The Bell

Original title: Varpas

Directed by: Audrius Stonys

Country: Lithuania

Year: 2007

Length: 56 min.

Premiere: /

Availability:

Synopsis: a group of scuba divers searches a bell in the bottom of a lake in Lithuania, following the popular legends.

RATING: 4.5/5

 

REVIEW 

"In the Middle Ages, life was interesting. Every house had its goblin, each Church a God. People were young. Now every fourth person is old…" - a line from Tarkovsky's Stalker that perfectly encapsulates the aspirations of Audrius Stonys' second feature film The Bell. 

Legends, folklore, myth, are the mediums that convey the vitality of a community. Fictional in their nature, they do have the power to somehow gain access to a more authentic level of memory, not because of their content, but because of their nature. That is why a legend so rich, that features a bell that has been lost into a lake while being transported during one of the many invasions Lithuania had suffered, is a perfect pretext.

An oral history that is being increasingly forgotten, as interviewed elderly claim to not remember the anecdote, The Bell is however a film in which silence dominates, broken by the divers, who seem only a disruption in the apparent stillness of the lake. Soon the film deviates in the quiet contemplation of the imperceptible changes in the fluid material of the lake itself, always in motion, always unattainable.

Yet, history is not as distant, regardless of the existence of the bell or not. A set of pylons in the lake, sunken boat wrecks, mementos of the near and very distant past - the pylons being  remains that date back to the medieval crusades against paganic lithuanian populations - inhabit the bottom of the ocean.

The Bell registers the perpetual cycle of the legendary dimension. In the words of Stonys, at the presentation of the film during his filmography's retrospective at Centre Pompidou: "when the last person that remembers the bell will pass away, the bell itself will die with him." While the elderly pass away, the children, interviewed in a passage of the film, seem to be eager to continue elaborating the myth, ensuring that the days of The Bell are far from gone.