Helena Wittmann’s second feature, Human Flowers of Flesh, sails out to the Mediterranean Sea on a small boat chartered by the stoic, determined Ida (Angeliki Papoulia). The specifics of her crew’s mission are ambiguous, but they are driven by an unequivocal need to search and question; the anthropologist at the heart of Wittmann’s debut feature, Drift (2017), takes to the sea with a similarly all-consuming yearning. To that end, Human Flowers is a powerfully sensory experience, at one point plunging us into a literal deep-sea-dive sequence into the unknown.

Without academic pretensions, the film meditates on the nature of physicality, time, consciousness, and even the porousness of cultural borders; according to Wittmann, the film originated with her futile attempt to make eye contact with a member of the French Foreign Legion at a base in Marseille, which also shapes Ida’s wanderings. Immersions in nature sit alongside quotations from Marguerite Duras or Claire Denis, which delicately expand on the original texts—most spectacularly when the specter of Beau Travail (1999) is invoked by a cameo from Denis Lavant, in character as Galoup. These affective collages are something of an invitation: Wittmann seems to propose that the life of a work of art can only begin when it reaches the viewer, open to its mysteries, willing to traverse its open waters. – Chloe Lizotte, Metrograph

This event is co-presented by Contemporary Moving Image Practices and the Film Study Center at Harvard University.