The county of Yoknapatawpha cannot be found with the aid of maps; it is the invention of the American author William Faulkner, and the setting of his classic novels. Tracing its tracks into the present, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky conjure a vanished landscape, saturated in its sultry atmosphere and eidetic visions.

Holy Time in Eternity, Holy Eternity in Time is a cinematic hymn to a legendary part of northwestern Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. The region takes its name from a Chickasaw compound meaning “Split Land” or "Water Flows Slow Through Flat Land”. But the laconic Yocona River is only one of the things that cuts through its schizophrenic soil, ever divided between black and white, past and present, myth and history. To be sure, the county of Yoknapatawpha cannot be found with the aid of maps; it is the invention of the American author William Faulkner, and the setting of his classic novels. Tracing its tracks into the present, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky conjure a vanished landscape, saturated in its sultry atmosphere and eidetic visions.

Their film describes a drifting voyage through a spectral South, resembling time travel in slow motion. Its rhythm is dictated by the river's languid flow, for the river is a storyteller. Its voice in the film is Major Young, an African-American man of sixty years’ age. He is a Protean poet, a painter, a builder, a horseman, a government translator, a Zulu warrior, an Egyptian king in the bloodline of Ramses, a black man with hillbilly blood. Young speaks with the thick voice of blood—that liquid inheritance that is thicker than water, that is never buried but which only flows onward. Man is a momentary arrangement of “blood, skin, bowels, bones, memory from the long time before it became his memory” (to appropriate Faulkner’s language). Just as blood flows from one generation to another, these inherited memories of ancient days, wars, Biblical legends, memories of slavery and of the Middle Passage still resound into the present: “They brought you ’cross the Atlantic Ocean / ’cross the Mississippi River, / where God have given you rest, / have given you rest, / on this side of the river.”

On reading his words reproduced on the screen, we may interrupt ourselves, we may lose our place in the transmission of experience. The pronouns that establish difference, the “you” and “I” between you and I, are reversed such that we trade roles with Young, speaking in the place of the prophet. "I understand you and you understand me," he says. In a simple gesture, an invisible arc is drawn from the griot to ourselves. “You understand me and I understand you,” we read. In order to “understand,” it seems, we must enter the split mind of Yoknapatawpha, the split land. Fixed identities decompose where the fictional and the physical worlds merge. The schizophrenic soil is plunged into blindness.

The first image one sees, to the sounds of birdsong and the martial trilling of crickets, is that of a silhouetted figure rising in the horizon. Three men materialize, floating aloft on the murky stream; like spirits of the dead, they are being conducted by the river's current, perhaps into the next world. But soon after, a man with a movie camera wades after the bodies like a specter wandered in from another tale. At each turn the drifting current pulls us deeper and deeper into the unknown.

The Yoknapatawpha of Florenty & Türkowsky teems with hidden and evanescent lights, of lightning in the night, of fireflies and fireworks (theaurora borealis of the American South) — but it is just as much a land of vacillating shadows, where great bears lurk within endless forests. An unseen narrator whispers a scene of Faulkner's story “The Bear” in which the young hunter, in order to ever see the bear he is pursuing, realizes he must first divest himself of his gun, knife and compass. When he finally encounters the aged animal, he is hardly aware of it: the graceful presence of the bear does not call attention to itself. It is dimensionless, like a seed of silent eternity couched in the noise of time.

“The past is a foreign country,” as L. P. Hartley wrote, “they do things differently there." Florenty & Türkowsky have composed a lyrical travelogue through that foreign land, like hunters in search of the miraculous. Recurrently the film leads into the dark forests where, after dusk, the bears celebrate ursine Walpurgis nights. There, safe from human interference, the bears imitate men, dancing, cavorting and playing music on their hind legs. At other times we witness synchronized dances that enchant like ancient riddles, we hear stray melodies, sounds of folk spirituals and bluegrass ballads. Each moment in Holy Time in Eternity, Holy Eternity in Time leaves a lingering trace like a spark in darkness. In the filmmakers' patient assemblage of images and gestures, these mysterious transmissions take on the air of inherited memories.

Blood is never buried; it only ever flows. “Yet the river almost seems / To flow backwards” (Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Ister).

Credits

A movie by Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky

With:

Major Young

The river crew
John, Nathan, Will, Lyles, Ian

The vineyard youth

The horse riders
Jay Jay, Michael, Corre, Chris

And:

James Howard Meredith speech at Ole Miss, 1969

Malcolm Cowley about «The Bear» by Faulkner, 1980

With the support of Institut Français Programme Hors Les Murs

Edited during the residency FRAC Champagne-Ardenne

YY©2011