Text: Emilien Gür

First published: July 25, 2020

 happy gogle translation for our readers Thanks Emilien!

[...] As the border between the human face and the architectural structure is abolished, the guardian is transfigured by the grace of the montage in carnal incarnation of the building that she watches over daily. The image thus accomplishes the work mentioned above, which is not so much the prerogative of dreams as of night: redefining our perception of the world.

 

[…] The film composes a very free rhythm, nourished by the unpredictable succession of meetings, the regular flashing of neon lights and the other strange sounds that punctuate the long nights on call. In this closed universe, reality is no longer distinguishable from fantasy. You don't walk around there; one sleepwalks there.

 

 

Screenings in Swiss cinema theaters

 

Cinema, kingdom of shadows, is the territory of the night par excellence. Whether tender, American, white, from a dreamer or from a dog, it is up to the seventh art to tell its stories, to reveal its faces. All good stories begin at dusk, between dog and wolf, when the light fades. The night then makes its poppean veil fall over the world, which only arouses our interest from the moment it begins to slowly vanish into darkness, so true is it that only the hidden fascinates. The gaze then tries to re-read the signs that daylight, just a few hours earlier, had covered with its diurnal evidence, suddenly rendered opaque by nightfall. It is all about learning to see again.

 

In Sekuritas, a nocturnal poem by talented Carmen Stadler, who signs there her first feature film, night falls each evening like itself over an office complex that security guard Nora Falk has the task of monitoring. The young woman, dressed in a stiff uniform that gives her the air of a space patroller, meticulously inspects the vast building which night gives the appearance of an erratic spaceship which continues its solitary race through infinity. . Throughout her nocturnal vigils, she meets the occupants of the place: a young, lunatic secretary in search of her lost cell phone, an old cook whose recipes no longer interest anyone, the enemy brother of a business owner. who does not manage to bring himself to announce his bankruptcy to his employees, as well as an Iraqi cleaner whose silence disputes him fiercely. The narrative framework, small, is declined around these meetings after midnight in a mode which is as much ephemeris as the skit: the nights follow one another, each carrying its share of unusual encounters. They all start in the same way, according to the protocol to which the stern guard submits unannounced visitors to the building, asking them to state names, first names, functions and physical characteristics. These questions resonate as the last vestiges of a rationality that has fallen into obsolescence on the arrival of night, which renders indistinguishable not only the color of cats' coats, but also the fine line that separates reality from dream.

 

Absurd and touching, these encounters reveal universes of solitude with Hopperian accents. The neon lighting, the large bay windows, the statism of the compositions, the treatment of the solid colors as well as the opacity that surrounds the human figures seem in fact to carry the echoes of the work of the American painter, at the cost of a certain academicism. It is regrettable that Anina Gmür's photography sometimes freezes in its own pictoriality, under the effect of an excess of formal mastery. The image then adopts a rhetoric that is too transparent, showing everything without suggesting anything, precisely where it would have been necessary to dare the blur and awkwardness, in other words not to smooth, but to innervate the sensitive data that inhabit the surface of the screen. . Nora Falk's strange nights would thus have gained in depth. A few moments in the film, however, take a more suggestive path, for example a series of overprints of unspeakable poetry, at the end of which the face of the security officer filmed in very close up is superimposed on a view of entire building piping. While the border between the human face and the architectural structure is abolished, the guardian is transfigured by the grace of the montage in carnal incarnation of the building that she watches over daily. The image thus accomplishes the work mentioned above, which is not so much the prerogative of the dream as the characteristic of the night: redefining our perception of the world.