Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s singular ability to transform not only space and time, but also the spectator’s relationship with their surroundings. Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to her mesmerizing feature debut Drift (2017), pushes her formal and thematic predilections towards a vanishing point where narrative dovetails with pure aesthetic elegance. A standout in this summer’s Locarno competition, it marks a major step up for Wittmann in terms of profile and visibility, and carries with it a certain seriousness of intent that harkens back to art cinema’s heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when ambition and ambiguity were all but inextricable bedfellows.
Starring Greek actress Angeliki Papoulia as Ida, a middle-aged woman and captain of an all-male, mixed-race boat crew, Human Flowers unfolds in waves of slowly breaking incident and exposition. Neither dramatic nor inconsequential, these narrative beats are instead suggestive of larger feelings and ideas which Wittmann frequently gives shape to via striking oceanic imagery and a kind of meta-materialist sense of filmic depth and texture. Shooting in 16mm, with the occasional intravenous-like injection of images taken from under a microscope or printed as cyanotypes, Wittmann (who, as a cinematographer, has lent her distinctive visual style to films by contemporaries such as Philipp Hartmann and Luise Donschen) has fashioned a fully functional aesthetic analogue for an otherwise elliptical narrative built around the wonders of its Mediterranean setting—a distinction unavailable to the digitally shot Drift. Even the stately typeface used for the film’s opening and closing credits speaks to a unified vision and clarity of purpose that more films of its scale should strive to match.
moves freely between land and sea, charting a methodical course from the shores of Marseille to the streets of Algeria, with a stopover along the bustling coast of Corsica. As the film opens, Ida and her crew are on leave in Marseille, where they drink and mingle with the locals by night and wander the city by day. As Ida explores, she becomes intrigued by the presence of the French Foreign Legion and the apocryphal stories she hears about its history. Seemingly drawn in by the soldiers’ expressionless demeanour, Ida is soon compelled to set off on a different kind of voyage—one that, by way of the Legion, will take her deep into the recesses of her subconscious, where France’s colonial past is made manifest and the existential plight of a self-possessed woman becomes increasingly unmoored from present-day matters. A true enigma, Ida is as much a structuring presence as she is an occasional absence, a character as concrete as she is elusive. As the boat’s newest crew member, Vladimir (Vladimir Vulevic), says of her before they embark, “I imagine
