Kosmos (2010) = 10/10 Masterwork

All creation exists as an allegory of the soul: the microcosm and macrocosm form a [mystical] metonymy in which biblical events are interpreted and reformulated as phases in the development of the soul, and its relation to the phenomenal world. Kosmos (2010) by Reha Erdem is such an allegory, a parable of kosmic biblical proportion.

The film opens with inhuman howling winds whirling round and round over a white wintry snowscape, and on its rounds the wind returns (Eccles 1.6), snowing the whole world over, shifting to night, with its hoary silver-grey sky menacing a vacant snowscape, shifting to day again, a pure argent white snowscape undisturbed and unperturbed by a background speck of movement, a lone feral-like man running breathlessly, at full speed towards white nothingness, wailing at whatever he's left behind - a vast boundless vacant snowscape of white nothingness. But then the run ends at the snowed-over cliff, and he takes in the view, right out of an impressionistic painting: the outline of a snow-swept medieval town sculptured by the blizzard and hewed right out of the rocks of the valley, domes and spires of trees and serpentine roads completing the vista. The wind echoes, the sound of emptiness reverberates across all the corners of the earth, synclastically returning to this medieval town, hallowed out of the stones of the earth.

The man, among rocks, an upheaving whorling winedark river tressilating impartially alongside him as he takes a knotted mess of money out his shoe. Catacoustical, tintinnabulating sounds of nature and mechanical melt into each other: fermenting water and crunching snow and echoing rocks spectrally intersecting with distant sounds of machinery and battle. A young girl, howling a wail, and the man, abandoning his wealth to the rocks, runs responds to the call: he runs into the ferocious slate icewaves to save a child drifting unconscious in the water. Breathing the child back into life, he then collapses, his winded breathing the sound of a wounded animal.

Cross-cut of the moon: representing the cyclical movement of day and night, the moon (and sun) is prime evidence in nature of the repetitive cyclical character of reality [Ecclesiastes], a notion that is a radical challenge to the conception of time and sequence inscribed in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, where things are imagined to progress meaningfully towards fulfilment. Trademark of Reha Erdem: the moon, a stationary indifferent dazzlingly bright spherical ornament, obnubilated and obtenebrated by pillars of clouds and the impenetrable murky blackness of night. Then we hear a cow's heated, gutteral mooing, moans from the bowels of the earth, and brightly-lit circular clocks whose hands are stuck, stuttering, no forward motion, and looks almost as if the hands are trying to move counterclockwise.

The local town tea-café, focal point for brotherhood, relaxation, warmth: echoes of the café door opening and closing are amplified, as are footsteps of the person entering the café, echoes intermingled with the distant resounding echoes of what sounds like off-screen battles and sprays of bullets and other military maneuveurs. The patron is the father of the young woman and the saved child, and he thanks the feral man, who responds by naturally articulating a verse from Ecclesiastes (9:2-9:5) and when asked his name, he replies, "Battal", and is welcomed to medieval town, a town that we later discover is perpetually involved in [off-screen] unseen violent border skirmishes, a town also perpetually involved in internal discord.

Battal, a prophet, a thaumaturgical, wild, feral man with a wondrously mellifluous voice flowing with honey, trilling ululations like a wolverine, his veriloquence enrapturing the townspeople just as Ecclesiastes has enraptured listeners and readers for over fifteen-hundred years. Most of his dialogue straight out of Ecclesiastes, a few bits come from the Book of Job and Song Of Songs. I must segue into Ecclesiastes for a moment, before returning to the film.

