- To make two unrelated story lines melt together and work as one. To reconcile documentary with fiction, without resorting to docudrama, nor to mockumentary. To tell a story as old as the existence of mankind and painfully actual. The documentary line- a man's strive to save industrial artifacts threatened with destruction. The fictional line- what remains of a human being when the most vital element is taken away. The vital element- the link between the two. This is Element 1. A film that wants to undermine the assumed perceptions and the generally accepted wisdom. And to stimulate the viewer's readiness to accept the film's discovered truth through non-conventional points of view.—Anonymous
- By bringing together two unrelated symbols, side by side, we obtain a different concept. Or so S.M. Eisenstein tells us. It is the principle of the ideogram. But what about bringing closer together two genres of film, that theory and practice hold as unrelated?
Element 1 consists in fusioning two stories: one is a pure documentary, filmed according to all the rules of the genre, not missing one of them. The other is a fictional action, it too being respectfull of its conventions. These stories are unrelated on every levell, except their prevaling theme. But both are intertwined in the texture of the narration, responding to each other, like cinematic echoes of the same worrysome thought. Out of this fusion a movie results: Element 1, a film that aims to undermine the assumed perceptions and the generaly accepted wisdom in order to stimulate the viewer's readiness to accept the film's ultimate truth, as expressed through non-conventional points of view.
The engineer Zaharia Trua worked for decades at the Water Plants of the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The shock of his life came late in his career, when a Diesel engine dating back to 1932 was sent to the scrapyard and melted down. This is the documentary line. For a mutation occured in the mind of the engineer. From evaluating the surrounding world merely through an utilitarian point of view, time made him appreciate more and more the artistic and cultural content of the daily realities. Thus, the Diesel engine, made in Austria before the WWII, became for Zaharia Trua a true object of industrial art, of which he appreciated the curves, the lines, the finesse and the craftsmanship of the makers, aside from the fact that it was still a functional engine, having outlived by decades its lifespan.
It is why, acknowledging the order for its destruction, issued in 1975, our subject tried hard to fight the decision, unsuccessfully. This defeat and the bitterness accompanying it remained vivid in his memory at the time of our interviews with him, in 2009- 2010. But the event triggered a lifetime obsession: to save for the future generations all the industrial artifacts related to man's struggle for water, items that survived time and human callousness. A constant effort over more than 15 years, resulting in the inauguration of the Museum of the Water, in 1992.
The documentary follows Trua's account, from the initial shock, a story that immerses itself in the past, present and future, through memorabilia, stories of fun and tragedy, personal defeats and common achievements.
Parallel with this evolves the story whereby a group of people try to survive, the best they can, to an adverse change in the environment. This is the fictional storyline. What remains of a human being's goodness if water sources have become toxic, almost overnight? What effect does water scarcity have on humans? What responsibility do we owe to the environment, as individuals, and what amount of it can we justifiably pass to the undetermined, shapeless authority/ powers to be? This is the core of the fictional story.
The two lines of the action intermingle, they penetrate each other's continuum, forming the texture of the story. And beyond it other issues are laying. In times where manipulation of the public, true lies and wagging the dog through the medium of visual stimulae has reached a threshold, over which the altering of man's will gets more and more sophisticated, thus more difficult to detect, the present film does not hold any manipulating intentions. It simply searches and finds a new mean of expressing ideas and feelings.
The theoretical foundation of the experiment lays in S.M. Eisenstein's article The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram (1926). In it, starting from the ideogram- a result of putting together two different and unrelated symbols to create a new concept, Eisenstein contends that film resides on the same principle, through montage: putting together two pieces of film, even the dialectical opposites of each other, results into a cinematic phrase, altogether different in quality from the originating sequences.
Pushing the inference further, along the same lines, Element 1 brings two stories, each of a different genre, in each other's vicinity. An intermingling of documentary with fiction results. But it is not docudrama, for it does not reenact a real event through the means of the fiction film. Nor is it a mockumentary. Let alone that it does not mock anything, it isn't cloaking/ hiding/disguising a fictional story through the appearance of a documentary. In Element 1 the documentary and the fiction coexist and prosper, each in its own right. No infringement is taken on the part of any of the elements of this binome. No rule is violated. The stories are unrelated, except for their distant theme: water, its importance and the mutations that the lack thereof produces in the human conduct. But the two pillars of the story lead to a coherent result. S.M. Eisenstein is confirmed once more. Bringing together two concepts does give birth to a new one, qualitatively different from the originating ones. Maybe a new way of better expressing the theme?
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