The Cycling Chronicle – how to find a way out
A silent cyclist is deeply frustrated with the position that he is being given in the society. While in the past his ancestors were given the meanings by collective religions, the historical and human development does not provide the transcendence to follow and the emptiness could - literally - scare to death. The only orientation that is being offered to actual Japanese generations, is a routine, which obliges one to step into a predetermined destiny. That troubles the isolated 17 years old boy so much that he is desperately seeking for a way to rebel, for a possibility to change. As he is aware of the briefness of the existence, he attempts to reach its edges, to change it radically. This urge pushes him into extreme actions, brutal not only towards the society but also towards himself. All stubborn and full of anguish, which he is rarely able to express, he is prepared to do superhuman efforts just to contribute something deeper to his existence. But the road that he is using for his pilgrimage does not offer him any escape, as it ends and leaves him not only with no answers but with even more questions.
Ana Javornik

Colourless Colours: Monoblock - Luis Ortega
A film by young Argentinean director, Luis Ortega, Monoblock takes into focus three female figures, two middle-aged ladies and young girl, each of them living with its own default. The author creates the ambience using the wide pallet of colours giving to each space its’ own nuance but the dominant one is red, appearing in every scene and space in different intensity. The red represents mother’s rotten blood, suppressed passions, abandoned dreams, muted wishes and forgotten strivings of this purely feminine world where from the masculine figures and energy are excluded. But all the other colours – the whiteness of the hospital, yellowish terrace, greyish fun fair and reddish sky – all are there to underline the emptiness of the world they are living in, the impossibility to drag themselves from this monotonous cave, but also as the contrast to the greyness of their existence. The use of colours is not untypical for Spanish speaking cinematography, but I never saw them used in this sense and with so many meanings as if there are telling story for the story and fulfilling all that is left unspoken. The way he paints characters and accentuates everything comes in contradiction with the term ‘colourful’, representing emptiness, sadness, loneliness, despair, and thus makes impossible to apply this word on this film which would be at the same time pretty convenient example as an explanation of it.
Antonija Letinić

Cycling Chronicle: Landscapes the Boy Saw
The movie follows a young man’s bicycle trip after he had killed his mother and flees towards the Fujiyama pushing himself forward until the point of exhaustion. The director Koji Wakamatsu does not establish a criminal hunting neither does he explain the reason for the murder but instead he portrays the boy’s inner struggle with his own guilt. The trip leads the boy into deeper solitude where he encounters outsiders who are trying to come to terms with there destiny and who remind him constantly of his guilty feelings and the face of his mother. In an ultimate act of castigation the boy forces himself to move up and down the streets near the coast and the mountains in the winter. The rough wintry landscape signifies his inner struggle and becomes itself an important protagonist since human beings are compared with landscapes – ‘landscapes the boy saw’. Even when the chain-drives break he shoulders his bike and carries his tired body onwards in search of punishment and deliverance. When he finally breaks down on the street and his bike is falling down a steep slope he stands on the edge between life and death and redeems his guilty feelings in an ultimate cry.
Barbara Laner

Luis Ortega: Monoblock, The Marginalised Subject
Monoblock is an explicit surrealistic and symbolic allegory of the expelled, the worn out, the margined subject who is unable to incorporate into ordinary safe life. And the Monoblock itself, the huge and terrifying building, could also be a wider symbol of broken chances, of stucking somewhere without a way of escape. Building on astonishingly and claustrophobic imagery we are guided into a very close and intimate relationship between three women and three generations. The daughter, the mother and the grandmother all socially expelled, keeping on nurturing their wounded and fragile connection in their broke social habitat (with a few exceptions) of two rooms. With the intense and heavy atmosphere full of picturesque,
surreal images, in contrast warmly and fascinatingly colored, we are fixed into their social and physical handicap. Monoblock is in a figurative manner reflecting and observing the personal collapse as a consequence of a wider economical breakdown (lately in Argentina) and is a poetical and fully referential (not hiding the obvious aesthetic inspirations) mirror of the current hyper capitalistic zeitgeist.
Biljana Pavlović

