Negation of viewing pleasure

After her debut feature The Tree won many international awards, Sonja Prosenc’s much-anticipated second feature film, Zgodovina ljubezni (History of love) world-premiered in Karlovy Vary, where it also won its first award, Special jury mention, winning another 2 Vesna awards at the recent FSF, Portoroz: for best photography (Mitja Ličen) and best ‘original work of art’.

The protagonist, a teenage swimmer/high diver Iva, endures a grieving process, as family secrets and mysteries, especially her mother’s, unveil. This unveiling happens subtly, through a powerful and highly suggestive visual narrative and we mainly see and feel the events unfolding through Iva’s eyes: we see what she sees and we grieve with her. The way the main actress Dorotea Nadrah is filmed is quite rarely found in mainstream filmmaking: dialogues are elliptical and rudimentary, but her face is more eloquent than any words.

Reminiscent, in its music-pervasive long shot grievance moments of Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs: Blue part of the trilogy (with its Zbigniew Preisner’s amazing soundtrack), History of love’s screen is dominated by water, not only as the film’s central imagery, but also as the narrative’s cohesive mould of the characters, evoking a palette of emotions: sadness, passion, transience but also of isolation (water also, traditionally, evokes fertility, purification, transformation, a new life, rebirth and regeneration). Mitja Ličen’s camera lingers on those (above and under) water moments: showers, swimming pools, rivers, water dripping on a window, often connected with the moments of changing (clothes, swimwear, underwear…) as the most intimate moments, rarely of physical nudity, but of one’s emotional nudity, vulnerability and exposedness to others. Water is the personal universe of feelings, thoughts and memories, a shelter of one’s own. Metaphorically put, this visual poem on the fluidity of human emotions takes place between Iva’s initial diving up exhale and her final diving down inhale.

Apart from water and nature, crucial in both of Prosenc’s feature films (a beautiful colourful butterfly on a shoulder, a deer on an empty city street appearing from ‘nowhere’…), music score, both diegetic and non-diegetic - ominous and disturbing - becomes a distinct protagonist of the narrative, adding to the miraculous dimension of life. Sound design is impeccable: every single sound matters (even a drop of water is highlighted) as if to underline the process of the sensory film experience, simultaneously drawing greater attention to the heroine’s hearing impairment.

There are no conventional flashbacks, no past, present or future. Time is not only fragmented but becomes completely subjective (and relative). Verbal narrative is also fragmented, only hinting, never explaining, as the “story” unfolds in the ‘real time’ of the character. Of course, this means putting the pieces together not chronologically, but as the character randomly chooses … to convey the feelings of alienation and detachment. Inhale/exhale. Exhale/inhale.

Family tragedy is central to both films, but while in The Tree death is ominous and threatening all characters until the very end, in History of love, it is the death of one person (mother) haunting all the characters. The worlds of fantasy and reality often blur, demanding an active, attentive viewer. In the fantasy/reality blur of The Tree, the actual reason for the family exile remains secondary, but the director chooses the Albanian language and (mixed) family, based on a previous documentary project. The underlying theme in both films can, also, be said to be revenge – or an impulse for revenge, more subtly and less directly conveyed in History of love. Whereas The Tree underscores the tense feeling of claustrophobia, creating in the viewer’s mind a sort of tension that s/he cannot escape, mirroring the film reality (close-ups, darkness, confined spaces that get smaller and smaller, brilliantly transmitted by Ličen’s cinematography), History of love is focused on love and revenge as eros and thanatos in more nuanced ways. Interesting are different reactions to love, intimacy and revenge of sister and brother, Iva and Gregor, who evolve in different ways during the course of History of love’s narrative.

Non-linear, fragmented narratives in both The Tree and History of love are open-ended, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination to shape the filmic universe. A term that comes to mind is ‘ethical anti-narrative’, as the author neither exposes her characters nor objectifies them. Together with her director of photography, Mitja Ličen, she takes care of them. More than any other contemporary art film today, Prosenc’s film works, in a way, mirror Godard’s statement: “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. The author demands an active viewer, prepared to get out of his/her comfort zone and as far away as possible from the commercial film junk food we are all served on commercial repertories. The aim is not to entertain the audiences. Violence, if narratively present, is conveyed more in absentia, thus taking away ‘the sheer pleasure of watching’. Such filmmaking, whilst not being radical, takes the position of the third, oppositonal, gaze, or of “negation of viewing pleasure”, in Prosenc’s terms.

Finally, Prosenc makes a kind of original poetic films that are not easy to talk about, even less easy to write about, because the artistic film experience cannot be conveyed by words only. Her visual poetics is very original and highly idiosyncratic that, along with her carefully contrived film structure and the consistent and ethical auteur politics, a critic’s elaborated ‘analysis and explication’ may become superfluous. It’s the kind of filmmaking that awakens all of your senses. It’s that rare kind of filmmaking that you feel, smell, taste, hear and touch. And you think about it for a long time after watching it… And when I say ‘watch’, I don’t just mean “watch passively’, but get immersed in her artistic world. Inhale. Exhale. Feel. 

Camera Lucida: When did you start having your idea for History of love (Zgodovina ljubezni) and how did it develop?
Sonja Prosenc: I was writing a script about people who are dealing with a loss even before I made The Tree. But during the shooting of The Tree a person very dear to me, a member of our family was dying. It was a difficult time. Later on, I started thinking about an unwritten demand of contemporary society that everything has to be likeable and “feel-good, in the “selfie-culture” we live in, even we, ourselves, have to become such a likeable “content”. We suppress our most intimate emotions and experiences, become alienated from others and from ourselves. Although in History of Love I venture away from a kind of a commentary on a social issue you can find in The Tree into an intimate tale of Iva and her family, the urge to explore the characters’ inability to connect with each other in the worst moments of their lives still derives from a reflection on the society: currently prevalent nihilism, violence and emotional detachment.

