4/13/24
Loosely anchored in present day Norway, The Fishing Place, under a trance partially induced by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, explores the temporal mobility of the cinematic event. Here events, hollowed out and curiously duplicated by memory, and actors, intermittently inhabited by characters from another time/space, flow like a river, from one lived moment into the next. This is a cinematic event as a qualitative multiplicity.
First flow: Anna Kristiansen/Ellen Dorrit Petersen, imprisoned by Nazis during the German occupation of Norway, is sent to the hydroelectric town of Notodden, Norway by Norwegian Nazi officier Aksel Hansen/Frode Winther. Her job is to spy on Adam Honderich/Andreas Lust, a German High Church Lutheran priest suspected of resistance activities. She enters a situation rife with complexities and danger — an upstairs maid consumed with compassion and envy, a cook with a keen nose for intrigue, a famous theater performer holding off death with her secrets, a banker shielding his betrayals and investments from all sides, a young man dying with terrifying visions. The first vortex: the Nazi officer and the priest go fishing. Two more vortexes follow.
Second flow: the characters line up – a vertical drift of memory escapes from the porous frame of the narrative. As characters circle characters and actors circle characters, new hates and older loves emerge from the shifting recombinations.
Third flow: the actors move to share the borderland with the now visible crew. The spell of the collective act of memory slowly unravels into a scattered, but still interconnected, whole. As the actors and crew depart, the camera and the director are alone left to reorganize the view.
Gavagai 