Koji Wakamatsu: Cycling chronicle, Architecture of the Subconscious
In the first, quite peaceful scenes of the film, we meet a young boy, riding a bicycle. Soon, we find out that this boy brutally killed his mother and he’s fighting now against the guilt, through restless cycling without destination. The film follows the boy through the struggle in his subconscious. Long shots of boys hard cycling, of his suffering face, people that he meets, his own off voice (which appears in the form of subtitles of the screen) and disturbing flashbacks on his mother’s death are telling us the story. But the constituent »storyteller« is also the landscape and the architecture that he is passing by. The landscapes, which are mostly white, cold mountains, unfriendly sea or rough cliffs, are the reflection of the mental burden and struggling going on in his mind. On his way he is constantly passing many roads, bridges and shores or he’s trying to get out of the tunnels trying to exit the labyrinth of memories on his mothers figure and death. When he’s passing through a city, he finds himself alone in the crowd of people, surrounded by skyscrapers and strange advertisements. The bicycle gets broken and he’s carrying it on his shoulders. He’s slowly getting up to the hill, carrying a bicycle like a cross. He’s throwing the bicycle and it crashes on the cliffs. After a long trip he’s finally found a way out.
Janja Sesar

Cycling Chronicle: The Landscapes the Boy Saw
Like in a cycle the questions of living will rise in every generation. And as in the Japanese culture the youth is supposed to pay honor and respect to the elderly people, the »Boy« finds himself listening to an old man. It is an analogy of the situations of the young people during the war between Japan and China long ago and the contemporary life of the Japanese youth. When the pressure to be successful in school and life became too much to bear, the Boy was brought to the point that he kills his beloved mother. And as the old solder says, also they were drilled to kill and prepared to die, when he was in Mongolia in the middle of coldness, snow and wind. And as we can see him cycling to »run, run, run« away, as it is stated during the film, the Boy finds himself in the same situation, emotionally and physically. It is the same cycle that makes his escape useless. Once again this is predicted in Japanese symbols within the picture and becomes true when the Boy is heading up to a funeral procession and remembers his murder. The written statements in images of a the wild and powerful landscapes (cloudy sky with rays of sun light, the waves of the sea, the birds in the sky) refer to the Japanese art of painting, which values higher a perfect copy than the original image and in that way underlines the repetition. The old soldier never told his family about his own guilt, but never managed to escape from them. And in the end also the Boy has stop to run away.
Julius Bauer

Cycling Chronicle: Liberating Death
After he unexplainably murdered his mother the young 17 years old boy begins to run away. So he starts to cycle away from his home and traveling through the vast countryside, meeting first an old man and afterwards an old woman, both telling him about the wartime in Japan. His journey is getting ever more difficult, since he gets more and more exhausted by the long ride and the mental images of his dead mother that he can’t forget. Finally, on the end of his power, he falls down and his bike gets damaged, which silently announces the end of his escape that takes place on a slope on a high mountain. While it first seems that he is running away of the place of crime it soon becomes clear that he is actually running away from something in him self: the guilt of murdering his mother. In his imagination pictures of her are appearing and so constantly remind him of the “worst of all possible crimes”. He is thus not trying to escape from the real world and people, but from himself and his guilt, which is subtly shown through the scenery. Namely, it seems that he is the only one who is moving and everything else is frozen, in a way. This speaks also about the imminence of death in life, which leads to the conversation with the old man and women who were talking about death and life during the war. So he finally has to except his crime and the penalty, which is dead, but at the same time the only liberation he can get from his act.
Martin Marzidovšek

Drawing Restraint 9: Nothing is Everything, Everything is Nothing
A film is a composure of different symbols. The most important one, I would say, is the symbol of the whale, because at the end of the movie new whale is ‘born’. The symbol looks like ellipse crossed with the line. It appears in all the different situations and at all different times trough the movie. It appears at the beginning and than stays present trough whole movie. It symbols the birth of the new wail and it can be connected with every detail, every story and every other symbol used. The film is filed with different unusual rituals and in the center of every one is that symbol. First there is a woman who is packing two presents and she puts gold symbol on both of them. She rips of the middle part of it witch splits them in two halves crossed with red line. Red line can become a symbol of scare as seen later in the movie. The cook on the ship prepares the meal in a shape of that symbol. The meal is at the top gray and in the middle white, which clearly reminds us of a whale’s skin and flesh. The people who are eating the meal also rip of the top of the middle, which gets in a connection with ritual between man and woman needed for the wail to be ‘born’. Instead of making love they cut each other (red line) and they first rip of their skin and later on their flash. There is also pool on the ship shaped that way. It is filled with white mixture (wails flash). At the beginning the symbol doesn’t mean anything to us, but in the end it becomes only thing which is really important for the movie. It is interesting how some undefined symbol gets in a position in which it become only thing that we can read from.
Nejc Sajovic

