Aquarela

Russian filmmaker Victor Kossokovsky's Aquarela (2019) is what was once called a "head movie" -- that is, the film is form of psychedelia designed to induce rapturous contemplation.  These sorts of movies are, in effect, light shows constructed of mind-altering imagery that is probably best viewed under the influence of mind-altering drugs.  Older folks will recall Walt Disney's Fantasia, an animated feature made for classical music devotees that had a vigorous second-life as a psychedelic "head" movie.  Pink Floyd's The Wall is another example.  Sometimes, these films take the form of spectacular documentaries:  The Hellstrom Chronicles was a lavish technicolor bug movie for entomology "heads' and, similarly, Gregory Reggio's Kooyanisqatsi,and the two similarly titled films that followed it, although ostensibly about how humans affect the balance of nature, were primarily exercises in showing majestic vistas in ways never before seen, mountains majestic and cascades and endless deserts in counterpoint to speeded-up footage of humans swarming in neon-lit cities, all to the churning, hypnotic music of Philip Glass.  These films tend to have limited or non-existent commentary -- the viewer is left to his or her own thoughts about what is depicted on screen.  It is as if using words to comment on the elemental imagery in these films would somehow distort those pictures or tame them to the audience's comprehension -- the point is not understanding but awe.  These sorts of films are manifestations of the sublime -- that is, astonishing beauty coupled with a sense of terror:  the images in Aquarela were captured at the risk of life and limb and, therefore, posited as all the more meaningful.  Herzog follows in this tradition in his documentaries, but, I think, delivers a superior product because he narrates his films -- we know what we are seeing on screen and, therefore, in my view, appreciate the spectacle more.  Kossokovsky works more in the vein of the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab -- this group of filmmakers produces movies without overdubbed narration and has, in fact, achieved several masterpieces in this form, most notably Leviathan (which resembles Aquarela), Sweetwater and the superb Manakamana.  Like those films, Kossovkovsky's vision is ideologically pure and purports to be unmediated.   But there is, of course, a certain naivety to documentaries of this sort.  Throughout the film, the viewer yearns for a little context to better appreciate the spectacle on display.

Aquarela was shot with Arri Flex cameras at 96 frames a second.  The film is supposed to be projected at the same rate, although it's my suspicion that when I saw the movie (at the Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis Uptown), the movie was shown at the standard rate of 24 frames a second..  There was no advertisement that the movie was being projected at its proper frame-per-second density and I couldn't detect anything different about the way the film looked -- it is clear and grandiose, but there was nothing surreal about the clarity of the images, something critics who have seen the film at 96 frames a minute have commented on.  Even with the image subtly degraded, the quality of the imagery is wonderful.  Peter Jackson shot The Hobbit at 48 frames a minute -- without a comparison side-by-side between the 24 and 48 frame per minute versions, I doubt that anyone could see the difference.  Without the comparison, I certainly wasn't able to see any difference between what was presented at the Lagoon Theater and what the director intended with the 96 frame per second presentation.  Aquarela follows a pattern established as far back in  film history as Leni  Riefenstahl -- he starts a sequence with images that are merely spectacular, then, the film increases the ante, piling up pictures that become more and more majestic or grandiose until, at last, the footage achieves a hallucinatory, mind-bending intensity -- in effect,the pictorial images go from being spectacular to unbelievable:  most of the sequences climax with shots that seem to show us things that are literally impossible.  (The pattern for this kind of cutting is the famous diving sequence in Olympia; Riefenstahl shows us divers gracefully plunging from high-boards into the water.  But, then, she increases the speed of the cutting, simply shows the bodies arching in flight and, then, reverses the directions between up and down -- at the climax of the diving sequence, the bodies soar upward into the sky, pictorial imagery that is impossible, that defies gravity and, yet, that is intended to display the ideal Platonic essence of diving:  an experience of flying through the air.)

