Fair Wind (Fahrtwind)

Chris Fujiwara checks in from Edinburgh to report on Fair Wind — Notes of a Traveler, and finds an Austrian film travelling the post-communist world, blissfully without alienation and with a constant ability to find mystery.

In the absence of any knowledge about the journey documented by the film, apart from the place names that appear superimposed in white type as each new location is reached, we must be satisfied with other certainties while watching Bernadette Weigel’s Fair Wind — Notes of a Traveler (Fahrtwind — Aufzeichnungen einer Reisenden). Above all, with the confidence of feeling that Weigel communicates: a confidence that comes from love, and Fair Wind is nothing if not a film in love with light. With each shot, we seem to see as much light as can be packed into a Super-8 frame. Rather than a painful brightness, the effect is that of contented saturation, visual plenitude.

If the image is constantly in a condition of being just right, the titles give both too much and too little: too much information, since the names of towns are likely to be unfamiliar and anyway of no use, and too little, since the important things — the links between these places, the motives that drive the filmmaker from one to the next — are always elided. Denied the code that would govern Weigel’s choices, the viewer more readily grasps the arbitrariness of any code and any choice. Which is to say that instead of committing herself to the rules of a discursive genre Weigel locates her film in the negative spaces lying around the genres she brushes past: travel journal or self-portrait, post card or essay.

The space of the film is not just ‘post-Communist Eastern Europe and Central Asia’, but also the space of a hundred or a thousand separate encounters between the filmmaker (once she has set off from her home in Vienna) and the people of the post-Communist world. There is no program, simply the succession of frames, highlighting the texture and the squareness of the image, making possible a kind of explosion of reality in movement, color, industrial forms (the Odessa funicular with its solid-color cars) and forms of ritual (elderly Ukrainians dancing to a town-square band’s performance of ‘In the Mood’). Every view, however enchanted, still implies what is, and remains, a social and historical context, but that context becomes displaced — not so much "made strange" as offered up to the delirious purposelessness of cinema, of this cinema.

Fair Wind is a film without alienation, so blissfully so that it is not even made against alienation. Fair Wind may perhaps be criticized for fetishizing the obsolete, for seizing hungrily on what it loves too sentimentally. But the success of the film has to do with neither alienation nor its opposite but with the filmmaker’s constant ability to find mystery, as if receiving it as a gift: a young couple in a partly darkened apartment, a card game on the grass in the country, shadows of leaves fading in and out dramatically on a white plaster wall, the broad smile of an elderly woman refugee, the pleasure of two nuns as they pull on bell ropes until they are lifted up in the air. Everything has just the expressiveness that it has: no excess or imbalance is caused by an expressive intention in the world in front of the camera, or on the other side by any need on the part of the camera to justify its being where it is.

The sounds that overlay the images draw very selectively from the field of sounds that must have been available, so that the movement of people with its urgency or randomness is never allowed to determine the pace and balance of the image. A gentle and graceful musique concrète of boat and train engines lulls the eye across sequences of short discrete shots; a lone cat’s meowing evokes a vacancy of night in an urban residential neighborhood. The brilliance of the soundtrack is a vital resource in the game Weigel’s film plays: a game between openness and closure, between the ‘open’ of a voyage without a destination and the ‘closed’ of a frame that is never going to run out of ways to fill itself.

Chris Fujiwara is the Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival and the author of books on Jerry Lewis, Otto Preminger, and Jacques Tourneur.