12: The Garden Cadences
On Dane Komljen's The Garden Cadences (2024), and on good portraiture.
“It’s difficult to leave now because there’s so much life here.”
There is no one way to make a filmic portrait. Given that it is impossible to convey the entirety of something or someone, all that can be achieved is an impression captured via select snapshots that collectively communicate an essence or feeling. Some filmmakers understand this, whereas others try to be over-encompassing or definitive, suggesting their word is the last one and that no other vision can be true. Dane Komljen’s The Garden Cadences (2024) is a portrait of sorts—though of a very idiosyncratic kind. Komljen’s focus is on the “Mollies,” a queer feminist collective that lived in a trailer park and garden in Ostkreuz, Berlin for a decade, before being evicted in 2022. Komljen does not attempt to address the totality of his subject, instead drifting nearer to, and further away from them, floating around, capturing glimpses, and then departing, cutting together his impressions into a 62-minute collage of the community’s last summer together in their space. Dysfunctional as a biography of a community but effective as a tribute to one, Komljen’s film is beautiful and fleeting, memorialising a set of dynamics that have since disappeared, recording elements of the collective but never suggesting anything conclusive about them.
The “Mollies,” while ostensibly the subject of Komljen’s film, are not introduced by name. The setting and situation is not outlined, and there are no opening text cards that provide any context or information. Instead, The Garden Cadences opens with a protracted shot of a foldable plastic crate slumped on a patch of grass. This image is accompanied by a poem read aloud as natural light fluctuates dancerly over the crate to the sound of nearby trains. Written by Aalo K, credited as a co-writer on the film, the poem is loose but evocative, talking of the “slag of emotions,” “the battle of life and death,” and “the instinct of survival,” and referencing also the railways heard rumbling in the background. Rather than revealing anything about the subject matter of the film that follows, this introductory passage abstractly sets the scene.
Following this, we see a cycle of images that serve to do the same thing: painterly shots of textures and surfaces that effectively establish a tone. A shrub, shimmering in summer light; several shots of a shed-like structure seen in closeups that disguise its exact form; rows of reeds wobbling in the wind; several plump red radishes; two tattooed hands interlocked; lovers lying on each other, dozing in and out of sleep. From here, Komljen’s film continues along much the same lines, with a bricolage of delicate, perfectly composed imagery of the sort the filmmaker has become associated with over two features (All the Cities of the North [2016], Afterwater [2022]) and a larger body of shorts. Any contextual details that a viewer gleans are learned organically, through attentive observation. We hear people speak German and listen to techno, and so we assume that the setting is Berlin. We are shown entangled bodies, shared meals, and showers taken out of watering cans, and so we assume that what we see is some kind of off-grid, intentional community. And we listen to people talk together, and through these snippets of conversation we learn something of their feelings towards each other, of their beliefs, of the queer culture of the city (“cool vibes and setting [..] sex positive but not super queer”), and of the looming end to this relational community as well as the promise of some possible new incarnation of it elsewhere.
All the Cities of the North consisted of carefully composed static closeups and tableaux, whereas Afterwater was a triptych of segments wherein the film switched style three times, using a different camera format for each section. The Garden Cadences sits somewhere in between. The film consists mainly of the beautiful, tightly controlled closeups described above, but also has a section in the middle intended to disrupt this form. In this, the camera flies off the tripod and becomes handheld, gliding and pirouetting through flowers and vegetation, moving so close to the overgrowth that the lens’ focus is lost and the images collapse into euphorically blurry bursts of pure light and colour. As well as serving as a visual reprieve, this abstraction intends to evoke something of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and the ease with which these boundaries can be collapsed. If you look closely enough at a flower and discover that it is no longer a flower but instead just a blur of red dilated light and a wash of colour, formless and free, maybe the borders between anything could be similarly indistinct?
In a disciplined film, it is a standout moment because it disrupts the rhythm; some of the film’s other best images are those that are similarly unexpected. One mid-film sequence shows community members feeling something of the strain of undefined cohabitation. Someone reads a book while the invasive reverberations of nearby electronic music shakes the thin walls of the structure that separates them from a party that they don’t, at this moment, want to be at. The next shot then shows someone else trying to sleep through the same noise, bass rumbling ever on as they frustratedly reposition a pillow over their head. Company sometimes comes with compromise, these images seem to suggest, but as this film is one of multitudes, the next sequence shows the idyllic inverse. Two people take a leisurely bath, looking like a picture of absolute serenity that even the camera’s presence cannot disrupt.
Overall, Komljen’s approach to portraiture here is restrained, even recalcitrant, perhaps due to this question of sensitivity. The dialogue is sparse and offers scant information, serving more like field recording than narrative device. The images are beautiful, but also shy to reveal too much. There is a sense that this is a film slightly afraid of encroaching on the microcosm it observes—of probing too much with a nosy camera and disrupting the equilibrium, or of sharing too much of something private and converting community into something too easily consumable by festival film audiences. We learn late on that the reason this garden collective is being evicted is to make way for the construction of an aquarium, a strange but striking detail that is present only as a flicker, learnt through a fragment of conversation that could be easily missed. One ecosystem makes way for another, a makeshift home for people replaced by an artificial prison for fish. The clammer of construction sounds heard throughout now make more sense, as do the towering cranes that frame the final shot of The Garden Cadence, which, in a film framed only in intimate and tactile closeups, shows the space from the widest vantage point yet. As this long take showing a trailer within the context of the surrounding city plays out, another poem plays on the soundtrack, this one seemingly a letter from one ex-lover to another. As with the opening poem, it is abstract in form but has resonances that are tethered to the visual portrait it bookends. “Things were falling apart,” says the speaker. “Things were too good to be true.” Like the images in the film, the letter is beautiful and bittersweet. “What does the end of things mean?”
All summers come to a close, but, given the knowledge that eviction is coming, the end of this one is particularly poignant. The plaintive suggestion seems to be that it is better to have had something and lost it than to never have had it at all. This is a fittingly open-ended and interpretative conclusion for a perfectly-imperfect piece of portraiture. There is no one way to make a filmic portrait, but the best kinds do not look to draw conclusions on, or close off, what they observe, but instead keep things pleasingly open. In this case, an instant in time that has ended is kept forever alive through snippets and snapshots, permanent memories of impermanent moments that glimmer and gleam, disappearing almost as soon as they appear.
Dane Komljen’s The Garden Cadences (2024) had its world premiere at Cinema du Réel and will screen next at Jeonju International Film Festival. It has a great poster. More information about Dane Komljen can be found here. To receive more articles like this, please subscribe. The writing in this newsletter will always be free-to-read, but donations are very welcome.
Really enjoyed this!