Ecclesiastes. King Solomon, a man endowed with the power and resources to explore all the possibilities of the human conditions, a man who knew what wealth and opulence was, a man who knew that the pleasures and allures of this world are fleeting and valueless, is attributed as the writer, and "Qoheleth", the speaker of Ecclesiastes, is the literary persona that he chose for himself. Qoheleth is the feminine participle of the Hebrew verb q-h-l, meaning "to assemble", and specifically refers to the assembling of people, but may also be metaphorically stretched to mean the assemblage of what's within the heart/mind/spirit/soul of the speaker, and is also commonly translated to mean "an assemblage of [wisdom] sayings". Qoheleth is the feminine form, which perhaps explains why an actor with a sweetened high-pitched feminine-sounding voice was cast. Qoheleth's pronouncements, moral maxims structured in concise symmetrical and antithetical formulations, oftentimes citations of traditional maxims that are challenged and/or undermined by the new context in which they are set, radically dissent from the consensus view of biblical writers. Unlike the bulk of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), which streams with the underlying doctrine that wisdom is the one true road of meaningful progress culminating in microcosmic and macrocosmic fulfilment, and includes the subdoctrines that righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished, and that man's spirit ascend upward after death, the speaker of Ecclesiastes profers that everything humanity endeavours to do is futile and everything operates in endless cycles of repetition and all (righteous and iniquitous) are the same, the spirit of man and beast alike and descend into the earth upon death. Qoheleth (Battal/Kosmos...) unblinkingly reflects on the ephemerality of life, the flimsiness of human value, the ineluctable fate of death, the cyclic nature of reality and how ephemeral human life is locked into that structure, the fleeting duration of all we cherish, the lack of qualitative difference between man and beast, the pointless effort of man in restless pursuit of some maddeningly elusive quarry, all human enterprise herding the wind. Qoheleth (heleth = hevel = flimsy vapour exhaled in breathing, which is the opposite of ruah, life-breath, the animating force in living creatures, the life-breath of the Creation parables) uses incantatory language and vivid imagery to deliver his bleak skepticisms that are slyly subversive and antithetical to the traditional doctrines and maxims and wisdom streaming throughout the Tanakh. He heavily utilizes cycles of repetition in his text which correlates to cycle of repetition that underlines the structure of reality. His thought process is wild and lose and freewheeling and maddened, he opens his assemblage with a reflection about the cyclical futility of all things (all is futile), and ends his assemblage with decay and death and mortality (dust returns to the ground). We dream and hope and lust and love but the end is all the same, merest breath. Time, history, politics, human nature, all bleak. Wind and rivers, pointless movement round and round, wild and unruly indulgence of senses, lucidity is lost.

The film. Cross-cut to outdoors: howling wolves, cawing birds, water whirls harmoniously blend together, then a Mosque, medieval and fortified, tintinnabulations of bullet sprays bounce off the archaic bridge, a car with a coffin strapped on the roof drives by Battal, who has returned to the rocks to find his money. On his side of the river, the snow has all but melted. A sudden feminine trilling on the other side of the river, which is deeply ensheathed with snow, fills the day and Battal ululates back, chasing her as the gulf of turbulent river seethes and surges under the sun, their spontaneous intertwining whistling alarm-call crescendos as purely masculine and feminine and primitive and hymnal and delightful and sensual and fierce and stimulating as the sun and the moon and the river, reviving the life-breath and the animus-spirit and the flesh and the heart and the bone and the very colour and richness of the earth and life itself. Like the wind and the river, Battal and the girl are wild and unruly and run round and round and round.

Pieces of music by A Silver Mt. Zion rake through certain scenes like sunlight (or G-d's light...), the music a golden threnody of weltschmerz, the musicality evincing the sadness over the evils of the world that encapsulates the sum total of the mood of the film and the director's mindset as he was composing this cinematic masterwork. Six pieces of music in the film are by A Silver Mt. Zion, and four of them are from a CD aptly titled He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms.

Background sounds of bullets and battles/skirmishes permeate every nook and cranny of sound, co-existing with pronounced sounds of nature. The town square, medieval and deserted, except for Battal looking on as the car (carrying four brothers, minor plotline) with the coffin speeds through, and as a military convoy crawls along. Sci-fi astral sound blips in the background, a plane flies over and the remaining echo sounds like a hovering craft astrally beeping above, looking down on the scene, and a pack of unruly boys throw rocks at Battal, accusing him of being a mute and a bully. A wanderer, hero, a prophet, a wild animal, a mute, a bully, what next? Astral sounds jettison and we see thin cow legs deep in the snow, heated gutteralings reminding us of slaughter, and like lighting, a visual of short wave sci-fi sound: circuitously tinselling the tenebrous blackness of night, Saturn's Rings, meteor trails, a time-exposure of millions of car lights streaking by fast in the black of night, spiralling galaxies, and then a plain, a deserted lunar plain ontologically blanked by the consuming expanse of an impenetrable black sky, catch your breath as a city of the plain, formed of fallen stars, foudroyanly shimmers and twinkles across the horizon, a radiating band of light trumping the ineluctably of dark.....