Camera Lucida: As your protagonist Iva passes through the grieving process and her rite of passage, family secrets and mysteries unveil. We mainly see and feel the events unfolding through Iva’s eyes: we see what she sees and we grieve with her. Was this aspect the most delicate moment in your script development?
Sonja Prosenc: Similar to The Tree, which was structured as a multi-protagonist nonlinear narrative, History of Love is also marked by nonlinearity, corresponding to the complex and fragmented experience of reality by the characters, namely the main protagonist Iva. Stepping away from a linear narration, the film builds on Iva’s subjective experience, and uses the story merely as a framework. Contrary to what one might think, this kind of film requires a very precise screenplay in order to determine the exact line between how much of a story to present without creating the impression that the point of the film is to tell a story, while still providing the most appropriate story clues to create a film universe wherein we can explore the inner states of the character as well as the more abstract concepts of the human condition. I have had an opportunity to develop this during a very fruitful collaboration with Midpoint and TorinoFilm Lab script consultants. Besides the narrative structure, sound plays an important role in this.

Camera Lucida: Did you identify with Iva’s character in this film?
Sonja Prosenc: There are motifs in the film that derive from the microcosm of my family, loss of mother, element of water, hearing impairment or even some small events like butterflies in the forest which seemed surreal when I experienced it etc. All those carry a meaning or a purpose in the film. I could say I identify with the whole body of the film, not with a character. I think in a film that is not conventionally narrative or story-driven, it is not so usual also for a viewer to really identify with a single character; usually you identify with a certain character through a story that you are watching and experience emotions connected to this character at an elementary or very concrete level. In a film like History of Love that is not plot or story-driven. I think it is about more abstract concepts of emotions, guilt, loss, revenge, detachment.

Camera Lucida: The way you film the main actress Dorotea Nadrah is quite rarely found in mainstream filmmaking. How does your approach differ from the way actresses have been filmed throughout the mainstream film history?
Sonja Prosenc: With Mitja Ličen, director of photography, we tried to follow one rule: we don’t expose characters, we don’t show them in the way that would expose their pain for the sheer “pleasure” of someone watching. We just carefully and sensitively give them space and time. To try to treat the characters with respect. Related to the question of respect and sensitive treating of a subject matter; in The Tree that deals with a very tragic situation of a family as a consequence of certain social circumstances it felt really wrong to make the film in a way that would ‘entertain’ the audience. So, there is an ethical dimension to the approach. There are films that very consciously take a position of negation of “pleasure” - for instance, they present violence, but in a way that problematises it and it is far from entertainment.

Here I would cite an article that presents Irreversible as an example of this in opposition to films like The Saw. The other subject related to lets say, this ‘ethics of approach’ is exploitation of identity, of marginalised groups etc. For instance, recently I saw a local film that gives a voice to a marginalised group and raises questions, but in the end it commodifies it and exploits it through merchandising in a manner of commercial blockbusters.

Camera Lucida: The symbolic level of water element (and not just in this film) is crucial, evoking a palette of emotions, which could be those of sadness, passion, transience but also of isolation (traditionally, water, also, evokes fertility, purification, transformation, rebirth and regeneration). Why did you want to make water your pervasive element not only as the film’s central imagery, but also as the narrative’s cohesive element almost shaping the characters?
Sonja Prosenc: I was a swimmer. I believe spending a lot of time in one element marks you a bit. Water can mean isolation, it can be a shelter, it evokes emotions like the ones you mentioned, and of course it is a very tactile stimuli. The way my previous film The Tree is very static and rooted - just like a tree, History of Love is marked by water. It defines the texture of the film. The fluidity in narration, with meandering of events, thoughts and memories, fluidity of identity od characters, I wanted the camera to be in motion, and I also wanted the film to be tactile or even to create a synesthetic experience. Through the film water gains a symbolic meaning as well, but it was important to me that the symbolism is not put in the film arbitrarily but it derives from the narrative, since the story -from the beginning when I started writing it- was marked by water very spontaneously, as part of the writer’s private universe.

Camera Lucida: This haunting water imagery has been achieved also thanks to your long-time DoP collaborator Mitja Ličen with whom you have worked on almost all film projects. How important for you is this mutual understanding with your cinematographer?
Sonja Prosenc: From the moment I write a first draft of script, or even before, Mitja is part of the process. I talk to him about the story and the images I see. We are both very visual persons so it’s easy for us to work together. Before the shooting I put every shot on paper. He likes to say he wants to be directed, just like actors. He knows I know what I want to achieve with a certain image, and that makes him feel safe in his work. And I know he can create the images as envisioned and even better since he understands their purpose. We feel safe in working with each other and this gives us a lot of freedom.

Biography of Sonja Prosenc

After graduating from University in Ljubljana, with diploma in Jornalism - Cultural Sciences, Sonja attended the Sarajevo and Berlinale Talents, co-founded the Monoo Production House and was selected for the TorinoFilmLab. Her award-winning and critically acclaimed first feature “The Tree” was selected by The Association of Slovenian Filmmakers as the Slovenian candidate for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016. Her approach to film language has so far been appreciated by cinephiles and film critics alike and “The Hollywood Reporter” described her as “a distinctively talented young filmmaker…who can tell a story in a startlingly unconventional manner”. Cineuropa selected her among 8 up-and-coming female directors in Europe. Her second feature History of Love, a co-production between Slovenia-Italy and Norway was supported by Eurimages, premiered at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the main competition program where it was awarded with Special Jury Mention; the film continues its festival run and it was also awarded at the national Slovenian Film Festival. She is a Board Member of the Directors Guild of Slovenia.