In the framework of our Milestones series, Sabzian and KASKcinema are screening La prise du pouvoir par Louis XIV, perhaps the most notable film of Rosselini’s televisual turn. Moving away from neorealism, he adopted a didactic type of filmmaking. Rosselini turned to the lives of historical figures, each emblematic of a significant transformation in human thought and consciousness. He saw television as a medium “without traditions” he believed could reconnect audiences with history, humanity, and truth. Rossellini films these historical events like events, as if they are happening for the first time. “Cinema is an art that always fails in reconstructing the past,” Daney writes. “But what it can do is seize the moment when something is passing.”
In Winter Adé, Helke Misselwitz captures another historic moment, one she herself is living. In 1987, shortly before the collapse of the GDR, she travelled by train from her home to the north coast of East Germany. Along the way, she met women of different ages and backgrounds, whom she filmed with rare tenderness and precision. “For almost forty years, the law has established that women are legally and economically equal to men. But what has happened in those 40 years in people’s behaviour towards one another? That’s what interested me.” One critic remembers “coming for History but leaving with a heart full of people.”
The people in Werckmeister’s Harmonies “have some kind of a relation to eternity”. Figures of refusal emerge in this film. “You are the sun. The sun doesn’t move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we’ll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign.”
