The film pictures look like a different era.
Photo: Harvest Film/Jaclyn Martinez
The shape follows the scenario. If you want to bring an old, sunken world to a view on the screen, you should do it with old means. The pre-modernity is often connected to a sometimes longing, sometimes anxious, and the film-related equivalent in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s folk parabola »Harvest« are the images of the cameraman Sean Price Williams, which are correspondingly grained and correspondingly grained. The film pictures look like a different era.
How far it goes back, so when exactly that plays, it is not clear. Somehow in pre -modern, in a late medieval England, at the time of a threshold: from which here as raw, as organically developing and natural -functioning world of a rural community, which is first managed by a kind owner, towards a world in which the country is not only seen as possession, but also as capital.
At the beginning, a land vermeter comes into the remote village in which “Harvest” plays, and begins to map this little world. Walter (Caleb Landry Jones), the main character, if not a hero, is fascinated. How to transfer and arrange the surroundings to such a small area, and what that is there. That is just a stain, says the land vermeter, a deficiency. But it can be remedied without further ado.
With the development of the development of the raw, poor pre -modernity, which is confronted with techniques such as measurement, counting and in the consequence of the capitalization of the country, “Harvest” comes closest to something like a plot. The novel by the British author Jim Crace is transferred to a gently shimmering, unreal scenario in its meditative calm, which is still more parabolically designed than the previous films. And that means that you should get involved in the granulence of the pictures, your colors and sounds and do not expect an exciting story or something in this way. You can see impressive moments of collectivity, dancing around the fire, body, body that are clamped into rituals, and a very physical love for nature that manifests itself very directly: Walter sucks lustfully tree bark and puts his tongue in asthöcher.
In the majority of the images, if you look wide more than that of the nearby, small works of art, especially in their impression of the casualness and spontaneous by the 16-millimeter material. There is nothing spontaneous here. Tsangari and Williams have their pictures, on which no plot hangs along, but who stand on and for themselves, composed to the last.
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What happens is, as I said, in the mode of the parabola, based on archetypes instead of characters: the simple villagers, the good ruler, the evil, because selfish rulers, the intermediary who sits between the chairs.
The pre -modern society is not a romanticized idyll, but over the outside, strangers are only considered with distrust and then attacked. The children’s heads are ritualized on a stone, “so that they know where they belong”.
The new, however, does not appear as a beneficial in »Harvest«, on the contrary. First the land vermeter comes, then the exploitation of the country as well as the people who live in and order it. The villagers react by force and the film is becoming increasingly dark. “Harvest” is interested in the threshold situation without preferring one or the other side. Both worlds as well as their collision are covered with a subliminal absurd humor, which runs through almost all films by Athina Rachel Tsangari.
“Athina Rachel Tsangari. Bucket: Josyn Bars, Rachel Rachel Tsanga. Mit: Landry Jones, Rosy McEwen’s Arinzé. 134 Min. Jetzt im Kino.