The fall of Icarus

On a winter night with a full moon, look up to the sky. A summer night in the country, look up to the sky. A night at sea, look up to the sky. When you arrive in a foreign city, look up to the sky.

The celestial landscapes that unfold each evening are always new paintings. Our senses only give us a tiny piece of what is really going on. They fail to capture the essential. Everything exceeds us in this infinite opening towards the beyond. Everything escapes us. We build instruments to compensate for the failure of our senses, we map, we name, we conquer with flags, satellites and telescopes zones of the infinite, as if we could transpose our human laws in this immeasurable. The starry vault, this other world, this great vertigo of the undetectable, of the gap without borders, without edges, swallows us sometimes. When we raise our eyes, in the solitude of our human condition, that we seize in a shiver this total opening, sometimes we remember. Humanity is not only fragile, it is improbable. How did we get here? To these permanent conflicts, this butchery, this hatred?

This layover around The Fall of Icarus wants to explore the possibilities that the sky offers to think differently about the human species. Having come too close to the sun, Icarus burned his wings. Using the myth not to remind us of human authority, but rather to remind us that individual desires for omnipotence do not lead to the firmament. Perhaps what should inhabit us in the face of these unconquerable heavens should be only a grateful humility in the face of the miracle of existence. Then, perhaps, the respect of all the forms of the living would seem to us more essential.

CONQUERING THE SKIES

Our Century, a film made at the end of the Soviet era by the Armenian poet and filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, is perhaps the work that best encapsulates the theme explored by this stopover. In a 30-minute lyrical fresco composed of archival footage, without commentary, Pelechian questions our century and its myth of Progress, between fascination, exaltation and repulsion. Processions, domination of nature, conquest of the skies and space, occupation and destruction, everywhere. A century of stubborn, blind and blinding vanity, which prefers the domination of life itself. A filmmaker of accumulation and excess, Pelechian condenses in this film the tragedies of a century, marked in particular by the failure of progress. Machines of all kinds follow one another, utopias of steel that promise liberation to the optimistic crowds that flock to applaud the parade. Culminating in a spectacular rocket launch, Our Century nevertheless celebrates the virtuosity with which humans have staged their own legends and praised their exploits.

Space Dogs allows us to continue this reflection on human vanities and the desire for power by adopting the perspective - literally - of a group of stray dogs. Laïka, the famous dog who was the first living being sent into space - only to die burnt - comes back to haunt the streets of Moscow in this documentary with a touch of uchrony. Destabilizing and confronting, this film thwarts anthropocentrism with an unusual and perfectly mastered cinematographic treatment. The story of Laïka, torn from her wandering to be sent into orbit, becomes a twisted metaphor of our relationship to the animal world and to all forms of non-human life, manipulated, exploited, deformed, sacrificed, to meet our aspirations.

The conquest of space cannot be approached without evoking the Cold War, which was the spearhead of an unprecedented technological race between the United States and the USSR, culminating in Apollo 11 and the steps of Neil Armstrong on the Moon in July 1969. Out of the Present, a documentary by the Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujica, is a document of unprecedented preciousness and whose synopsis alone is worth the detour. In May 1991, the Soviet cosmonaut Sergheï Krikalev flies to the Mir orbital station. When he returns, 10 months later, his country no longer exists. The Soviet Union has collapsed. A breathtaking work combining video footage shot during the mission and additional 35mm footage shot in the Russian space station, coordinated by cinematographer Vadim Yusov (the one behind Tarkovsky's Solaris), the film documents the political events leading up to the Moscow putsch in parallel to this life in weightlessness. Stunning!

THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS

If the skies have whetted the human appetite for conquest, they also feed other appetites, reflexive and interior. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the most popular places for astronomers. Many observatories are installed there, drawing on this lunar landscape forests of telescopes, whose jerky movements create curiously moving dances. In this unlikely place, miles away from our urban and overcrowded imaginations, the mind gets lost in the contemplation of the beauty and mystery of the sky, of a dizzying depth. Cielo, the first feature film by Canadian director Alison McAlpine, celebrates the grandiosity of this infinity that constantly unfolds before our eyes. With her solemn, calm and soothing voice, she guides our reveries in a reassuring cinematic meditation. Through an approach combining science, spirituality, infinitely small and infinitely large, Cielo manages to render the intensity of the vertigo that inhabits every human being confronted with the immensity of the sky. This poetic work, tinged with a great respect for the living, brings back the human being not in his finitude and his difference, but in his relation to the ecological entities that share his reality, inscribing itself in a new humanism that accepts the relation of interdependence of all forms of the living.

Detour and end by the lunar figure, star among the stars, the one in the light of which our lives take place. Influencing the tides, lighting our nights, organizing our time and guiding our dreams, this celestial object, natural satellite of the Earth, has always played a role in human cultures. Experimental filmmaker Malena Szlam, interested in the temporality and materiality of cinema, creates with Lunar Almanac a chronicle of the phases of the Moon by capturing its light through long exposures on film. More than 4,000 images are used in this unveiling of lunar temporalities unfolded on a single axis, creating an ode to the mysterious power of the star.

 

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director