Orphea (Alexander Kluge and Khavn, 2020) (Patreon)

Last year I tried to watch Orphea and bailed after a scant 20 minutes. But recently, the Houston Cinema Arts Society selected the film for a one-week virtual run, which put it back on my radar. How did this happen, exactly? As far as I know, Orphea still has no U.S. distributor, so securing the rights probably took a bit of extra effort. Someone in the organization (with which I am affiliated) was clearly a big fan of this film. So I went back and watched the whole thing.

This is a strange piece of work, one that is about equally composed of daring vision and utter nonsense. And it is a collaboration in the fullest sense of the word. Although I have never seen an entire film by Filipino experimentalist Khavn, I am reasonably familiar with what he does. But I know Kluge quite well, even his post-1980s video essay work. And Orphea is a sort of shotgun wedding between these two very distinctive filmmakers. In fact, it's almost as though two different films, both vaguely on the same topic, were inelegantly spliced together, a two-man omnibus effort.

The primary idea behind Orphea is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but with the genders swapped. In Kluge and Khavn's version, it is Orphea (Lilith Stangenberg) who must venture down to the underworld to retrieve her lover Euridikio (Ian Madrigal). But both filmmakers process this myth in their own unique styles, and the result is total confusion. It's not just that the two visions don't really gel. It's that both directors' individual methods are themselves characterized by chaos and information overload.

Khavn's parts of the film engage with the mythic and religious histories of the Philippines, in particular the island's syncretic combination of Catholicism and Chinese ancestor-worship. As staged by Khavn, this resembles a kind of madcap, carnivalesque atmosphere that plays like a parody of Western misperceptions of the "primitive," with Jesus and Mary butting up against ritual masks and dances, the sorts of performative actions that would prompt Levi-Strauss to reach for his notebook and pen. But along with this, Khavn's style employs ramshackle, arte povera constructions and the exotic-erotic, recalling the films of Jack Smith. 

By contrast, Kluge's contributions are high-octane Brechtianism, using deliberately retro video effects like chroma-key and split-screen framing to riff on the Orpheus myth as it has appeared in the Western tradition, especially in classical music. Stangenberg is frequently shown performing arias in a warped, attenuated mode, warbling and whispering like a combination of Lotte Lenya and Cathy Berberian, toggling between cabaret and grand opera within a single phrase. This is combined with Kluge's trademark textual inserts, themselves a character-generating program's approximation of Magic Marker notes on a white board.

This double maximalism is never boring, but it is frequently frustrating. It's odd to complain that a given film ought to have fewer ideas, but Orphea too often feels like a flurry of loose-leaf journal notes, a disorganized assault on the viewer. Collage and juxtaposition are time-honored modes of composition, but they require an alternate formal approach, not the apparent absence of one. 

By the end of Orphea, this organizational problem becomes an ethical one, since the filmmakers take a vague lunge toward topicality. Orphea's journey to Hades is compared with the movement of refugees to Lampedusa, prompting the sudden and unexplained use of the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Kurdish boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Who is responsible for this choice? With authorship divided between two individuals, it's hard to tell, and that strikes me as a problem.