14 PFF Editorial: CHAOS scripted within dedicated to Maya Deren
In 1946—the year she filmed “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” her final appearance as an actress—Maya Deren also published two texts that most fully outline her aesthetic-philosophical worldview: “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film” and “Cinema as an Art Form.” The latter, shorter but more well-known, begins with the following dedication to Solomon David Derenkowsky, a Kiev-based Jewish psychiatrist: “To my father, who, when I was a child, once spoke to me of life as an unstable equilibrium.” This year’s 14th edition of the Philosophical Film Festival is dedicated to his daughter, who, during several beautiful days in June—sixty years after her untimely death—will remind us that art, too, is a finely choreographed walk on a tightrope, a dance of balance, a sublime act of equilibrium between chaos and order.
Therefrom, albeit with a deliberate twist, comes this year’s maxim: “Chaos scripted within.” The reasons are manifold —ranging from intimations of avantgarde poetics to the interplay of consciousness and the unconscious—but it is mainly because, in three words, the maxim encapsulates the essence of the mythic thinking matrix: that eternal need to deconstruct the cosmos into chaos, to mark the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, to recreate everything from the energy of its own origins. And this aligns with our annual goal: to awaken you from the fatigue of routine, to disrupt your everyday life with bursts of beauty, to stir your bodies, hearts, and eyes—so that you gather the energy to tackle the challenges ahead, to reassemble the fragments of your scattered “self,” to rejuvenate, at least until next summer, your thoughts, perspectives, and feelings.
This year, we have been rejuvenated as well. As an intimate continuation of the Deren retrospective—which will include screenings of all six of her completed films, as well as a documentary about her life and work—we bring you a selection of four video essays, whose diverse content will make you think about the bellies of whales and the transformations of clay, but also about the loneliness haunting the margins of our cities and the internet, loneliness whose unforeseen tenderness we have already immersed you in, when together we experienced the burden of some other margins—ethnic, class, and intergenerational—as we watched “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” one of the focal points of our educational program.
And while, within its framework, we philosophize with children and high school students, and tirelessly prepare the “Proceedings” of the second “Film and Philosophy” conference, as well as the Macedonian edition of Tarkovsky’s “Sculpting in Time,” we will leave you—in the company of distinguished professors from home and abroad—to spend an hour or two with several chatty nudists on the Adriatic coast, with a Canadian professor in transition and his girlfriend, and with the incomparable Little Tramp, a whole century after Chaplin first sent him searching for gold in the Alaskan mountains.
Finally, in the competitive section—whether in the comfort of the cinematheque hall or under the open sky in its courtyard—we will screen 5 feature-length and 16 short films. Among the latter, as always, you will find intriguing plots and memorable ideas about birth and death, personal and collective identity, love, and all that love is not. Among the former, in our official selection of feature films, we bring you perhaps the last film of the great Víctor Erice, as well as the latest from the energetically unique Radu Jude; alongside them, there is the third film by the increasingly interesting Tinatin Kajrishvili, and two diametrically opposed cinematic visions from Vietnam and Iran: the misty poetic debut of Thiên Ân Phạm, and the politically sharp satire by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami.
For Maya Deren, film was a ritualized and ritual act, an act of “vertical exploration” within the “horizontal progression” of the narrative. Like a hidden sonnet in a Shakespeare play, its duty, she believed, was to formalize the chaotic flow of time into a dense philosophical-emotional extract, into an otherworldly experience which, instead of being made sense of by surrounding events, becomes precisely that which gives all surrounding events their meaning. The ritual, in other words, is not a formal addition to life, but what living relies on, life’s essence. Viewed this way, all art is a kind of ritual: it, too, realizes its purpose through the exercise of form; in it, the form is meaning.
No different with our festival. It, too, along the horizontal axis of seven June days, invites you to some increasingly necessary vertical explorations, both of the self and the world. It, too (now, for the fourteenth time), strives to give shape to our companionship—through philosophy, art, and great directors. It, too, is, essentially, form. A ritual. Let it be shared, once again. Welcome.