And this is just the beginning.

A pack of wild dogs, bones tossed out of the whorlstorm, the moon impassive and obtenebrated in the swirling murky nebulae of nigrine night, astral echoes, a girl called Neptune and a man called Kosmos, auroral moonlight coyly evading absolute obtenebration, human howls intersecting with animal howls, a hand that heals, the albugineous eye of a cow awaiting, stores robbed, stolen money restolen and returned and stolen again and returned again, sounds of marching, constant amplified reverberating sounds of gunfire which sounds like concrete dropped into piles of concrete, the entire skin of a cow ragged and battered and guttered and fleshless and lifeless dragged away from the scene of the slaughter, a white cow head devoid of eye and splattered with blood. Nocturnal shots of the moon and clocks (hands static and hands offering a slight almost imperceptible advancement) and trains are strewn throughout, counterpointed against diurnal shots of slaughtered cows and ravenous wolves, Battal and Neptune flying.

Battal preaches to any and all, chases after three women (lonely exiled vespertine teacher, a woman with a handicapped leg, the equally wild and feral girl whose brother he saved), performs miracles (resurrects drowned boy, self-heals his cigarette burn, spirits out the infernal cough of an ailing old tailor, pleasures the teacher out of her migraines, guilts the boy who stole money from him into speaking again after being mute for a year), steals money to pay for sustenance but also giving the stolen money to others in need, howls like an animal in pursuit of Neptune, scales trees and roars ferociously and religiously peregrinates through the squalid, run down streets of the town where rabid dogs prowl and where buildings are vacant empty shells. Battal, wanderer, foreigner, hero, radical prophet, thief, wild animal, lover, healer, hedonistic, generous.

Battal and Neptune, all the scenes of them acting like animals intensifies the aforementioned Ecclesiastical theme of the lack of qualitative difference between man and beast, the pointless effort of man in restless pursuit of some maddeningly elusive quarry, all human enterprise herding the wind.

Battal and the healed mute boy racing through a vast smalty, bluish, hyacinthine expanse of primordial deep, the firmament and niveos landscape awash in pillars of dark blue and indigo, an eyeslat of Venetian glow looking on indifferently, the boy finally on his back, Battal racing towards self-consuming flashes of fiery effulgence, behind him the distant, thin, milky way band of the city on the plain, in front, smoking like a celestial firebrand, bonfires from an crashed vessel, an unidentified flying object, from the earthworld or airworld or waterworld thorough nobody knows but it's been hurled onto the outskirts of the city on the plain, astral blips and bleeps and staticy radio waves and fragments of an evangelical speech about adversaries and destroyers (music and speech excerpted from A Silver Mt. Zion's Broken Chord Can Sing A Little) chaunt overhead, blazing fire shooting out of the snow is filmed at an hovering overhanging angle that makes it look like a conflagaration of fire among the clouds/heavens, G-d a disembodied flammen torch, a pillar fire and cloud with Battal at the top of this niveous Mountain Top, a panorama of the lights of the city of the plain, the city the Outer Tabernacle, the people scattered at the bottom, proclaiming, a sign!, shooting stars, a crashed airplane, an earthquake, the earth roared, a rocket, the object is forbidden, a satellite, and Battal, perhaps just a mortal man.....

