QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

One of the most exciting filmmakers working in the Baltics, Uģis Olte’s still youthful career has already taken him far and wide. Other than the prominent place he reserves for music, the topics and tones of his early work vary considerably. From a documentary about the first rock band to play in North Korea (following the ex-Yugoslavian band Laibach in Liberation Day), to a folkloric horror-thriller in Livonia with River of Fear I (2021), and with his newest film, Tesa Man, to fully experimental terrain, Olte makes memorable images that refuse to fizzle with the credits.

With his newest and boldest film, he shoots a silent film of a post-metal band performing in the middle of nowhere Latvia as some mysterious woman emerges, through the musical ritual, from nothing into something marvellous. It might be a mistake to call Tesa Man a silent film, though, since the notes and rifts of Tesa, a Latvian instrumental post-metal band, somehow speak. It even took me a few minutes to notice that the feelings the film was generating within me were completely driven by the combination of the images and the music with no dialogue, or really even characters, to contribute. The quiet synthesis of the images, the music, and the absence of dialogue made me think of the words of Erling Kagge, a Norwegian explorer and the first person to reach the South Pole on their own, in his book Silence: In the Age of Noise: “After all, silence is not nothing. It is better to say that from something comes something”. The music speaks clearly enough.

The experimental work runs just over an hour and is part concert documentary, part abstract video art, and part fantasy. A band plays some songs and the interactions between their music and the audience creates new life. Olte employs nine cinematographers for the one-hour film and synthesizes those different photographic eyes into one coherent look that rhythmically alternates between long shots with close-ups. The three-member band plays a concert in the bitter cold of Vidzeme in Northern Latvia. They don’t wear gloves and their hoodies can’t keep them adequately warm. Their performance in the middle of nowhere draws an impossible crowd. Tesa plays in a makeshift amphitheater that also serves as something of a musical altar, and, like a god in an etiological myth, a new lifeform emerges from their creative “silence.”

“Rumour has it that this music film was directed by Nature itself,” the Riga International Film Festival description cheekily claims. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Olte has a special connection with the Latvian outdoors — a connection that is also on display in River of Fear (Upurga). The entire film’s relationship with the cold and the snow will appear as totally alien for most; for them, the harsh winter sings a song of belonging and tender love, hence the creative and life-giving potential. Tesa Man almost comes across as a metallic post-modern adaptation of the Book of Genesis with the creation of a human from the borrowed matter and lungs of nature. In my earlier interview with the director, he mused that “nature is a feminine force,” so it came as no surprise to me that the body that emerges is feminine in form. The filmmakers’ smartly handle the extraordinary encounter with the naked woman, covered in mud, with more mystery and strangeness than sexuality or desire.

An idiosyncratic experimental film may not work for everyone. It’s not an indiscernible glacier of a film, either. Every image relates to the next in rather clear terms, and the music functions not unlike a traditional score that sets the mood even if the role is elevated to resemble a religious ritual like the eucharistic meal. There is no neat and tidy meaning that Olte hands his viewers ready to digest without their own reflection. That would seem to go against the creative spirit that undergirds the project. The beautiful creation doesn’t come singularly from the guitars of Tesa; the audience is critical to the creative act too, their presence a non-negotiable to the art the band makes. Given the context, it would have been a much weaker film if Olte had a hammer-fisted thesis to force-feed viewers.

Tesa Man just premiered in the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.