Aquarela is about what Goethe called the "biography and life-history of water."  The film begins with an extended sequence that is quasi-narrative:  at an ice-covered lake between huge barren mountains, cars have broken through the ice.  Crews of  men with primitive looking capstans and winches are laboring on the ice to try to pull the vehicles to the surface.  But the blue crystal of the ice is eroded and there are streams and patches of open water and the workers keep plunging through the wafer-thin ice into the dark, ominous depths of the lake.  The film begins with a man on hands and knees cupping his eyes to peer though the ice at a car sunk below.  This Herzog territory (his Russian film Bells from the Deep) and the activities of the men, who keep plunging through the ice sheets, seem vaguely comical, although also very dangerous.  In the distance, cars merrily zip along a track in the ice, oblivious to the fact that there is a whole sunken parking lot of vehicles that have broken through and been drowned in the lake.  We see one car suddenly plunge into the lake with one of its passengers apparently lost in the icy water.  On the remote shore, in a classic Herzog-style shot, a barn is brightly burning with no one paying any attention to the fiery conflagration.  The film, then, cuts to the fjords of Greenland where we see skycraper-sized icebergs calving off a glacier and plunging into a huge lagoon where flotillas of ice bergs are drifting.  As the enormous ice bergs plunge into the lagoon, the film takes on the abstract unreality of Riefenstahl's diving sequence -- the ice, after falling into the water, surges upward and the buoyancy of the ice bergs results in images of colossal mountains of blue and green ice, draining vast waterfalls from their sides, rising up out of the sea.  The directions seem to be reversed -- the titanic towers of ice surge upward, surfacing like monsters of the deep, colossal dolphins and whales rising from the lagoon.  We see the ice from every possible angle, including extended sequences under water, a diver skirting the edges of vast icy caverns, suffused with dim blue light with the eroded underbellies of the bergs hollow-eyed with depressions and pale indentations.  (The scenes underwater were claustrophobic, the camera tilted upward as if to search for an opening in the ice and I found these extended sequences physically unpleasant to watch.)  There are shots from drones and helicopters.  In one surreal image, we see a vast iceberg alone in the deep blue sea suspended, it seems, on rafts of fog and mist.  One iceberg carved like Lohengrin's swan-boat glides by the camera, apparently the size of a battleship:  a huge ice giant seems to recline at the stern of the swan boat and there is a sculpted wing about the size of a ten-story skyscraper looming over the dragonish prow of the ice vessel.  The film then, shifts to mountainous waves -- a tiny ship is trapped between 500 foot waves with the sailors actually climbing up onto the sail boat masts in the tempest.  The waves get bigger and bigger and, at last, they seem to be covered with masks -- the mountainous wall of the wave collapses, dissolves into spray and, behind, we see something that looks like Niagara falls, a huge precipice over which water is falling as if from a cliff -- I have never seen anything like this and it is breathtaking.  The director, then, shows us floods.  His camera tracks down the empty streets of Miami in a hurricane, scooting over wind-driven water that seems to be four feet deep, palm trees bent over like old crippled men, and the wind hurling projectiles this way and that.  We see a graveyard that is underwater with stately egrets standing on their stilt-like legs among ancient gravestones.  A dam has burst and enormous torrents of muddy waters surge down a steep embankment (I recognized this imagery as being the Oroville Dam rupture in California).  Suddenly, we are underwater in some kind of cave or subterranean tunnel.  The cave is full of water that roars like a locomotive past a man.  We can only glimpse the man in the torrent of water.  He seems to be gesturing and, then, we perceive several other shapes, men and women drenched to the bone, staggering forward through the walls of falling water.  Several close-ups show the people's face, inexpressive against curtains of falling water.  The film ends with pictorially sublime shots of Angel Falls, the water dropping so far, through veils of rainbow, that it never really reaches the bottom of the cliff -- a perpetual cloud hangs over a dangling delta of jungle from which a river, slate-colored in the afternoon light, emerges.  The cliffs thousands of feet above the jungle canopy are rust-red, streaked with cobalt blues and fissured with deep pink ravines and chasms.

The film is dedicated to the great Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.  The only sequence that seemed to me to be related to Solurov's work was the highly enigmatic and inexplicable scenes of the people in the tunnel, buffeted by deadly-looking jets of water.  From time to time, the imagery is accompanied by grinding heavy-metal music that is impressive but doesn't exactly fit what we are seeing -- the heavy-metal music seems to much of a nod to "head film" traditions, is too explicit, directly commenting on the violence that we are seeing.  This movie will not be to most people's taste.  Jack, who saw the film with me, was bored by the perpetual onslaught of water images without any narrative commentary.  I'm older and was raised with "head films" and so I thought the movie was wonderful -- but that may be merely the hangover of a psychedelic youth.