Archive – Reverse shot

Industrial devolution
By Saffron Maeve

New York Film Festival 2024:
Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari, United Kingdom, not a distributor

A remote English village is overthrown by xenophobia and piggish capitalism in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest, set after the Enclosure Act of 1604 eradicated England and Wales’ open-field farming system in favor of private property. It takes place somewhere between this privatization and the industrial revolution. Harvestan earthy, unflinching adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 pastoral novel, it is a rejection of structures of exploitation throughout the ages. The film opens with servant and outcast Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) engaging in an erotic encounter with nature: chewing the bark of branches and tonguing tree hollows before plunging naked into the river, probably high on mushrooms, an obvious staple of the village.

When Walter returns home, he finds the townspeople mad and the farm on fire. His employer and childhood friend Master Kent (Harry Melling), who oversees the land, scapegoats three passing vagrants for the arson; two men are sentenced to a week in the pillory, while a woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), has her hair forcibly cut before being thrown into the forest where she lurks for days, true to her name, as an exiled witch. This hellish incident sets in motion a cycle of misfortune that destabilizes the village, a farming community that, by local agreement, is “not so much pressed to God’s bosom” as “within his grasp.” day trip away from all signs of civilization. Harvest was photographed by Sean Price Williams on 16mm, a choice that lends an appropriately grainy texture to lingering close-ups of toiling hands harvesting wheat and ram’s wool, images of labor soon to be disrupted by a new order.

The discomfort among the local population is fueled by the increased presence of outsiders. First, cartographer Phillip “Quill” Earle (Arinzé Kene), who is tasked with designing a map of the area, throws the villagers off balance. They are very skeptical about his presence and the fact that he is simultaneously ‘flattened’ on a map, assigned to the present without history or future. Feeling concerned about Quill’s intruder status, Walter shows him around the village and the surrounding oak forest, marsh, lake and heath, sharing anecdotes about the place and his late wife, killed by a bee sting. According to him, Quill’s job is one of affection, documenting and labeling the region; his brushstrokes are peppered with communicated personal histories, and specimens of local flora flow from his workbook, waiting to be catalogued. “To name things is to know them,” he says to Walter.

The second arrival is much less amiable, with the odious, wealthy Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) coming to demand his right to the land from his cousin Master Kent, who sheepishly gives in to his demands. Master Jordan’s goal to turn the land into profitable pasture comes just as the farmers celebrate their annual tradition of gathering, bringing home everything they gather in the fields. This privatization and forfeiture of Master Kent’s ideals is immediately felt by the community, many of whom are excoriated by Master Jordan’s henchmen, who also kidnap and attack the townswomen in a nearby mansion.

Leader of Greece’s Weird Wave – a movement of Greek absurdist cinema that emerged in the late 1990s and echoed the country’s economic concerns in non-traditional film narratives – Tsangari produced Yorgos Lanthimos’ film Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2007), and Alps (2011), and directed her own unusual feature films, The slow pace of events (2000), Attenberg (2010), and Chevalier (2015). Her directorial projects have grappled with isolation, assimilation, and mortality, each enduring enduring humor under insular conditions. In Attenbergthis is a sexually inexperienced 23 year old who playfully acts on her desires as she comes to terms with her father’s terminal illness, and in Chevalierthis is a yacht full of virulent men measuring their cocks and engaging in crazy rituals on the Aegean Sea. Harveston the other hand, it plays more like a routine historical drama, in which the threat of so-called ‘progress’ hinders a society’s self-determination. Being Tsangari’s first English-language feature, the film sheds some of its steadily disastrous humor and Greek locales while retaining its institutional critique of capitalism and chauvinism. The erosion of the village’s open-field system flows into a broader sphere of sexual violence, confronting the men’s negligence and complicity. There are also sequences that bear Tsangari’s stamp of awkward comedy; At one point, a group of children are led by a town elder to the village border, where they take turns bumping their heads forcefully against a bolder, “so they know where they belong.”

Some will find Harvest a labored entry in Tsangari’s oeuvre, although its more bloodless qualities – a pragmatic plot, lack of characterization and tonal unevenness – seem to work in the film’s favour. The story lacks an emotional, individualized center, a void left empty by the ostensible protagonist Walter, who is woefully distant. However, this plays out as a result of modernization and uniformity, with the village’s relational networks made increasingly obtuse, while the asymmetrical tone mimics the friction between tradition and modernity that delineates the plot. The film carefully analyzes how upper crust idealism pits itself against agrarian labor, while underscoring the judgments hidden in notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘convention’.

You can imagine a version of it Harvest that plays on its occult activity, such as Tsangari’s obscure 2015 short film The capsulein which ritual, fetish and anthropomorphism merge into a feminine mythos. Instead of, HarvestThe Beldam character creeps around the edges of the frame, never quite justified or answered. There’s also a sense of indecision in the film’s racial politics; Quill and Mistress Beldam are both black and suffer sharp ostracism at the hands of paranoid villagers, but the script doesn’t interrogate these humiliations as fully as it does issues of class and gender.

The project is packed with unremarkable ideas, but Harvest is the most visually convincing: it is rich in images of arms combing through tall, green grasslands, clusters of high clouds, shears tearing through wool. Williams’ camera is fascinated by imposing Georgian landscapes and their attendants: mud puddles, grimy bodies writhing in the dark, pig-chewed limbs – all suitably rustic, while poignantly observing the disappearance of a place and its people. . Appropriately then, Harvest is bracketed by territorial sequences in which Walter lays claim to the land: from his first bush fuck to a moment when he scoops up and inhales piss-soaked soil and says, “You are me and I am you,” to a final blow with the head against the border rocks. In these moments of reclamation, Tsangari exposes her themes of attachment, belonging, and intangible possession.