Walden (Viennale-Trailer 2022)

A close-up of water, trees reflected on its surface. Insects chirp, a bird squawks in the distance. Occasional raindrops dissolve into circular ripples that expand and vanish. An image of tranquility. Could it be Walden Pond, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau escaped from society in 1845, living alone in a cabin he built himself? “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” he wrote in the book Walden. Leading by example, he entreated the reader, “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
Just as we might suspect Hamaguchi Ryūsuke to be advancing Thoreau’s credo, music intrudes on the soundtrack. Then a woman’s voice reads a passage from Walden. Even if we don’t immediately recognize that the clip is from Douglas Sirk’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS – another, very different portrait of New England living – the melodramatic strains and the woman’s breathy, mid-Atlantic elocution unmistakably belong to classic Hollywood. A leaf floats into the frame, evoking the Technicolor autumn and the devastating emotions of Sirk’s film. If a simple superimposition of sound and image can trigger such a surge of association, memory and feeling, perhaps we can let this machine run just a little while longer. (Giovanni Marchini Camia, Viennale Catalogue 2022)