A movie set in the woods or mountains*

“Anderntags hat man sofort getauft, weil jede Mutter lieber ein «Gotteskindli» auf die Arme nahm.”

– Gisler-Arnold Babette, midwife (via)

Murer describes the people from Switzerland's gorges in three movements, along the lines of a symphony

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

Mountain living on International Mountain Day. Available to watch via the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste's media archive.

Travel mountains on International Mountain Day

 

A starving community has come to the agreement that the elders approaching the age of seventy are to be carried up Narayama mountain to die. The day prior to the mountain's festival, sixty-nine year old Orin prepares to leave, carried by her son Tatsuhei.

“This winter… I'm going to the mountain. My mother went to the mountain, as did the mother-in-law of our home. So I have to go too.”

– Orin

In Keisuke Kinoshita's highly stylised 楢山節考, the arguably cruel (and most likely fictional) practice – of 姥捨て [ubasute, abandoning an old woman] – is superbly abstracted. Narration, dramatic lighting, colour filters and very obviously a soundstage underline that what we're watching is not a film, but a kabuki play.

Grauzone takes place in one of the three spaces documented in Murer's beautifully titled documentary Wir Bergler in den Bergen sind eigentlich nicht schuld, daß wir da sind [We, the mountain people, who live in the mountains are not really to blame for being there] (1974). One valley lives in tune with its natural rhythm, the second experiences a transition to modernity.

Sie fallen unerwartet in einem traumlosen Schlaf.

The third space, the “grey zone” – both this film's title and a descriptive term for an undefined neutral zone – is where the Bergler have become technology dwellers, where they live on summits made of concrete instead of rock. Where rumours about a #pandemic stir an ancient, unnamed fear. And symptoms: the sudden urge to wander out in nature, an acute melancholy, an overall hyper awareness. A young, prosperous couple become infected and pick up secret radio transmissions. What they believed was concrete, solid, immovable, suddenly shows signs of a shift.