With echoes of one the most controversial debates about film, opera and ballet failing spectacularly to pollute film culture but still lingering in the background, my meeting with internationally acclaimed director Damiano Michieletto proved, in hindsight, to be meaningful and necessary rather than serendipitous. Our exchange offered the possibility to not only get to know his work, creative vision and approach to storytelling, but also reflect on the matter of film that really matters.
Few filmmakers would have dedicated their first feature film to silence; how its visualisation can be preciously held to address one of the most personal and political issues of our times. Even fewer would have been able to fully express its subtleties, nuanced texture, eloquent power and inherent loudness amidst intervals of words in a mode most cinematic.
One’s first, visceral, affect-ridden response to the film may be similar to having been punched in the stomach; by pure cinematic force. A force that is poetic in its harshness and whimsical in its rawness, fully embodied in the outburst of a shirtless, tattoo-clad Barry Keoghan singing on top of his lungs: “Is this too real for ya?”.
Amidst transcribing my conversation with Daniel Hui during the 68th BFI London Film Festival, news broke of his latest film Small Hours of the Night (2024) being banned in Singapore. While such news risks becoming an overrepresented angle, due to its trending potential, the film’s artistic integrity and refined aesthetic linger post-festival, inevitably shifting the focus back to the film itself.
Daniel Hui’s whimsically harrowing black-and-white, closed-form film is a brilliant testament to the poetics of cinematic time, expressed wonderfully through the analogue, velvety precision of 16mm. Drawing on real-life events, factual socio-temporal and political coordinates, the film is evocative of sombre and tumultuous events in Singapore’s political past.
The tactility in Clark and Gibisser’s film, its poetic, sculpture-like aesthetics, the respectful, organically alluring cinema verité style, alongside the poignant critique of historical patterns of extraction, expropriation, and ownership, offer much more than a compelling documentary film with matter that matters. From the slow, tentative movements of human actors feeling their way through survival with experienced care, dignity, and inquisitiveness, to automated, machine-learned gestures coordinating motion efficiency in tempo, reminiscent of Ballet Mécanique (Léger, Murphy, 1923), the film creates a sophisticated universe for the exploration of varied forms of technicity, materiality and materialism.
