Moderation (Blaise Kirschner, 2016)
HD, 149min, sound
Moderation, a meta-horror film set in Athens, Cairo, LA and Rome, revolves around a female director and screenwriter who are faced with the disintegration of their relationship and their film project. As a result the director becomes more and more drawn into conversations with the actors she has cast, who reflect on the way horror traverses the realities of their lives on and off screen. In line with certain tendencies in horror cinema from cold-war Europe, Infitah-era Egypt and post-junta Greece, lived experience is neither naturalistically represented nor is it sublimated by recourse to the irrational. Rather, the irrational is used to externalise and de-subjectify what haunts the protagonists and to re-ground the possibility of agency operating at its limits.
The film’s moderation - in method, means, performances and overall mood - questions the very possibility of moderation exercised within a desire-heightened reality circuit suffering from glitches of the unreal kind. Moderation, in its subtle tuning with this reality’s hyle and its fundamental weirdness is thus a work as well as the tool for, and matter of, this work’s undoing (the film films to exhaustion). It may come across as a filmic piece of fictocriticism and certainly feels as something ultra organic: rooting, growing, genre-branching, disintegration and all. It’s skin and organs are intermingled, equally present and simultaneously spent; depth and surface are just identity-in-shape shifting, mnemosyne is a window with a view to a graveyard, the film is horribly alive and life feels like a ventriloquist’s act. In the context of “everything is real and nothing is what it seems”, alarm is introduced as a coagulating agent: it creates black humour pools in the midst of the most unexpected scenes, it fixes the Barbarella-floating sensual scenes as post psychedelic gore, it betrays the quiet mushrooming of several subgenres within the principle one, it turns music into decomposing flesh and leaves us in the grip of uneasy yearning. NADJA ARGYROPOULOU
Only the virtuality of horrors past can shield the reality from the horrors of the present. And this is where Kirschner’s horror really lies: by and by the “possible” abandons the setting, because no functional connection is able to keep its form here, the real becomes virtual. This might be exactly why the idea of horror seems so very productive right now — because its form is the form of consequential deviation, it measures out the consequences of affirmative forms of behavior, of the reproduction of the social as a genuinely pathological state. Moderation doesn’t seek out the sensationalism of extremities, the voyeuristic love of catastrophe. What it refers to is rather a consequential simulation that always finds itself gravitating back towards reality, because reality on the most banal level contains so much horror. And consequential horror signifies a narrative structure that today opens up a life form—rather than an infinite death. KERSTIN STAKEMEIER
Moderation was commissioned by Nadja Argyropoulou for PCAI (GR), co-produced by Beirut (EG) and Nomas Foundation (IT) and supported by the Elephant Trust (UK) and the Greek Film Centre (GR).
FESTIVAL SCREENINGS
66th Berlinale, Forum Expanded (world premiere)
Lenbachhaus in cooperation with DOK.fest, Munich
60th BFI London Film Festival, Experimenta
57th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Fast Forward
Glasgow Film Festival 2017, Crossing the Line
The Desire of Wounds. At the End of the Work., EN translation from Entgrenzter Formalismus: Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik, Kerstin Stakemeier, POLYpeN, Berlin, 2017.
