Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about some films which I enjoyed at the festival Instants Vidéo in October 2023.
Pangäa, a 14 minute short by Beate Hecher and Markus Keim, tells a familiar story of a lone individual and his alienation from the soulless, corporate, authoritarian, dystopian world, but the filmmakers tell this tale with an original visual and musical language, without dialog. The results bypass the overly-familiar tropes of the genre, allowing us to connect directly with the loneliness and despair at its heart.
Keim portrays the alienated protagonist, an anonymous worker, a corporate slave in an office, in a world of similar slaves. Pangäa uses animated pencil/charcoal drawings to create a hauntingly gray world, sad, drab, and devoid of human faces. But precisely because the images are hand-drawn, they are alive with human feeling. They express how the man feels about his world, the drabness and sadness of his life. Keim, on the other hand, appears as a cut-out photographic figure in full color, moving through this gray environment in stop-motion animation. His expressive, troubled face is a beacon of humanity beaming out of the gray, the color image expressing his tortured loneliness, lost in a world where all human connection is absent, a world where nothing seems fully alive. The slightly jerky motion of the animation helps to visually integrate this photographed figure into a hand-drawn world, while at the same time emphasizing his alienation from it. The contrast between color and black and white images is used as a signifier in many films, such as The Wizard of Oz, but this way of combining the two into a single world creates a singularly powerful expression of human alienation.
In a telling detail, when the man looks at his watch, checking to see if he’ll be on time for his office job, it appears on his flesh-colored, photographed wrist as a black and white drawing. The clock, the measurement which transforms moments of human life into units of money earned for an employer, is a tool of the system, the life-consuming machine. In an interesting visual twist, when he sits at his desk, surrounded by grey figures at identical desks, he engages in his data-entry work by writing with a pencil in a notebook, but the text also appears before him on a computer monitor. As a human attempting to be a piece of a machine, he can only produce his work from his own hand, his own mind and body, but must transform it into the data required by the machine. The hand-drawn visual world of Pangäa is entirely subjective: it represents the man’s emotional experience of his world, and the hand-made quality of the drawings of such objects as his computer monitor evoke his desperate attempt to find human meaning in his environment.
After a while, it seems that the “data entry” work he does is related to the elimination of people, people whose homes appear as circles on a map on his screen, or at least the elimination of their jobs and means of survival. One of them is his downstairs neighbor, a woman whose ghostly presence haunts his imagination. One by one, the few city trees seen through the window are felled. New construction appears all over the city. The buildings might be new, luxurious and expensive housing for the elites. They may simply be warehouses for machines. His newspaper fills with articles about the dispossessed and the homeless. A new world is being constructed, one which needs fewer and fewer people. The title refers to the original single continent of the early planet earth, and apparently the world is once again being made homogeneous and lifeless.
There is no uplifting, hopeful ending; Pangäa is truly elegiac, a sad hymn to a vanishing human world. This elegiac sadness is a key emotional frame for our times, which are commonly perceived as an ending, a vanishing. A similar feeling was expressed in the 2008 song by Antony and The Johnsons, Another World: “I need another world; this one’s nearly gone.” Pangäa invents a beautiful visual voice for this sadness.
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