Carlos Casas's Cemetery is exclusively showing November 18 - December 17, 2020 on MUBI in the Undiscovered series.
I am very happy and proud to introduce Cemetery to its new audiences at MUBI. It is always a great honor to reach wider audiences but its also a difficult task to introduce one's own film, especially a film I have worked for nearly a decade to complete, and that has taken so much of my passion and dedication, to a lot of issues and questions, that I hope will also be part of your experience as a viewer.
I never imagined in my darkest dreams that this film would be viewed in the context of a world pandemic, forcing cinemas and festivals around the world to close and confining people to their homes. But I guess now the film is in your hands and I really hope it will provide some positive light and hope in whatever shape or vision you might want to give it. I would suggest watching in full darkness and maybe with headphones or loud sound. All I can do now is humbly wish you a great journey.
Allow me to take this opportunity to tell you a little more about the origin of the project and my reasons for making it.
Everything started from my fascination with the myth of the elephant graveyard, and what it tells us about our relation to nature today. The genesis of this film was initially a mystery to me and became evident only long after the research started, when I happened to re-watch the film Tarzan, the Ape Man. It was then that I understood how much this film had affected me as a child. It sowed a seed that was finally blooming, a sensation that still haunts me today, and that questions not only the idea of nature and the meaning of the myth but also the ability of cinema to move us, to affect us, to shape us.
In my previous documentary films I have dealt with the most archaic and remote locations of the world. I somehow travelled in time to other periods, to more ancient lifestyles, looking for an answer to the notion of the end of the world, but also to meet and understand its survivors. Those films were dedicated to our resilience, to our ability to adapt and to reincarnate ourselves.
Cemetery, as a continuation of those journeys, brings to light my fascination for our imagery of nature and the notion of the sanctuary. I believe we are living through the most radical of times as a species. Blocked by our inability to act against our accelerating mistreatment of the planet, victims to climate change and now pushed ashore by pandemic waves, we are storming into the Anthropocene. I believe, if we don’t change our course, in the coming years most of the species and environments we now know will disappear. Our relation to nature has reached a peak as our population grows and the advance of civilization and technology reshape our planet.
During theses times, the mystery of the cemetery as metaphor is fundamental for ourselves as a species, and our ability to relate with the natural world. I believe that guarding the most ancient relation to nature there is another sentient being, another keeper and guardian much more ancient than ourselves, and to which this film is ultimately dedicated. My fascination with this animal is linked to its richness, from its amazing emotional and complex social life to its rich sonic language and wisdom. I believe it guards ancestral secrets as a species that are essential for our understanding of nature and the natural world. This film is mostly intended to create new bonds between humans and elephants and ultimately with nature. This film is also my way of reshaping the traditional animal documentary, making it along the lines of a spiritual and nearly mystical search, hence the will to work with Chris Watson and Ariel Guzik, both prominent nature and animal interlocutors.
Formally and aesthetically, the film aims to break certain laws of the cinematic experience; it wants to somehow become a rite of passage for the spectator, from the early influences of classic adventure films to more experimental cinema references. The film is actually a crossover of adventure film, animal documentary, science-fiction documentary and a hypnosis session. A sort of conceptual collision of Tarzan and La région centrale.
Cemetery is an exploratory film divided into four parts, four different point of vision and four ways of understanding film and contemporary cinema styles. The film begins as the story of a journey, a simple archetypal story, followed by a chase or persecution, only then to become a personal journey for the viewers, as well as a sensorial challenge, while arriving to the cemetery at dark, blindfolded by darkness and guided only through sound, the spectator reaches its destination and then is reawaken for a new dawn, to a new light.
The myth of the cemetery remains ever more urgent today, and it’s today that its meaning is more pertinent: to somehow illuminate a new vision of nature and our position within it. My challenge was to uncover that myth in order to present it anew, to make a contemporary reading of it, and experiment with different visual and sonic languages. I consider this film as the ultimate battle of vision and sound, hearing and seeing. For me, this film concludes a journey, a personal cinematic exploration process to question sound in the wider cinematic experience. In a era where film is becoming more a distraction, I wanted to create a film that is not a commodity, that demands as much from viewers as it gives, a film that somehow hands viewers a larger responsibility: forcing them to become the projectors or creators as well, using their own experience, to project their own images, their own light. I wanted to make a film that folds onto itself and changes, that finally uses our sleep as tool for filmmaker/audience interaction. I wanted to create a manifold film, a "machine of perception" to quote Snow, but also a film that speaks to our childlike, oneiric side. A film that would use darkness to create itself.
Along the way, while preparing this film I asked myself a lot of questions that will be left unanswered, but that will populate the film like ghosts. Maybe there is a way to find new means by which to understand our position and our responsibility as species, and also as viewers. Maybe if only we allowed ourselves to be reawakened, reincarnated cinematically and maybe even spiritually, perhaps then we could answer the question: does our journey end here or does it continue?
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This introduction was based on “Notes on a film about elephants,” a text by Carlos Casas published in his forthcoming book Cemetery. Journeys to the elephant graveyard and beyond by Humboldt books.