QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
A Baltic film festival would be incomplete without a documentary in the poetic tradition of the Baltic countries. Originating through a resistance to the Soviet house style, the Baltic poetic documentary emerged in the 1960s and articulated a new, more formalist documentary that avoided talking head interviews (or talking altogether) and the explicitly political in favour of meditative images and mundane subjects. Holy Destructors, a Lithuanian-Latvian co-production with additional support from France, carries the tradition to new and much smaller places.
The feature-length documentary studies a topic so niche it’s almost certainly the first film to dedicate itself to it: the fungi and other microbial life associated with a variety of Christian iconographic paintings of Easter processions, of both the modern and non-modern sort, and the bio-archaeologists and restorers working with them. The small critters (if that’s even the right term) twinkle and twiddle as they “destroy” the remnants of holy people and their icons.
Director Aistė Žegulytė opens her film with an aspect ratio that rarely graces screens: a perfect circle. It’s a ratio so rare it slips traditional filmic descriptions to describe aspect ratios: the 4:3, 16:9, etc. The maverick canvas works perfectly for her minuscule subjects by imitating the field of vision one would find in a microscope. Sometimes this is because that’s exactly what we see: the perspective of a microscope of some sort. Other times, editor Danielius Kokanauskis cuts 8mm and 16mm archival footage and modern tourist footage of churches and museums to fit within the spherical spotlight, giving it the feeling of a subject that one needs to study. Pay attention to me, the ratio seems to tell us. And pay attention we do.
The actual “holy destructors” are unimaginably gorgeous as they form their own blue volcanoes, sperm-like worm figures, frozen white forests, and green seaweed. Not even Stan Brackage could replicate their uniqueness. Nor can I adequately describe them since each lifeform is distinctive from the next. They, in a strange and diminutive way, remind us of Pope Benedict XVI’s definition of emphasising that each individual is unique and unrepeatable. All of life is unique and unrepeatable to Žegulytė.
The Easter procession is a plastered and unmissable feature of Holy Destructors, but the theology behind the images points more to Holy Saturday than to the childlike jovial hope of Easter. Holy Saturday falls between the more well-known Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and, to some Christians, symbolizes the descent (and victory) of Christ into hell. For the most radical of theologies, it is the death of God. These colourful and microscopic lifeforms show the actual process of decay of holy bones, paintings, and much more – the hope and joy of Easter is surely on the rise. Still, there is something achingly melancholic behind the beauty of these tiny images.
Holy Destructors showed in the Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
