Thoughts
on a film: Petria's Wreath (1980)
PART
I: PROLOGUE
In the first scene of the
film, an elderly woman, not yet formally introduced, walks out into a small courtyard
to the rear of a house and begins her daily chores. During this act, she spies
the ever-present movie camera and follows it from the corner of her eye.
At first I thought this
was a flaw in the acting; a non-professional, cast by the director for
authenticity, and as such unable to ignore the unnatural intrusion of the camera
as she enacts these small routines. However, as the woman returns to the house
and makes her way through to the cluttered kitchen, her own eye once again seem
to meet that of the ever-watchful apparatus; breaking the fourth wall to
acknowledge the unseen audience, only this time, with deliberate intent. In the
next breath, the old woman speaks and begins her story; her attitude, genial
but world-weary; her audience, those of us trapped behind the unconscious
partition that separates the viewer from the viewed.
Petria's Wreath [Srđan
Karanović, 1980]:
The story is already here, all around her. It's in the house
and its cluttered decor; it's in her face, lined with age; it's in her voice, worn
but warming. As her ailing hands hover over mementos and reminders (a photograph,
her husband's violin), every possession becomes a significant prop;
a relic to her life's sad journey; to the characters that we're about to meet.
As the old woman steps out
of the frame, the camera tilts up to the window space. In the foreground,
slumbering cats snooze silently in the warm morning light. Outside, in the
middle-distance, a photographer has set up his stills camera. Just as the old
woman clears the frame, a young woman, seen outside through the adjacent window, steps before the photographer's
camera and effectively takes her place...
Petria's Wreath [Srđan
Karanović, 1980]:
In this small moment, director Srđan Karanović has traversed the limited boundaries between documentary (the
observation of this elderly woman), fiction (the story about to be told) and
fantasy (the memory of the woman made real); introducing the idea of the past
as a story, to be reflected on, from a distance, and the more important
"meta" role that the appearance of this photographer will eventually
fulfil.
It's a moment that is
easily missed, but one that resonates with the same profundity as the time
travelling jump cut that transitioned Stanley Kubrick's immortal masterpiece
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) from the dawn of man to the infinite cosmos. The
subject matter and the technical presentation might be very different to that
of Kubrick, but as a gesture - as a means of transporting the story from one
place to the next through the use of a very practical filmmaking technique - it
functions on a similar level. It's that idea of moving between different levels
of time and memory; between the physical and metaphysical, the conscious or subconscious space.
