Tusind sole

Tusind sole er en filmvisningsrække i København. Hver måned præsenterer vi én international premierefilm og ét genopdaget historisk værk, der på forskellig vis udvider filmmediets mulighedsrum og vores fælleshorisont.

Billetpris:
50 kroner (medmindre andet er angivet).

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Kommende visningeraugust

MOVING

Ohikkoshi
Shinji Sōmai
1993
124 min.
JAPAN
DCP
JAPansk tale / engelske undertekster

Virkelighed og filmiske mulighedsrum flyder sammen i denne utrolige dannelsesfilm. Instruktør Shinji Sōmai (1948-2001) regnes blandt sin generations største filmskabere, og Moving har haft afgørende betydning for nyere japansk film.

Renko er en energisk pige i 6. klasse, hvis hjerte går i tusind stykker, da hendes forældre meddeler, at de skal skilles. Renko nægter at acceptere sin nye tilværelse uden videre. Hun skjuler skilsmissepapirerne, spæner vægelsindet rundt, spærrer sig inde på sit værelse og drømmer om en foreningstur ved Biwa-søen, hvor den lille familie engang holdt ferie. Indestængt og ked af det, men samtidig drevet af en kluntet nysgerrighed og opdagelsesiver, bevæger Renko sig rundt i Kyotos gader og afkroge.

Følelsernes opdragelse og Renkos hverdag danner filmens ramme, i hvert fald lige indtil den ramme overskrides og noget grundlæggende virkeligt forsvinder. Renkos perspektiv skubber til filmens logik og farver dens struktur. Det hele foregår så umærkeligt og blidt, at man ikke nødvendigvis opdager det med det samme. En imponerende forening af hjemligt drama og filmisk-metafysiske mulighedsrum. Netop dét var en af Shinji Sōmais store egenskaber, og i Moving skaber han i scene efter scene en dynamisk relation mellem Renko og hendes omgivelser.

Sōmai rodfæster filmen i relativt lange, uafbrudte indstillinger, som han lader karakterernes uforudsigelige adfærd spille med og op imod. For Sōmai var formålet med de lange indstillinger ikke at anlægge et rigidt formsprog, men at arbejde med skuespillernes såvel som filmholdets energi – “to burst through the frame from within,” som den japanske filmskaber Ruysuke Hamaguchi formulerede det i et nyligt hyldestessay til sin landsmand. Shinji Sōmai valgte de greb, som var nødvendige for, at hans karakterer kunne brænde igennem, og i Moving er Renkos livskraft så stærk, at billedet på et tidspunkt ligefrem står i flammer.

Præsenteres i samarbejde med Cinemateket.
Kopi: MK2.

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“The World Doesn’t Know Shinji Somai”
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023

“The world doesn’t know Shinji Somai”. That was the catchphrase coming with the book Yomigaeru Somai Shinji (Shinji Somai Renaissance) published in 2011, 10 years after the director’s death. Now that 10 years has passed again, does the world finally met Shinji Somai? Yes and no. Of course, several retrospectives of his films have been organized in festivals, where he found a new audience. He is still far from achieving the widespread recognition that all Somai lovers feel is his due. This is a thing that I’ve felt precisely while speaking with those involved in cinema around the world. The world still doesn’t know Shinji Somai.

Since his debut in 1980, Shinji Somai is held in the highest esteem by Japanese film fans, just as it is, let's face it, impossible for anyone making cinema in Japan today not to have Somai in mind. Of course, it is easy to imagine the difficulty of mulling over the atmosphere of early Somai films if one is not familiar with the specific context of Japanese cinema in the 1980s. At a time when, with the dismantling of the major studio production system many films were being made by parasitising other industries such as television or music Somai launched his filmography by making "idol films" relying on the popularity of the teenage girls who played the leading roles (which is reminiscent of Hou Hsiao Hsien's debut at the same period).

We often speak of the "sequence shot" or the "long shot" to characterise the stylistic feature he acquired during this period. However, nothing could be more misleading than to regard this as his 'auteurism'. Simply comparing Somai Shinji's long takes with those of Welles, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos and others will only make his technical coarseness stand out. This could be understood as a reflection of the poor production conditions of Japanese cinema in the 1980s. But no. What he was really aiming for was first and foremost the 'sparkle of life' of the actors. In his work, the long shot allows these young women, seen as "idols", to burst through the frame from within, the better to escape. This inspires the crew, who grew up in studios, to break through the limited circumstances of the time. This 'long shot', which is a by-product of his deep trust in the vitality of the actors' and crew's bodies, is not just a directorial technique, but rather a reflection of his 'attitude to life'.

