Watching Ute Aurand’s Rushing Green with Horses is like being spirited sideways into a pastoral. Shot entirely in 16mm with a handheld Bolex camera, the film’s lush observational shots rush, roll, and wash over the viewer. A loose, essayistic kind of film, Rushing Green features footage of the filmmaker’s family life and celebrations, as well as moments of work and travel. We see glimpses of an al fresco family dinner and a table laden with slender glasses waiting to be filled. At the same party, an elderly man holds up a CD with a string ensemble on the cover – a small, but cherished, gift. Later we watch a young girl confidently stride across an elevated corridor in the Reichstag with the Berlin skyline behind her. Quieter shots of meadows, hills, and bodies of water, or of people setting up cameras, consulting books or handwritten notes, invite the viewer to marvel at quotidian pleasures. Made up of footage collected by Aurand over the last 20 years, Rushing Green conflates and exceeds categories such as ‘experimental’ or ‘diaristic.’ The resulting posy – for Aurand’s film is replete with unkempt beauty – of scenes, images, sounds, and silences is a rich study in atmospheric portraiture and a testament to the value of looking closely.
Since her entry into the German experimental film scene of the 1980s, Aurand has exhibited a striking capacity for sensitivity without sentimentality, both in her films – including Halbmond für Margaret (Half-Moon for Margaret) (2004) and Paulina (2011) – and her women-centric programming. In a note for ‘Ute Aurand: Eye Movement Stillness’, a 2015 program at DIM Cinema in Vancouver, Michèle Smith remarks: “Aurand records life’s small, ephemeral details . . . later reworking them in a style that is at once energetic, rhythmic, playful and – unusually for experimental cinema – tender.” This is certainly true of Rushing Green, where quick sequential shots of the same subject – often an organic or architectural detail – from slightly different angles or varying proximities give the viewer the perspective of a bee, first hovering above, then beside, and then below. The film’s panning jump-cuts make me think of the peculiar rhythms of a wristwatch that refuses to keep time, but also won’t stop ticking. We see several babies, children, and adults at different stages during the 82 minutes of Rushing Green, but their reappearances are rarely chronological. A teenage girl who dances alone in her room at the beginning of the film appears next as a serious preteen wearing a sparkly fedora. Later we see her as a young adult gathering chestnuts. With only snippets of dialogue (either in German or English, with subtitles withheld) to accompany the decontextualised tableaux, we are compelled to interpret Aurand’s subjects impressionistically.
Watching the film, I was reminded of a night I spent housesitting a manor in Dorset. Alone except for a pug and a terrier, I thought about using the temporary privacy to examine the owners’ enviable collection of books, art, and furniture. In their absence, however, the house seemed to exert its own psychic demand for decorum and I retired to my room, feeling oddly chastened. Rushing Green has a similar kind of withheld intimacy, full of tender moments that we are welcome to explore – within reason. True to its title, the film’s moods, emotions, and imagery rush by, captured in quick, bird-like edits that simultaneously invite proximity and disavow straightforward interpretation. Midway through the film, the camera pans over a handwritten note that reads: A child asleep in its own life. As viewers, we inhabit a comparable space between sleep and wakefulness: forced to accept the limits of our knowledge about characters and settings, we are instead immersed in heady, dream-like affect.
We do not know the particulars of the occasions, characters, and gestures that Aurand captures, but observe them from the sidelines. This distance could be disorienting in a less carefully constructed picture, but Rushing Green’s hyper-attention to the world asks for a different kind of engagement. Denied full access to Aurand’s life and context, we must independently interpret the sights and scenes presented, creating our own narratives and associations. What this adds up to is a self-reflexive, autonomous viewing experience. Like a magician, Aurand understands that the spectator’s truest pleasure lies somewhere between seeing and understanding, and wisely leaves us wanting more.
Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based in Canada.
