The Light Images of Nicolaas Schmidt
Cinema knows that time means light: shootings are organized in way that allows the sun to be kind to them. And still, filmmakers have rarely used light as an object and subject to the same degree to which they used time – and if they indeed do so, then few noticed it. Here, at last, is Nicolaas Schmidt, whose films are precisely plays of light, or rather, plays of twilight – the so-called “golden hour” –, the double moment, of utmost importance, that lies in the immediacy of both sunrise and sunset: anything that happens in this diffuse light comes seems holy, decisive, since it’s the beginning ot it all – or the very end.
Schmidt hasn’t made many films – even so, a couple more than what I’ve managed to see so far. I easily went through his First Time, his only medium-length film, at Locarno in 2021: back then, I wondered by the jury, of whom Adina Pintilie was also a member, awarded it, but I have understood in the meantime. Because it happens that Inflorescence – with a rose and, lost in the background, a German flag swaying in the wind for around seven minutes, while in the background, a slowed-down version of Don’t Dream It’s Over – won the award for Best Filmmaker at BIEFF in the same year. Again on the big screen, Schmidt’s cinema seemed to bear an incredible visual self-conscience: a gaze that is simultaneously longing and suspicious towards the (im)possible naivete of all contemporary images.
„To be consumed lightly”, the filmmaker writes, since his cinema plies itself to the aesthetics of comfort: young people with angelic, Netflix-esque visages, Coca Cola commercials, constant twilight, karaoke and pop music. Once comfortable, the spectator will feel the shocking paradox of alienation brought upon by the extreme banality, of un-happening in Schmidt’s cinema: for the most part (that is, 40 out of its 50 minutes), First Time is a long single shot in which two unknown boys timidly share glances without having the courage to take the first step. The view beyond the window, which crosses tunnels, landscapes and lights, becomes the film’s major subject, while the spectators’ anxiety only grows and grows – briefly before moving into the train, a montage of Coca-Cola advertisements with uplifting mottos flashes on the screen. It’s quite clear that Schmidt’s boys are not only not having an uplifting experience, but are moreso embodying a contemporary neurosis of the masses: the impossibility of becoming a protagonist, the futility of striving for the close-up shot that a protagonist culture promises at every step.
A few years ago, the same actors performed in another one of his short films, Final Stage (2017), a de-dramatized melodrama about a boy that gets angry at his boyfriend and cries all throughout a mall in Hamburg, the biggest in Europe, for the entire duration of an 11-minute-long single shot. Once more, the foreground is pointless, since the action happens in the background, amongst the shuffle of shopping bags, advertisements, restaurants that sell the traditional food of faraway, unknown lands: light images, anonymous, culturally naturalized to such a degree that they’re part of an unknown visual subconscious, one that, however, can be understood apriori – Schmidt’s view of this is clear, and his manner of showing it all the more so.
(Călin Boto)