Moving (selected in Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section in 1993) is, amongst all of Somai’s films, the one which first created a contact between international audience and his entire oeuvre. However, the film did not simply end up unawarded, nor did it receive the same critical favours as Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, which was screened in the same year and in the same section. Here again, the world and Somai replayed their failed encounter. Watching the film again today, it seems unbelievable. Especially because of the presence of the lead actress, Tomoko Tabata. Her ability to move, the expression on her face, her eyes - everything is incredible; but it is her voice that I find most captivating. This voice, which alone manages to express her whole being, which plays with distance and time as if it were breaking down all boundaries, to touch and shake the adults who play the other characters, right up to the audience. As a filmmaker, it's hard to believe that such a being could exist in a film. The images are like so much evidence of her vital energy. We are led to reflect on the fact that the life force residing there may also be in us, and we may not be making full use of it. Life, here reinstilled.

There can be no doubt that Moving is still the best gateway for "the World" and Shinji Somai to meet. You don't need to know anything about the history of Japanese cinema to understand this film, which marks a period of the highest refinement in his career, as well as having been brought to life through Tomoko Tabata’s character. But if, thanks to this film, viewers ever become interested in Shinji Somai, I would like them to see his twelve other films. Because in each of them, you will see bodies and hear voices that surprise you. Again and again. There's nothing to be surprised about. We have not yet met Somai Shinji enough.

We still don't know Somai!
Hamaguchis essay blev udgivet i pressebooklet i forbindelse med den nyrestaurede udgave af Moving.

20. august
19.15
Cinemateket
(Gothersgade 55, 1123 København)

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Kommende visninger September

DRIFTING LAURENT

Laurent dans le vent
Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, Mattéo Eustachon
2025
110 min.
Frankrig
DCP
fransk tale / engelske undertekster

Den unge Laurent ankommer til et skisportssted i de franske alper uden for sæson. Planen er, at han vil drive rundt i de kolde bjerglandskaber, klamre sig til andre, hjælpe dem på vej, danne fællesskaber, alt sammen inden turisterne kommer. Hvem er Laurent egentlig?

Laurent. 29 år. En smuk drifter, der følger vindens retning. Ud af det blå kommer han dumpende ned på et skisportssted i de franske alper uden for sæson. Vi får at vide, at han leder efter meningen med livet, men Drifting Laurent er ikke en psykologisk rejse. Vi lærer først og fremmest Laurent at kende som et ydre; som en ensom fremmed, der inviterer sig selv ind hos mennesker; en arbejdsløs skikkelse, hvis eneste arbejde er at klamre sig til andre. Heriblandt: en fotograf, der tager billeder af landeveje, en landmand, der leder efter sin ged, en urtelæge, der bor alene med sin søn.

Som karakter indskriver Laurent sig i en rig filmhistorisk tradition af inciterende skikkelser, der aldrig afslører deres sande jeg. Dem, som forbliver en skitse, en idé, en skygge, noget flygtigt og fremmed, som man ikke desto mindre lukker ind og lader sig betage af. Fremmede fugle og karismatiske gratister som Falskspilleren i Erich von Stroheims Foolish Wives (1922), Den besøgende i Pier Paolo Pasolinis Teorema (1968), Den hjemvendte i Alain Guiraudies Misericordia (2024) og nu Laurent, Den vandrende.

Men Laurent er ikke et onde. Han hjælper dem, han møder på sin vej. Alle får deres øjeblik, og det er Laurent, der får dem til at skinne. Han er en outsider, men hvem er ikke det, når det kommer til et goldt bjergområde, hvor alt er kodificeret i henhold til årstider og turisternes ankomst? Et landskab og et folk i stille sjælevandring. Alle klarer sig, men også kun lige netop, og sammen udgør de et løst sammenhængende fællesskab.

Instruktørerne Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture og Mattéo Eustachon mødte hinanden på filmskolen Cinéfabrique i Lyon. De debuterede i 2022 med Dying in Ibiza (A Film in Three Summers). Drifting Laurent er trioens anden film, og den havde verdenspremiere i Cannes ACID i 2025. Det er en film, der giver plads til øjeblikke af tøven, forvirring og usikkerhed. Tid til at vandre, til at mærke steder og mennesker, til lade venskabelige og seksuelle forhold slå rod. I hvert fald lige indtil vinteren kommer, og med den, turisterne…

Præsenteres i samarbejde med Grand Teatret.
Kopi: Best Friend Forever.

