The Banality of Grief by filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen had its international premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam as part of the Masters section.
Jon Bang Carlsen does an effective job of portraying the title, The Banality of Grief, in the first few minutes of the film. However, as the film progresses, you see beauty in the banality. It’s there in the poetry and slow rhythmic cadence of Carlsen’s words that accompany images. Images that often repeat, like the trains on the tracks, or the lines on the road. Giving the viewer a bit of white line fever until the conclusion of the film is reached.
The film is a (mostly) found-footage documentary that explores Carlsen’s grief over the death of his wife. Some footage that appears was captured for his other film projects, but he repurposes them to explore the themes in this one. The footage from Winslow is more of an anomaly. It appears it may have been intended for a different project. However, as far as I can tell, that project has been shelved or repurposed into this one. It makes sense if his grieving mind was preoccupied with this subject. He could’ve been building this documentary without even realizing it. Especially since the conversations he engages in relate to the themes he’s exploring. Particularly, his interviews with the Hopi people and the woman who is known as the Vintage Girl. It was interesting that with the Vintage Girl we saw Carlsen in the act of directing, which we didn’t see in any other footage. The Vintage Girl represented someone who presented an image of the past, preferring to live and dress like she was in the 50s. For Carlsen, who is grieving someone who is now in his past, the appeal of that is apparent.
Carlsen had very few videos of his wife, who did not like to be filmed, preferring to live in the present and viewing the lens as “the dead man’s eye.” A fitting pairing for a man that tries to capture life on film, and would later seek to reconcile his grief for her loss with the lens. Some of the few shots he has of her come from their trip to Ireland to attend the funeral of the mother who put her up for adoption when she was born. The other prolonged one of her presences was (though you do not see her) is when she’s in her own casket.
The filmmaker, like an artist he interviews in the film, is laying his pain on the table. Going deep inside himself to connect with the audience. Slowly pulling out the different threads, the things that make him who he is, as he figures out who he’ll be without his wife.
When I started The Banality of Grief, I questioned why it wasn’t a short. The theme seemed to be explored in full before the title was even dropped. However, the longer it went, the more I wanted it to keep going. There was something so honest in the quiet anger of Carlsen’s grief and the beauty of juxtaposing with banal things.
If there is one thing I would’ve gotten rid of, it was all the stuff about Trump. In big part because despite the film constantly giving you dates for when things were shot, without the political stuff, it felt evergreen. Whereas the Trump stuff really grounded it into a time and place.
There was a beautiful line at the end that drove home Carlsen’s wife Madeleine’s view on the lens being the “dead man’s eye,”:
“The beauty of seeing is only fulfilled, when the one you are looking at can see you back.”