STILL FROM OREK'S THE VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA Visual meditation may be in need of further editing"
The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga is, at times, something of an inscrutable film," writes Daniel Walber of
nonfics.com; "Loaded with philosophical voiceover and weighty poetic quotations, scenes of profound silence and a great many enigmatic images, its most immediate impact is one of bewilderment." And Clayton Dillard of The House Next Door on
Slant Magazine waxes rhapsodic. "Jessica Oreck's
The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, Dillard says, "is a staggeringly polymorphous documentary that often suggests a collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Part meditative nature film, part urban observational, part fairy tale, these seemingly disparate parts consistently juxtapose throughout to form not just an evocative mood piece, but a larger, discursive work that achieves something resembling Sergei Eisenstein's concept of dialectical montage. . . To call Oreck's film 'hypnotic' would be too easy, as it would neglect the content of her ravishing images, which cohere into a rather precise essay film."
Well, I'm sorry to report that personally I could not perceive the "precise essay film" Dillard promises. I might also suggest that any collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be likely to produce a shapeless mess -- which each of those artists have risked producing occasionally on their own: together there would be a work of no discernible style. And this is what happens in Oreck's film. There are gorgeous woodland scenes and glowing landscape skies. Then there are roaming panoramas as a camera rushes by roadways in the periphery of a city or past blocks of flats downtown. Then again there are shots of conventional Eastern Bloc art illustrations for a "Witch Baba Yaga" children's tale (a kind of nastier Slavic version of
Hansel and Gretel) while it is read in voiceover by an older woman in -- what language? Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?: these segments are strewn through the film, interrupted by the philosophical musings, whose import seems to be, life is mysterious and the woods are lovely, dark, and deep. There is too much going on here, and it all adds up to rather little. Part of the problem is that the image quality -- lensing, color correction, the eye itself in the 16mm cinematography by Sean Price Williams -- is not up the the best technical standards of Reygadas, Reggio, or Weerasethakul. Some further editing and post-production may be needed to bring this film up to the concept it aspires to. The illustrations for the Baba Yaga story are disappointingly conventional stuff, quite unimaginative.
An underlying thesis stated at the outset is that modern civilization is opposed to wilderness, but we "have" our own wilderness inside us, and any attempts to repress it will only cause it to burst out. This is the kind of experimental, open-ended film that some will find inspiring. Others will just see it as a long slog. Look up Walber's and Dillard's comments for more favorable angle on the film. But I warn you: they speak in very vague and general terms.
The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, 73 mins., was shown in early March 2014 at the True/False documentary festival in Columbia, Missouri (where the Walber and Dillard saw it). It debuts at the New York Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. Showing Saturday, March 22, 1:30pm – FSLC; Monday, March 24, 6:15pm – MoMA.
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