8. september
19.00
Grand Teatret
(Mikkel Bryggers Gade 8, 1460 København)

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INTERVIEW WITH KELLY REICHARDT
Scott Roxborough, 2025

What was the origin of this story, the idea to do a heist movie?
I’ve just always been interested in heists. I like to dig around and read about them when they come up —they’re fun to read about. And I read an article on the 50th anniversary of the art heist in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1972. The article was about these teenagers who got caught up in an art heist at the Worcester Art Museum. That piqued my interest. So it was just a little seed for how to start telling this story.

Did your family background have anything to do with it? Your father was a detective.
No, not at all. My dad was a crime scene detective, my mom was an undercover narcotics agent, and my stepfather was an FBI agent. But it wasn’t really about that. I mean, while making the film, because it was set in the 1970s, a ton of things came back to me from being a kid then — being in the car all the time, that sort of thing. But there’s no biographical element in it.

You said it was the 50th anniversary of this particular heist, but were there any specific heists that you based the story of the film on?
No, but the Worcester heist was a jumping-off point for sure. Those were snatch-and-grabs like this before security cameras and other measures were put in. Museums had roundabouts in front of them, so robbers could just drive up, retirees were the security guards. Before the Gardner Museum [heist of 1990], there were a lot of these kinds of robberies. At the Worcester Museum, they took a Rembrandt and four huge paintings. That was a little bit of a stepping-off point. I liked the idea of it being in New England, so we set it in Framingham, which is close to Worcester. I wanted it to be smaller, not like masterpieces being taken. It became about painting by Arthur Dove. That was fun to dive into.

Was the idea that stealing Arthur Dove paintings, instead of Rembrants makes the whole thing slightly less grand or ambitious?
Yeah, it lowers the stakes. I felt it was better for the size of my film, really, and for the ambitions of this character. I felt like it was easier to get my arms around than having it be paintings everyone knows, like Degas or Rembrandt. I went through a lot of different stages of what it would be, but I kept coming back to Dove. I was a little bit worried, to be honest, because Dove paintings are quite small, and on their own they’re not majestic necessarily. One could dismiss them or find them unremarkable. He wasn’t very popular in the ’70s. But Tony Gasparro, the production designer, and I came to believe that if you set them in a room with multiple ones and gave them the prestige of a museum setting, that would carry it. We found one visual of a Dove show from the ’70s and riffed off that.

For the 70s setting, what is it about that era that resonates now?
Well, I liked the idea of taking a sort of classic character — James Mooney [played by John O’Connor] is kind of like a man-boy, and a father and a husband — who makes a big career move and tries to execute it to the best of his ability, then gets stomped on and doesn’t know how to recover from it. That’s sort of within the conventions of heist thinking — we think of [French director Jean-Pierre] Melville or something. But then there’s an undertone of a character who feels detached from what’s happening in the country. He’s too old to be drafted, he’s a middle-class kid with a judge father, and he has two kids. He’s not worried about being drafted, so he’s not tuned in.

The idea that keeps reappearing in the films I’ve made is this question about the individual versus the person in a community, or in a society, or as a citizen of the world. Can you really remain separate from what’s going on around you? Or does the drag of it catch up with you? Are we just all more connected than that?

Can you keep yourself separate from the politics around you, which is a particularly important question for artists.
Yeah. A lot of people say, “Well, I’m just not political.” And I think: Do you have a bank account? You’re political. Not to be political is a very privileged position. If you can go through life and not worry that someone’s going to knock on your door and take you to a prison in El Salvador, then lucky you.

Uddrag fra “Kelly Reichardt on ‘The Mastermind,’ Josh O’Connor and What the ’70s Have to Teach Us Today“, The Hollywood Reporter, 2025.

THE LAST DIVE – vises på 35mm

O Último Mergulho
João César Monteiro
1992
88 min.
PORTUGAL
35mm
PORTUGISISK TALE / engelskE UNDERTEKSTER

Vi udskyder efterårets komme en smule med portugisiske João César Monteiros sommerhede, drikfældige kærlighedsfilm The Last Dive. En eksistentiel film om håb og håbløshed og om i det mindste at nyde den sidste tid, vi har på jordkloden.

Unge Samuel sidder på havnen i Lissabon og kigger ned i det natsorte vand. Han har besluttet sig for at tage sit sidste spring. Hoppe i vandet og ikke komme op igen. Men pludselig kommer den pensionerede sømand Eloi forbi, som en dickens’sk juleånd, og får ham overtalt til at vente lidt med at springe. De skal lige have et par øl sammen, og så kan de hoppe sammen i bagefter. Det bliver begyndelse på det umage pars rejse rundt i den portugisiske hovedstads festende natteliv.

Over to dage og nætter drikker og spiser de lystigt, bliver barberet, besøger den fordrukne og dameglade Elois sengeliggende og lidende kone, danser og synger og køber et slips og finder sammen med nogle unge kvinder. En af dem er Elois meget stumme og meget betagende datter, Esperança, og uden at sige et ord får hun pustet en lille smule glæde og håb og liv ind i den ellers opgivende Samuel.

