Blaž Lukan: Runaway Film

Runaway Film
A film constantly on the run, running away from something or someone, from itself... A film with no pretentions of being a film. Rather it wants to be description, a diary of a journey, of days and lives that have fled, that have escaped control, life itself ... What escapes is what exists, but what doesn't exist also escapes, devoid of all romanticism, and certainly of God ... Perhaps only the time counted down by the music that dominates the flight ... Counting down? Counting? Measuring? No, embodied time, even though apparently mute, silently aflow, singing and conjuring forms: being itself ... A running that wants to outrun time, and succeeding, even though every suspension, every slowing down or ceasura—paradoxically— has a boomerang effect, redoubling the force of time's seemingly even pulse. A blow to the forehead or a splash to a devouring gaze that cannot get enough of the images, desperate to capture them all at once in a single glance, in a single frame ... But time, though seemingly crystal clear, is never straightforward, never in focus; it is, in any one moment, blurred, opaque, diffused ...
 
Perhaps it can only be captured by a dizzying speed, the runaway film, one that has overtaken itself only to be caught in its own infinite loop, plunging headlong into the trap and drowning there.... A film in which all frames overlap to unfold in a projection of an overarching single frame, a condensed mass of pixels stacked on top of each other in an infinite stack of darkness and silence ... But the film shirks from the metaphor of a submerged world, where time slows down and everything grows into depth; rather, everything in this film unfolds on the surface, rising into a tower of silence, carving scratches and wounds into time...
 
But the wounds are actually somewhere else, in the breathing we cannot hear, in the exhausted hand and body holding the camera, having sought refuge in the crowd, among the rocks, in the labirynth of home, entered as if through windows, rarely through doors, and preferrably on the fringes: basements, attics, messy rooms, busy streets, subways ... Now indoors, now outdoors, there seems to be no difference between inside and outside, it doesn't matter whether we are at home or in the street, whether surrounded by warmth or a cold blast, it doesn't matter whether it is day or night, summer or autumn, a cemetery or a bus stop, space emerges before our eyes as a single place where we are not ...
 
Heterotopias—understood as marginotopias in the film—are in fact interior spaces of the body with its hand that cradles the cradle; this constantly emerging, tremulous, shifting, at times unbearable camera, in fact the body of its bearer.... It wants to force its way into every space, disperse every crowd, whether of people rushing in the street, or those waiting for the subway, or those shouting slogans against the authorities at protests ... It wants to inhabit every corner, everywhere it wants to find what cannot be found, but which, somewhere in the end, will emerge, if only as a realisation don't think it will ever pass... What will never pass is the search, the reckless pursuit, the possession of infinite spaces, infinity itself, which of course will come, and the spaces will disappear, but not within our lifetime; in our lifetime time is infinite and spaces are boundless ...
 
In the mad rush nothing appears to matter, everything is fleeting; what matters are the interruptions, the stops, the singular moments at the stations where we become and at the same time are constantly becoming—and yet, even this impression is wrong ... What matters is the flight itself, the running, the speed of liberation grounded in the conviction that one day it will crash against the glass ceiling of that which will stop it; moreover, it will merge it with its own mirror image, indeed, sum it all up, envelop it into oneness with its own universe, in which everything is still there and nothing can disappear, fade away ... In fact, we are already immersed in this universe, only the difference between facts and memories is a constant reminder that our actual world is in fact permanently marginal, that we exist insofar as we don't exist, and that whatever exists is ephemeral ... But, as said, not within our lifetime, in this life everything is unforgiving ... All one voiceless but deafening miserere, the endless repetition of a single note which we all hear, although in reality we are all busy with our own—equally inaudible—notes ...
 
Although the film frantically returns to what has already been shown, like a refrain that tries to relive again and again the irreversible, what has passed once and for all—for which precisely it will never pass, since only what is can pass—each frame is new... New as a single day passing from birth to death, literally, the birth and death of a life, of someone very close, so close that it seems like your own; but at the same time repetitive ad nauseam, filled with flight, with searching, with an emptiness that is in fact suffused with something that we cannot recognise, because it is identical with us ... It is as if we were watching a film in which two key protagonists were missing: first, the person to whom the film is dedicated, who is behind the decision for each and every shot, who in fact sets the camera in motion, and then the person who makes it visible to us, who with their very body inscribes this ever new message about a time of nothingness ... The film diary is really a dialogue, a dialogue with oneself, who exists but cannot answer any one question, and with the one who is not, and can answer every question ... Who in these steadily fleeting answers, receding like the horizon before a drone, is still there, more than ourselves, but by way of absence ...
 
So what is and what is not? There is no clear answer, everything is a festering fugue, basso ostinato, interrupted only by the deafening breathing or analogous crackle of its bearer at completely unexpected moments. Everything is a path, a fine line of death, the only true witness to life. Where this life takes place, how it is lived, what occasions define it, what lessons it gives and what remains incomprehensible—all these are secondary to the mere fact of its existence, the sole guarantee that we are ... A film that wants to find itself in itself and seems like a winding path through the desert, where the footprints are deep and yet the path disappears right behind us ... A film that does not seek substitutes for life, but, like life itself, captures in its gaze all that is, and yet can never stop ... Although the dynamism, the tension, seems to be growing, it is not driven by anything external, but by an internal combustion engine that runs on perpetual fuel, set in motion once and for all by that fatal act which is in fact its opposite, its negation, and which now drives it, and drives it, and drives it, all the way to the impossible encounter not only with itself but also with oneself...
 
A film that refuses to say: there is nothing, because at the same time it is immensely grateful for everything that is: for the people close and far; for Š., for Š. again and again; for the masses, who are, after all, pulsating with life, rushing into it, albeit often in misguided directions; for nature, which needs nothing more than to be left alone and just be; for the moments of spontaneous harmony and exclusion; for the ontological contingency which is often anticipated and planned, as it should be; for the beams of luminescence and the fading lights; for rehearsals of performances that never happen; and for recording echoes that fade into themselves; for the picturesque panoramas and the dramatic avoidance of collisions that flow seamlessly like a film-river, referring unintentionally to countless works from the history of cinema and unkowingly triggering new associations ... And especially for him, for N., who is the only one who really is everything ...
 
Unintentionally and unknowingly? That is the question, because along this frenetic path, where sound drips persistently and relentlessly on the same spot on our skulls, we are led by a gaze that is radically open, curious and eloquent, full of images and sounds that can only be mastered by believing that at the end of the path we will be met by total blindness and deafness, but will nevertheless bear witness to what is, what was and what will be ... A film so full of the concrete, which nonetheless functions as an abstraction, staging the very essence of what is, or rather, of its approximation that still has an infinitely long way to go ... To get to itself ... A film that may one day finally find itself on this journey through space and time ... Find itself at last ...