Saturday, June 2, 2018

The Arrival of Joachim Stiller (Harry Kumel, 1976)



It's only in its final moments that Harry Kumel’s The Arrival of Joachim Stiller resembles an explicit parallel of Christianity, and it’s a measure of the film’s scope that this represents one of the more modest potential destinations. The film’s protagonist, Freek Groenevelt, starts to observe strange events, many of them linked in some way by that name “Joachim Stiller” – the unseen Stiller starts to assert himself as an explicit presence in the life of Freek and others, for example in letters arriving correctly addressed despite having been mailed decades earlier. Over the course of its two and a half hours, the film sometimes seems to be building the kind of myth that in contemporary Hollywood hands would yield a portal to hell surrounded by swirling CGI demons; at other times though “Stiller” seems more like an abstract expression of all that’s unresolved in our personal or collective pasts, or else like mere mischief-making, some kind of local in-joke. The film’s closely-observed Antwerp setting is certainly a major part of its appeal – we spend so much time observing the city’s trams and streets and cathedral that you wonder if Stiller doesn’t work for the local tourist bureau. But equally as important are the copious narrative strands and throwaway scenes that in terms of their strict contribution to the resolution seem to be neither here nor there, in particular a bawdy extended subplot about a near-feral local graffiti artist and the unprincipled entrepreneur who sets out to profit from his work: as in the Hitchcockian opposition between suspense and surprise, you get the sense that the film’s scheme depends as much on what doesn’t happen, or on what can’t be rationalized or justified, as on what does and can. For all its considerable eccentricity then, the film stands as a more intriguing and rewarding exploration of personal and spiritual striving than a more devout or linear work would likely be.

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