I hvert fald lige indtil de to mænd vender tilbage til havnen. For det er blevet tid til, at de begge skal træffe et valg: om enten at stille træskoene og tage det sidste hop eller blive hængende og nyde, at solsikkerne blomstrer og står høje som et menneske.

The Last Dive er et portræt af Lissabons stejle gader og tvivlsomme, fordrukne typer, der lever, når natten springer ud. Den er både en fortælling og en fornemmelse. En følelse af at være fuld og have tømmermænd og bevæge sig gennem livet på den skrøbelige sti mellem ekstase og desperation, forelskelse og håbløshed.

Dialogen er sparsom og store dele af den drukner i larmen fra gaden og livet i byen, og på den måde ender filmen med at mime Esperanças manglende evne til at tale. Derfor taler den med sine bevægelser, sin tidslighed, sine blikke. Med andre ord: en stumfilm a là João Cesar Monteiro.

Filmen var Monteiros bidrag til serien Os Quatro Elementos om de fire elementer, der blev lavet af fire portugisiske instruktør og udkom i 1992. De tre andre instruktører værende Joaquim Pinto, João Mário Grilo og João Botelho. The Last Dive behandlede vandelementet. Og den er et oplagt udgangspunkt, hvis man endnu har til gode at bevæge sig ind i den portugisiske instruktørs filmiske verden. Monteiro tilhørte den generation af portugisiske filmskabere, der brød frem i 1960'erne, da landets fascistiske regime begyndte at krakelere. Hans samlede værk er spraglende, men alle filmene er drevet af et ønske om at forene folkelig komik a là Chaplin, aristokratisk pompøsitet, litterær realisme, seksuel okkultisme og formalistiske eksperimenter til et distinkt filmisk udtryk.

På bedste Alfred Hitchcock-vis har Monteiro en vane for selv at dukke op undervejs i sine film. The Last Dive er ingen undtagelse. For instruktøren har en undseelig, men ikke mindre legendarisk cameo i filmen. Et kort moment, der indbefatter både en toiletrulle og et helt særligt blik.

Præsenteres i samarbejde med Cinemateket og den portugisiske ambassade.
Rettigheder: Leopardo Filmes. Tak til Paulo Branco.
Kopi: Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema.

[Læs mere...]

João César Monteiro: Poet Provocateur
Haden Guest, 2010

João César Monteiro (1939-2003) remains among the most indelible and unusual figures in the history of Portuguese cinema, a visionary and profoundly eccentric filmmaker whose unique contribution to postwar European film is only gradually being recognized today. A cosmopolite imagination tethered by a provincial attachment to Lisbon, a libertine with an obscurely puritanical streak, an unrelenting aesthete guided by an archaic spirit – Monteiro was a deliberately contradictory and difficult artist who obdurately resisted affiliation with any declared “school” of filmmaking. Monteiro dedicated himself instead to a mode of sublimely, and often perversely, high modernism fascinated by a rich undercurrent between the cinema and the other arts – especially poetry, painting, theater, literature and music. Like the films of his compatriot Manoel de Oliveira (b. 1908), Monteiro’s cinema was also animated by an alternately cryptic and trenchant political agenda that took frequent target at the holy trinity of Church, State and Family still firmly entrenched after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship. In such seminal early works as Paths and Silvestre, Monteiro treated obscure Portuguese myths and legends as Rosetta stones for understanding the darkest shadows of the national unconscious and suggesting the ways in which the country’s imperialist and patriarchal legacies continue to shape its citizens. In opulent late works like God’s Comedy and Come and Go, Monteiro channeled his lasting preoccupation with corporality and perverse sexuality into a sustained interrogation of individual agency and collective desire.

Raised in a devoutly Catholic family yet an avowed atheist as an adult, in many of his late films Monteiro cast himself in the recurrent leading role of “João do Deus”- named for the Portuguese-born patron saint of prostitutes, the infirm and fishermen but a wholly secular figure, a perverse Buster Keaton-like dreamer drawn to young women and possessed of a patient defiance of the established social order. A curious religious logic also guided the development of Monteiro’s extraordinary visual style, which moved from the radical mise-en-scene of the early work towards an increasing austerity shaped, above all, by Monteiro’s proclaimed distrust of artificial light – which reached its apotheosis in Snow White – and his desire to capture the effulgent mystery of sunlight and its shadows.

Katalogtekst fra Harvard Film Archive, 2010.

25. September
19.00
Cinemateket
(Gothersgade 55, 1123 København)

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