“Art is not about creating something new; it’s about shedding light on what already exists.”
John Barth
There is a scene in Alice Rohrwacher's La chimera, which exquisitely plunders the tomb of Fellini's Roma. Our orphic tramp and his merry tombaroli raid an unearthed Etruscan shrine; we experience this raid from inside the sepulchral seal, hearing the scraping, thudding echoes from above. As soon as they break in, the vacuum dissipates, a rushing exhale of souls from the deep, and we see the colourful frescoes evaporate, oxidising in the new air. There are some films that feel like they are not just auguries taking flight from the unknown, but that the filmmaker themself has some implicit access, that straddles a spiritual lithosphere and an atavistic mantle. To watch is to be disinterred, and to attempt to speak of them seems like a vulgar excavation, coarse, grubby fingers snatching for words in the aether. It is to chance rupturing a dream.
Rohrwacher places in our mortal, inept hands the divining rod of art, collective ritual and memory, the enveloping mysteries of grief and love; how to be human is not just to stumble upon sublime relics of the evanescent and enduring, but to be the unsuspecting bedfellow between them. For Rohrwacher, the archaeology of soul is also the archaeology of cinema, which unlike sacred artifacts, was made for human eyes. Her film sifts us through the metaphysical sediment of celluloid, and the vibrations of our spectral earth that they uncover. She tills the soil of Fellini, Pasolini, Varga, Rossellini - the face of his daughter, Isabella, who is also in the film, is itself is a landscape of film history.
Rohrwacher charmingly etches the twitchy gambol of silent film in the exploits of the mischievous tombaroli. Working with cinematographer Hélène Louvart in 35mm, she then weaves Arthur’s dreams as scratchy, warm fragments of 16mm home videos, tenuous dispatches blurred between memories and visions. When he is dowsing for tombs, and stumbling close toward their site, the flitting inversions of a frame pulse the circular orbit of our hero, as above so below. Filmstock, like our bodies, our objects, has an aura that flickers and breathes, and is subject to decay. It is the dappled membrane in our shuttle between the past and present, dream and waking, seen and unseen, life and death. Rohrwacher recognises it as the same tattered veil that flutters in our periphery, vanishing when we turn to look at it; she is able to divest the plain cloak of conscious feeling, and pull on Ariadne's thread.
Increasingly, in film, in culture, in the present, the liminal tear of our bodies, perforated animals that we are, is shunned and paved over for the visible, synthetic, immediate. There is no room for mystery, or appeal to the beyond; it is not a part of our material lives like our ancestors, so we smother it within ourselves. The spaces in which we might form community to grasp or brush against the ghosts in our selves, in each other, removed and returned to space and time, are not just desecrated - they face an immaculate extinction. How precious, how rare to find this film in our midst, that embodies all of these things, in earthy, delicate beauty, in joyful, despairing romance.
Our tragic hero thrums in the beyond, while his body languishes in the present. Arthur (Josh O’Connor) doesn't just hear the boatman's call; he is tethered to the underground, a vagabond whose true trespass is in the land of the living. He is a fool, redeemer, tattered pilgrim, and hanged man. Quietly wracked by a dolorous fever, a wretched husk in his soiled linen suit, he is the long, lonely rider of Nick Cave's Galleon Ship, the nocturnal poet of Dino Campana's Canti Orfici, who looks back, ransacking the past for his lost love, seeing her face everywhere. And yet, there are stirrings of life and love, as he is drawn to the askew zephyr of an odd woman who, beckoning on the white bank of Riparbella, could resurrect him.
Josh O'Connor's incredible performance is soulful, subterranean; the languorous, chthonic anchor of his body, what he exhumes on his face, is profoundly moving. His tarnished patina reminds me of what Walter Benjamin said about auras; that they are "a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be". That he projects this fragile, ringing communion onto the objects he beholds, creating a chiming lattice with his environment, his co-stars, with Rohrwacher's spirit itself, is truly remarkable. I do not understand it at all.
This last month has been marked by my (somewhat reluctant) whiplash revelation of Josh O'Connor. I've gone from hurling invectives at his soggy persona, to gnomic lechery at his delicious heel-turn in Challengers; during La chimera, I felt something akin to the softly wrenching vertigo of realising, quite against your will, that you have fallen in love. Beyond feeling the tremors of, and wrestling with the unyielding vapours of my own ardent chimeras, I often compare my very frustrating writing process to being confronted with a great wall. Like Campana's Orpheus, "I gaze at the white rocks, the mute source of the breeze, and the immobility of the firmament". You cannot scale the wall, you cannot bulldoze the wall, you cannot turn away from the wall. The only way out is through, an agonising caress of that stone hide, trying to find some purchase, a nook, a cleft that will allow you passage to the other side. The block itself is the rubble and threshold of epiphany. Watching O'Connor felt like I was pressed up against that same wall, a crack of light across my eye, Pyramus looking for a slant glimpse of his lover. So it is you; my last man's face.