In essence, we cannot detach myth from social life and translate it into formal elements. Myth is one of the most important patterns of the order of everyday human life. In addition to being intertwined in the cultural norms, myths have a lot of tension with the production of pragmatical knowledge, from everyday politics to ideological construction. In the context of anthropology and religious studies, myths in any culture are almost always related to the origins of social institutions, from marriage to leadership institution which always born of what Mircea Eliade calls illo tempore—time outside the time of reality that we experience, where the social and natural laws we know today don’t apply: from mythical creatures, talking animals, and supernatural powers.
The deliveries of myths vary: from stories transmitted from generation to generation in a geographical landscape to myths translated in nonverbal and experience-based forms. Cinema is a contemporary myth-creating machine that has been operating for one-half of a century in a specific context. In the aesthetic construction of documentary cinema, as a form expected to represent reality, the epistemophilic impulse to the spectator—as written by Bill Nichols—is a strong element of experiencing documentary films, even though the documentary form in its development undergoes a dynamic evolution. How to experience myth in a cinema-style context which on its historical developments on par with terminologies like factual, reality, and truth?
In the Spektrum program: Memitoskan Mitos, this question tried to be investigated and observed from two feature films and three short films that investigate, interpret, and create myths, either directly or indirectly with various approaches. These films tell myths through their dynamics with social and natural landscapes through more sensory experiences. The presence of myth is not merely expressed as a sacred story but is also translated into the most modern language of cinema—playing with form. The five films in this program represent human relations with myths in the information age.
Two featured films, Bosco and Red Moon Tide describe the myths and relation to geographic space and cartography. In Bosco, the myth of the City of Bosco and its inhabitants imagined by the filmmaker’s grandfather is juxtaposed with the factual circumstances of the city, while in Red Moon Tide, the story of mythological creatures in the Galician universe stitched with the story of the mythical figure Rubio de Camelle. These two films are presented with a contemplative nuance while taking an excursion into the space of fantasy and reality.
The two short films, Storegetnya and Mada, deal with the overlapping of myth (fiction as the center of Mada‘s case) and science. Storegetnya observes the alternative medical practice of speleotherapy that in the myth could cure asthma and other acute respiratory ailments by breathing mineral and salty air in caves in an underground salt mine in Avan, Armenia. On the other hand, Mada tries to destabilize the science of archeology by creating new myths and fiction. Both films challenge the understanding of verification in science. The short film, Termimpi Maujun, through the context of dreams and their relationship to the environment and community, illustrates how myths can also become a scourge if reproduced and regenerated continuously. People on Sunday mythicize the phenomenon of leisure in the context of filmmaking, which in the cinema industry, there is almost no boundary between work and leisure time. Finally, Dormant Soil / Concrete Reflections presents the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings from a non-anthropocentric perspective, against the myth of anthropocentrism that has been attached to everyday life in the poetic and reflective way.
— Riar Rizaldi
Programmer
