Everyday Drifters

Mihaela Brebenel

The space of the screen in the black box where we are all sat is divided into

time slots. A series of short films is about to be screened for the press. It is the second

in the Berlinale Shorts competition.

Before entering, we have all drifted between several black boxes, between

cinema seats of burgundy or violet velours, around food stalls in the Postdamer Platz

Arkade. We are now seated, about to experience the drift anew whilst bodily

restrained in the comfortable seats, gaze forward, curiosity sharpened.

This new drift is contrasting our stillness, uncomfortable and hard to stomach

in one go. It is not scenes of horror that create this visce-reality, nor experimental

camera movement that swirls and shakes the image. It is the restlessness of the

moving images, the rhythm of montage and the rhythm of affects drifting alongside.

In actuality, not even alongside as that implies a separation is still in place, but

intimately close, in synchronized breathing and pacing up aimlessly.

The inner rhythm of the moving images experiences this intimacy with the

characters, the rhythm of the characters' affects experiences this intimacy with the

often closed spaces where the film is set and these rhythms together birth an intimacy

of the spectators with the films. This is the common grounds where the inner driftings

of  Back by 6, 15 Iulie or La Ducha meet and form that sense of an unknown body that

Deleuze believed cinema has the ability to create. In the case of the above-mentioned

films, this body is created mainly by an affective drift.  Back by 6 has its characters'

bodies experience a physical and emotional derive, leaving their affects visible to thespectators' gaze, welcoming the strange and the random encounters, creating an

altogether sense of familiarity and awkwardness. Investigating the everyday with a

curiosity we can easily identify with and finding small spaces as secret doors to new

dimensions of the concrete, this film's inner rhythm carries us through moments of exaltation and utter sadness. And as it happens in real life, our emotional derive finds

us at times wondering how was it that we reached that point. And then, everything

that at some point was naturally familiar becomes surreal, fermenting with our stirred

emotions, just like one of the characters finds himself more agoraphobic on a streetsuddenly populated than he was when it was completely deserted.

The space closing on one's emotions, suffocating one's sense of normality is at

its best depicted by Cristi Iftime in 15 Iulie, a journey inside a family's affective

worlds, a drift between rejection and closeness, offering a sharp sense of empathywith the struggle of a girl to create bridges and bondage in the constant emotional

rejection that is her relationship with her father. Shot in a small apartment, the short

film manages to escape into the unspeakable cracks of a damaged affective state, the

drift comes here from within, and it surfaces in the extended spaces of this apartment,

like emotional waves hitting the walls and retaliating with increased power due to the

lack of response. This drift is strange; it is extremely uncomfortable, leaving the

viewer part of the scene and a powerless bystander at the same time.

With   La Ducha, we find ourselves present in another closed space, between

the intimate walls of a gay couple's bathroom. But here, the waves have already

smashed into the walls, the storm was there and we are opened to the images of 

emotional shores being washed already by pain and drama. The couple is broken, the

negotiations over emotions and possessions are over but they are both still drifting,

suspended in this space that used to be a shared intimacy and the reclaiming of their

 

own paths. The cat stands as living battleground, it remains the only open affective

drift that can bring them together and make the separation complete. Negotiations

over who gets to keep the cat become the last possibility to escape this suffocating

space, a buffer zone between the necessity to claim an emotional despair and simulate

a sense of normality in the everyday.

As viewers, we drift inside these stories, drift out of them with each turning on

of cinema lights, falling in and out of love with their passages, joining them

emphatically and detaching ourselves rationally once the projection diminishes into

complete darkness. It is an affective  jouissance to be able to step close to the moving

images and dance with them, then drift away and birth them anew by drifting through

words about them.