In his recent book Filmmakers Thinking, Adrian Martin quotes the German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky at length regarding the “dialogues” that all filmmakers are engaged in; one is a dialogue “with the depicted things, the represented objects, the model… a dialogue with the world and with reality.” The other is “the material that the artist has or does not have… the camera, the lens, filters, sound and editing.” A fairly common sense assessment, it seems, but one that becomes particularly relevant when engaging with Rob Tregenza’s new film The Fishing Place. It’s a curious object, very much an example of an artist thinking through the work as he makes it and as we view it, and one where the materials at hand — in this case, the crane — become an intrinsic part of the film’s meaning. This is, in fact, a very easy film to describe, but it’s more difficult to articulate what its strategies add up to in a more meaningful way. It’s an elusive, slippery object, and probably a masterpiece of sorts. The film is divided into two parts: roughly an hour-long, traditional narrative and then a 20-minute epilogue of sorts that consists of one single long take. The distance between these two parts, and how we as viewers bridge that gap, construes much of the film’s profound power. This is Tregenza’s state of the world address.
Transpiring during WWII in occupied Norway, The Fishing Place follows Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a housekeeper in rural Telemark who finds herself under the thumb of SS officer Aksel Hansen (Frode Winther). Hansen was responsible for liberating Anna from a Nazi prison, but now wants something in return for his efforts. She is tasked with becoming the housekeeper for the local Lutheran pastor Honderich (Andreas Lust), who Hansen suspects is part of a resistance movement. She will track the pastor’s every move for three days and report back to Hansen, who presumably wants a reason to imprison the pastor. Writing many years ago on Tregenza’s first feature, Talking to Strangers, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted that part of that peculiar film’s point is that “when strangers meet, they immediately fall into a kind of role-playing, a form of lying.” This is taken to a different extreme in The Fishing Place, where subterfuge is very specifically baked into its premise. Over the course of these three days, Tregenza documents some of the denizens of this small hamlet; an aged actress confined to a wheelchair, other housekeepers, locals filing in and out of church. It’s all very solemn and hushed, with warm interiors set against the vast, snow-covered mountains captured by Tregenza’s epic long takes. The acting is quite good; Petersen is excellent as Anna, a quiet, taciturn person whose placid demeanor masks some kind of inner turmoil. Meanwhile, Lust, who also starred in Tregenza’s previous feature, Gavagai, is firm and stoic, communicating a kind of palpable rage broiling just under his severe features. And it’s his Honderich who experiences a crisis of faith, attempting to tend to his flock of parishioners while lamenting the moral turpitude of those he is supposed to be saving. What use is faith in a world such as this?
As critic Manohla Dargis notes, Tregenza is more than adept at “deploying the conventions of mainstream fiction.” But The Fishing Place‘s power stems from going beyond those conventions into something entirely more thought-provoking. After all, Tregenza has never been a traditional narrative filmmaker; a true American independent, he has made only five feature films in almost 40 years, all shot on 35mm, while also working as a cinematographer and distributor at various points in his career. He favors languid long takes, and in The Fishing Place many shots will begin in medium closeup on one character and then slowly, gradually, begin a journey that snakes through sets, outside, and up into the air, sometimes utilizing tracks or even mounting on a truck for additional movement. The effect here occasionally recalls Michael Snow’s great La Région centrale; not exactly in one-to-one way — the Snow film is as frenzied and disorienting as Tregenza’s is calm and calculated — but in the manner that each emphasizes the existence not only of the camera, but the specific way in which the camera is being utilized. It’s a very formal, highly materialist approach to articulating space and meaning, all of which is compounded in the film’s final movement.
Here, the camera finds Lust on set, before tracking backwards to reveal a series of sets, crew, and extras, eventually moving out of the building entirely and taking to the sky in a grand, sweeping fashion. Lust smokes a cigarette and chats with another person, while Tregenza can be heard offscreen talking to the crane and camera operator (all are presumably on the same airborne platform, although the soundtrack could be a trick of post-production). It’s the kind of self-reflexive moment that is often referred to as “Brechtian,” and it functions here in several ways. There is, of course, a long history of “pulling back the curtain,” so to speak; Tregenza is a Godardian, and this rupture suggests several of the French master’s films (Contempt, certainly), but also the lineage that inspired Godard, notably Jerry Lewis. And, of course, the disjunction also specifically aligns The Fishing Place with Manoel de Oliveira’s Benilde, or the Virgin Mother on the one hand, with its opening credits displayed over a tour of the sets where the film is about to transpire, and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, with its sublime ending that stops the narrative cold and switches from film to digital video. But more than a mere post-modernist gesture, Tregenza is explicitly linking the past to the present — the encroachment of far-right, outspoken Nazis, collaborators, and the destruction of the natural world are quite obviously and concerningly still with us. The past cannot — can never — be safely cordoned off or contained via simple genre tropes.
DIRECTOR: Rob Tregenza; CAST: Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Andreas Lust, Frode Winther, Eindride Eidsvold; DISTRIBUTOR: Rob Tregenza; IN THEATERS: Cinema Parallel; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
Comments are closed.