Europe Next Door
Europe next door (Evropa preko plota) is a docu – fictional film dealing with the particular conditions of the inhabitants of a village in Vojvodina at the time of nowadays European integration. The work has a political value because of its sided point of view close to the traditional people’s ordinary needs. Želimir Žilnik, the author, is an historic figure in Serbian Cinema and a clear opponent during the old regime. He is not moved in criticizing Europe by the rejecting of a superior order (at least that doesn’t appear through the film). It is just celebrating the importance to be always the same in a world rapidly changing. Competitive market, wild capitalism, homologation are changing nature of workers making them say: »If we want survive, we have to steal«. The poor farmer must arrange his daughter’s wedding agreeing that is the only way to make her life better. This behavior is an unnatural one forced by the nowadays society. To survive you have to steal, but also to change your mind and way of life, we could say. The scene of the drunk farmer’s speech is clearly summarizing: »I am ready to fight everyone and everything but I am just afraid from what attacks me from behind«.
Paolo Bernardi

Cycling Chronicle: About the social relationships
Having a protagonist who avoids almost any chance to establish a relation with the other characters and hardly pronounces a couple of words in the whole movie, it can lead us towards the analysis of the social relationships as they’re portrayed here. Assuming this, the key sequence in this sense is the one with the guy listening to a war veteran: save from the old lady at the ending, the former soldier is the only character we hear talking to the protagonist. From his words we get the idea of the old Japanese society, where people were hopelessly tied to the figure of the Emperor and conditioned by the faith they owed him. At this point, it’s interesting to notice that the other people we hear speaking in the movie always belong to a common social group: students talking among them, fishermen talking among them… So it seems to emerge the idea of an apportionment of the social structure: the family and those that in sociology are known as »community of equals« have taken the place of the Emperor, becoming the social references of the individual and, therefore, his sources of conditioning. And it’s just from this sort of conditioning that the protagonist tries to escape, in a run which is a cry of freedom, opposite to the everyday’s run he’s forced to by the society. Two relevant details: while he rides his bike on the streets, he crosses many car-drivers and many pedestrians, but no other bikers; as well, it’s significant the scene in which he shares an igloo with other people: we see the others talking among them, but we don’t get any audio: indeed it would be useless, since the guy is anyway not interested in interact with them. Once killed his mother (symbol of the family pressure, as the students stress in their dialogue), he neither belongs to a group anymore, nor wants to.
Piervittorio Vitori

Cycling Chronicle: What did the boy see?
A 17-year old boy is cycling across Japan after murdering his mother. The hostile landscapes he travels through are not only natural scenery but also a landscape of his disturbed mind and, even more importantly, landscapes of the dark side of Japan’s history, culture and present-day society. Within them the boy finds a context (a landscape) for his crime and tries to redeem his troubled soul. He starts his voyage at the foothills of the Fuji mountain – the symbol of Japan’s grandeur – but as he goes deeper inside the country he comes across desolate flatlands, unfriendly, cold, snow-topped hills and heavy sea. And people who reveal to him the dark spots of Japan’s reality. His voyage is the boy’s inner travel to himself and director’s highly critical comment on his home country.
In the final scene we see the boy carrying his broken bicycle uphill as some kind of modern Jesus, seeking redemption for his troubled soul and his malfunctioning country from all their past and present sins by the means of self-inflicted suffering. The shot where he throws his bicycle down the hill is put against a shot in which he is killing his mother and the one of him screaming, like these actions were just different expressions of the same felling – all just an outburst of rage as a result of accumulated pressures inflicted on him by dysfunctional environment, all just a quest for final catharsis.
Špela Barlič

Cycling Chronicle
After killing his mother the director Koji Wakamatsu sends his protagonist a 17 year old boy on a bicycle trip across Japan. Just as life is, the young man on his way to clear his thoughts and feelings has to deal with ups and downs, just as he has to conquer mountains and valleys. On his way he meets people telling him about their past and trying to place themselves within their lives, which he is attempting to do. At the end after helping an old lady as kind of atonement he finally reaches the point when he is able to give his feelings especially his guilt a place to express themselves in shouting. After carrying his already destroyed bicycle up the mountain which seems to make it even harder to himself, he is able to throw it down. But as the young man in his solitude keeps pedaling on and on and also the wheel keeps turning on and on, just as earth and life do, throwing down the bicycle and shouting signify only the first steps in order to free and purify himself: life and its struggles will always need to be dealt with.
Susanne Pedarnig