Every time I see a film by the Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz I find myself on unstable ground, as her style is so different from anything else I’ve seen. Her films are peculiar combinations of non-fiction and fiction, family stories and pure invention, and I love the way she blends it all in unexpected ways.
I have now seen three of Bohdanowicz’s films (Maison du Bonheur, Veslemøy's Song, and this newest one); each time I have started to watch one of her films without knowing or remembering that she was the filmmaker, only to be suddenly be jolted by a feeling of familiarity. There is something singular about her technique and the atmosphere she creates, though it is not something obvious.
In MS Slavic 7, a researcher arrives at a Harvard archive to review a series of letters. The researcher is Audrey, and the letters were exchanged between her great-grandmother, Zofia, and another Polish poet, Józef Wittlin, both displaced during the Second World War. Zofia was Bohdanowicz’s actual great-grandmother, a poet and translator of some renown, who fled Poland for Wales and then Toronto, where she wrote about her love of the countryside and desire for tranquility. Bombastic organ music plays through the first few minutes. Then there are scenes of intense stillness within the archive. Sometimes lines from the letters are written across the screen as Audrey silently reads them. Some humour is added by an officious archivist, who steals each scene he appears in.
Later, Audrey sits across a table from an unseen interlocutor, explaining her textual analysis and interpretation of her great-grandmother’s letters. Although she is interested in the meaning of words and poetry, she is also intent on examining the objecthood of letters. In order to define what she means by ‘objecthood,’ she recounts the story of the artist On Kawara, who mailed a postcard daily with the phrase “I GOT UP AT” (in English and in capital letters) followed by the time he arose that day. The repetition, she says, reduced the postcard to its essence by removing narrative. She also speaks about the rawness of finally seeing the actual objects, her great-grandmother’s letters, and being able to handle them, to smell them and to touch the where the ink is impressed on the paper.
Another scene takes place at a sixtieth anniversary party for some relatives. Here, Audrey encounters her aunt Anya, who is hostile and dismissive of Audrey’s interests in the letters and her proposal to put them on display. In fact, Anya has been secretly sabotaging Audrey’s efforts to act as literary executor. The various scenes are cut up through the film, and they do not unfold in chronological sequence. That the dialogue and acting are a little formal and stilted is obviously part of the project, although I don’t know exactly why, other than that it creates an odd mood.
Though there is not much action in the story, there is a deep intellectual quest, which plays out both in the archival search (the reading and copying of texts) and in the scenes where Audrey interprets the meaning of the words and ideas. It is clear that she is using these old letters and the work of the two poets as part of a personal journey, and her hope is that by decoding the lives of these two poets she will understand herself and her place in the world. I can’t think of many other examples where cinematic tension arises from watching a character study and think, trying to decode metaphors and symbols.
Unexpected, weird and mesmerizing.
MS Slavic 7 plays at the Cinematheque on September 28th 6:30pm and October 1st at 8:45pm.
Watch the trailer.