Cinema of Stonys

In honour of the retrospective organised at the Centre Pompidou, it is worth studying the works of Audrius Stonys, lithuanian filmmaker who has achieved in his works a form of poetry seldom attained in contemporary documentary cinema.

BIOGRAPHY

"Henrikas Šablevicius taught me the poetic language, Jonas Mekas taught me freedom"

- Audrius Stonys (Masterclass held at Centre Pompidou, 9 Nov. 2024)

Born in 1966, Audrius Stonys studied in the Music and Theater Academy of Vilnius, under the greatest masters of the baltic poetic documentary from the '60s and '70s, such as Henrikas Šablevicius. He later attended a seminary conducted by Jonas Mekas in New York. His first independent short film, Earth of the Blind (1992), was awarded as Best Documentary by the European Film Academy. Throughout his career, Stonys directed 20 films, between shorts and features, with a preference towards the short or medium length form. His film Ramin was shortlisted in the best documentary category, but was ultimately not selected. His latest feature documentary Bridges of Time was presented in the documentary competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2018. After a hiatus of six years following the passing of his long time collaborator, cinematographer, Audrius Kemezys, he is now working on a new film in South Korea.

LONELINESS

Often the films of Audrius Stonys are centered on characters that conduct a solitary life. According to him, this exploration was not programmatic at first, but became a systemic interest of his early on in his career. There are practically infinite examples, but some of the most iconic of these figures are the protagonist of Apostle of Ruins, a georgian man who lives in Vilnius and collects scrap metal to create works that only he considers art, or the Woman and the Glacier, who lives entirely isolated near a glacier in Central Asia. The sense of solitude and melancholy that these loners often convey is however not to be mistaken for a commiserating representation of their status. The hermits of Stonys are alone, perhaps incomprehensible for the collective society, but powerful examples of self-determination. Stonys describes this condition that he studies in his films as a form of "bright loneliness". The striking aspect is how these characters feel mystical, in a similar veign to some characters of Tarkovsky films, such as Domenico in Nostalghia.

SILENCE

"Early on, I questioned whether this art can be stand on its own, without the support of literature, of words, if cinema could express all the spectrum without words."

- Audrius Stonys (id.)

The majority of the works of Stonys features minimal or absent verbal elements. Part of what defines the poetic sense of his documentaries, this aspect is meant to distill the pure cinematic form, to distance it as much from the other art forms which it uses as support. Words, additionally, according to Stonys, are a form of lie, they can be used to further distance one from achieving truth - which is why his masters, the documentary filmmakers of the Baltic New Wave, have employed non-verbal forms of communication in their films that Stonys adopted and perfected in his own works. It is far from describing the works of Stonys as poor in the sound department, as he stresses out himself, cinema is an audiovisual form of art in which sound is as important as the visive. Complex atmospheres are rendered through a construction that employs music and effects, in an effort to convey the unspoken. Choral pieces are very common in the scores of Stonys, with their religious nature often influencing the sense of spirituality that pervades his filmography.

TRUTH

"Just a simple moment of truth, is what you try to achieve in documentary cinema."

- Audrius Stonys (id.)

Documentary is the cinematic art that seeks to represent reality in the most adherent possible way, a research of truth. The very nature of cinema, an artifice, makes absolute truth unattanaible, be it the pirandellian social "masks" worn by people, or the lies of words, for which the attitude of Stonys is of a humble, sysiphusian nature. Truth is the ultimate unattainable prize, but for Stonys, success lies in getting as close to collect fragments of it. Children in films such as Alone or Gates of the Lamb are more 'honest' because the social cues that impose humans to act or simulate are still not engrained in them entirely, animals are similarly capable of nearing truth, and ultimately, reality. Stonys accepts the form of documentary as entirely artificial, to the point that even the ambient sounds are constructed in post production, because the truth he seeks is something that is difficult to see or describe without mediation.

INVISIBLE

The cinema of Stonys is an attempt to describe, through the visible sphere of reality, something that remains impossible to see, comprehend or even describe. A tendency towards a form of ascension that is achieved through silence, contemplation pervades each of his films. Profoundly metaphysical in its approach, due to the religious nature of the choral pieces often used, but also the relations to faith-related themes, the documentary cinema of Stonys can be perceived as profoundly spiritual. It is however not a form of transcendence that adheres to religious forms, but entirely introspective. In focusing extensively on the faces of people, in the landscapes, Stonys seeks to uncover the mystery of reality that lays in its invisible form.