You might ask why Bleak Week in the middle of the long, warm days of summer, and especially when the real world itself is bleak enough without the need for further help from movies? In times of worldwide despair, in the middle of wars, genocide, and environmental catastrophes, when “the world has been ending for a long time,” (as one of the characters say in Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt,), when a world leader publicly calls for “a whole civilization [to] die, […] never to be brought back,” why amplify this negativity or wallow in our desolation? If it doesn’t affect any change in our real-world circumstances, why should we invite fictional drama into our lives already heavy with anguish?
This is not a new question. The short answer is that art is how we come to terms with, or at least start to come to terms with the tragedy of the human condition, whether in terms of its existential status or in terms of its concrete manifestations in impoverishment, oppression, abandonment, isolation, and alienation. And this answer hinges on one’s faith in art’s capacity for creating meaning despite its ‘inoperative’ nature and despite its apparent inability, reluctance, or disregard to give final answers. As someone who has been engaging with art of this sort, and knowing many great works of cinema grapple with this dark side of humanity, I am proud to have programmed Bleak Week for the Cleveland Cinematheque, though sad that I will not be here to attend.
I had the pleasure to curate some of my all-time favorites for this week. While it is a highly varied program as to the particular tones of ‘bleak,’ there are at least two treads that run through our five-day marathon. On the one hand, there are philosophically oriented conundrums around the urge to violence, societal collapse, and the nature of evil, as you’ll get to think through in Funny Games, The Vanishing, Werckmeister Harmonies, and Day of Wrath. On the other, there are the emotionally devastating stories where the characters find themselves at the edge of hope: Breaking the Waves, Taste of Cherry, A Short Film About Killing, The Fire Within, and Umberto D.
I believe that this kind of ‘cinema of despair’ offers more than catharsis. It forces us to face the darkness and to keep our eyes open. As Béla Tarr puts it, film functions to make us understand “why we are the way we are. How we commit our sins. How we betray one another. And what interests lead us.” Many of the characters in these films tell themselves that there’s no other choice, there’s no other way to proceed but the forsaken path. When we watch them on the screen, we want to scream “yes there is.” As such, these films put us outside of ourselves to take us out of despair while letting us feel that despair in the most intimate way. And the intense brutality of existence also harbors kernels of truth and beauty that the characters in these films search for, knowingly or unknowingly, guided by passion or folly, which is sometimes perverted rationality in desperation, and sometimes a life force that has broken away from the shackles of reason towards something beyond. They do this despite themselves and despite everything they are subjected to, and that’s perhaps what we get out of these movies too. The characters may not find it, but we, in the immensity of the moving images and sounds that push us deep into ourselves, face our guilt, shame, fear, and anger. In other words, these films help us face our shadows and the shadows that subsume the world, and be reminded that there is something there, something seemingly unreachable yet still worth every pain and tear to aspire to.
So go and watch some bleak films. And if you feel overwhelmed, you can always leave the auditorium to breath in fresh air, and come back in again recollected.
Bilgesu Sisman, Director of Cinematheque