Change Your Image
antonio_nanu
Reviews
Topio stin omihli (1988)
The stars down to earth
As a famous German poet said, we shouldn't be deceived: the light is not growing stronger, it's just the darkness being absorbed in itself. And an analogous process is is situated at the core of ''Landscape in the Mist''. The children awake, and they are amidst impenetrable mists and despondency looms over their perspective. Voula admits to being afraid straight away. But her brother, and more relevant, her companion and her only friend, the one towards whom nearly all her words are directed, soothes her: they're in Germany now, and therefore she must not be afraid. To calm her, he proceeds to tell her the story, for which he now will have enough time: ''In the beginning it was the darkness... and then it was light.'' It was a rather short story which, for all its brevity, managed to contain the answer, in the simplest fashion, for the most perplexing questions. Perhaps there is nothing truly beautiful left at all, nothing whose beauty we can acknowledge without at the same testifying for the abjection and horror laying at its center. Toward the end, the pair board the train that will take them to Germany, at last, after many failed and painful attempts, having procured themselves the necessary tickets--once again, as they witness in the beginning, a sign which they cannot recognize; it tells them nothing, it is opaque and void of signification--, and they are smiling in a sudden discharge of light. However, the situation soon changes, as another gesture of the outer, adult, incomprehensible world makes its presence felt: they need their passports, of which, of course, they know nothing, and so darkness prevails again. It is of no avail to search justification on the untenable plan of reason and common sense. Yes, the sense of healthy proportions would indicate what would seem at first a few logical, reasonable steps, but only at first, for the belief that life truly works by ways so superficial, and that our perspectives are ever so simple to contemplate is but a lack of true consideration, it is blindness and ignorance. We need only insist with our sight over the objects, so that we may hope to know anything at all about their essence. And this essence may strike us as rebarbative, injust, debased, and truth be told, it is just so, because only in this light, which reveals the objects in their true undesirable element we can accede to a point of view from which anything can be salvaged. Just as Orestis invites the children to look closely and attentively to what seems to be a mere piece of erased film thrown away, to concentrate enough upon it until it reveals a tree, behind the mist, and concedes finally that he were indeed playing games, as there was nothing of note on that fragment of plastic which ends in the hypnotized hands of Alexandros, who seemingly cannot escape its charm, its stupefying possession of nothing, we should look straight in the mist, in the paralyzed absence, in the nothingness, and extract the beauty we deemed initially denied by this very mist which we must penetrate, as the two children in the end who discern a tree, as picturesque as can be, growing from the thick fog, its characteristics getting more and more clear with each moment, culminating in a real formalization of a landscape, with the children themselves being absorbed by the tree's trunk. It was perhaps a chance not to give in to the superficial simplicity of facts and logical relations and seemingly evident choices, but rather to that other one, the simplicity of profundity which lies deem in murky waters, and in the most despondent darkness, but which can at last deliver things, ennobling them to the level promised by the essence which seeps from the realms of hidden truths. It was as beautiful as the cry of happy children becoming that which they truly were, behind all the deceiving and beautiful appearances, while looking for an elusive figure which they can only stumble upon in a completely unexpected shape.