Thomas Elsaesser on Parallax Views
31 January 2017
A Cinema of Abjection. Film historian and theorist Thomas Elsaesser delivered a “thought experiment” to IFFR guests yesterday, when he set out to test the limits of Europe’s political values through an evaluation of the abject human state, as depicted in cinema.
He commented how both Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake and Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann exemplified this notion before turning his attention on Bright Future 2017 selection Park, by Sofia Exarchou.
"She has found the perfect setting (Athen’s abandoned and derelict Olympic Village) and the perfect protagonists (a group of local street kids and shiftless adolescents) to craft a parable of contemporary Greece as a country of abjects, who amid parental abandonment and societal dereliction (i.e. in an abject country) live suspended lives – sometimes literally, as they balance their bodies on stadium chairs, atop ramparts and walls, or stretch out precariously at the edge of a swimming pool,” he stressed.
