cenas do mal.

I watched Gus Van Sant’s ‘Gerry‘ last night and I loved it. Friends had warned me about this movie - how boring it was, how nothing happened, how they had watched it in fast forward just to realize they could get an insight on the whole movie that way. They weren’t lying, it’s pretty much the truth, except for the last part. ‘Gerry’ doesn’t quite fit the standarts for an entertainment movie, that’s true. If you approach it from that point of view, you may as well say it sucks as entertainment. So you’ve got to watch it from a blank mind, so it can reveal itself as masterpiece.

‘Gerry’ is the story of two friends named Gerry (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who go on a hike together in the American desert, just soon to find themselves lost. And it portrays this situation masterfully, in its long takes and silences. It wouldn’t, as some critics said, have sufficed to portray those landscapes in a 1 minute shot. That wouldn’t have done them justice. The long takes derive from the very nature of the places they portray - immortal, vast, silent and brutal. The means must become invisible in order to let the subjects live. And so it does.

As my video teacher says, in the East one must put himself in a state of introspection in order to create. While in the West, one usually creates from a state of boredom. This is the paradigm from which the movie must be seen. It has lost its narrative substract, it has lost all accessories, just leaving the core nude to our eyes. The long takes of driving, of landscape, of pointless walking are the very essence of the movie. By alienating (to some by “boring”) the viewer, making him go through a sort of endurance, it gest him into a certain state of altered counsciousness crucial to the understanding of the message.

And the message is nothing: the alienation of desert spaces, the randomness of death. Death itself on the verge of progress and technology, the very possibility of absurdity in life, caused by the great open spaces that we can’t confine and control. The movie condenses all that we fail to grasp, the secret meaning that is, itself, the absence of a meaning.
In its lack of meaning it brings more insight into the nature of things than the moral of any other movie.

I have often thought about cinema - how much I love to watch it but how little I can connect it to art. For me cinema and art cannot be the same field. Or better even, narrative movies seldom can be called art. That is not to judge what’s best, it is just a certain innate feeling that I have.
As to say that there are masterpieces in narrative cinema that I so much love, and then there is something else. I guess that that something else is never a field of general acceptance, as it’s precisely what is hard to endure, sometimes seamingly pointless, and always consists of open images and lacks moral. ‘Gerry’ belongs to this “something”.
It comes sort of a summary of James Bennings “Ten Clouds” (that one is like the supreme and pure symbol of the feeling I’m describing - pure nothing, pure boredom and its possiblity for meaning), or an hommage to Ansel Adams - but here punctuated with human presence.
Some of its sequences are stunning visually, as the one when both characters are walking and the image shows just their faces, tumbling up and down, and the sound of their footsteps, sometimes coordinated and sometimes not, creating obsessive rythms.
And the music by Arvo Pärt is so beautiful…
And so everything comes together to project in the viewer their experience of loss and being subject to a sort of random violence.

Here is the trailer that is, to some extent, all that the movie isn’t: