of copyright material in recommendation of the film Azor

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