The mute boy dies, Battal tries to cure the handicapped woman's leg, and cannot. He realises she is a drug addict, and when he destroys her drug supply, she falls apart. As she is falling apart, the lonely teacher, the evening primrose (song playing on the radio at the train station the night she arrived), commits suicide. He returns to the handicapped woman and tries once again to heal her lameness, the military breaks into the room, and Battal takes flight, back into the snowswept world he came from, the snowy landscape transforming into an expanse of pure white snowscape whirled with snowfall, a halation of daylight brightly blurring the top edge of the screen, Battal running far head, diminishing from sight, the camera slowly tilting upward towards the heavens, a tilt from Kosmos to cosmos, the instrumental Stumble Then Rise On Some Awkward Morning dissonantly thundering across all corners of the globe, the camera continuing its upward climb amid nebulous circuitous swirls of cloud and auroras and blacks and blues, finally resting upon a bright moon in full glory, stationed amid a vast, teeming boundless expanse of stars, and suddenly the moon zips away, as if we're not even on the plant earth!, film ending where it began, a cycle repeating itself ad infinitum, the battle of the heavens forever raging on.

Where do We come from, Where are We going, Why don't We care anymore?

Kosmos (2010) laments the lack of faith that afflicts our modern world and the contemporary human, the lack of faith in existence, nature, humankind, the interconnectedness of the world.

Ecclesiastes 9:2-9:5

Everything occurs alike to all. One event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As is the good, so is the sinner, and he who takes an oath as he who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: That one thing happens to all. Truly the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil. Madness is in their hearts while they live. And after that they go to the dead. But for him who is joined to all the living there is hope. For a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die. But the dead know nothing and they have no more reward for the memory of them is forgotten.

Ecclesiastes 3:16-3:20

Are they yours, these rabid things?

They're scared of you.

Why would they be scared? Take control of your animals! What kind of human being are you!

They're strays. And their predicament is the fault of man, ma'am For in the place of judgment, wickedness is there, and in the place of righteousness, iniquity is there. In fact, what happens to the sons of men also happens to beasts. One thing befalls them. As one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath. Man has no advantage over beasts, ma'am, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and all return to dust.

Ecclesiastes 2:20-2:26

I turned my heart and despaired of all the labour. I did that to stop my heart expecting any reward for my labour. For what has man for all his labour and for the striving of his heart? I could not find the answer. For all his days are sorrowful, and his work grievous. Even in the night his heart takes no rest.

So you're saying you won't work. That's all from me, friends. I don't want this man here any longer.

There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labour. This also is from the hand of G-d. For G-d gives wisdom and knowledge and joy to a man who is good in His sight, but to the sinner He gives the work of gathering and collecting that he may give to him who is good before G-d.

A paradise of pomegranates! The fountain of living waters! I'd be in seventh heaven with her! She who looks forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun!

Song Of Songs [Solomon] 4:13-4:15 - Paradise of pomegranates! The fountain of living waters!

Song Of Songs [Solomon] 6:10 - She who looks forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun!

Ecclesiastes 11:2-11:3

Ecclesiastes 7:29 - G-d made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.

You do not know what evil will be on the earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth. And if a tree falls to the south or the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie. What's the use? What have I seen? What have I learned? Truly, this only I have found. G-d made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-4:10

Ecclesiastes 4:11 - twofold cord not quickly broken

Ecclesiastes 5:2 - Do not be rash with your mouth

Two are better than one. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. And a twofold cord is not quickly broken. When my soul isn't listening to me, I step out and tell my skeleton. Do not be rash with your mouth, and let not your heart utter anything hastily. For G-d is in heaven, and you on earth. Therefore let your words be few.

Job 15:14 - What is man that he might be pure Job 22:14 - Thick clouds are a curtain to Him

Why does your heart eat away at you like this? Why do your eyes flash lightning but you turn your soul against G-d and spit out words like this? What is man that he might be pure? Don't lessen the stride of your strength. Your bones are full of your youthfulness. And you say, what does G-d know? Thick clouds are a curtain to Him. You say He doesn't see you or your troubles. I've been all the way to the pole star and back! I've climbed up and down the seven layers of heaven! Lift your face to G-d. I've seen your illness..........!

Creation's Hour is yet still so early in this world.......