Film Review: The Certain Malaise of a Forest Once Glowing

by "Nebby" Siits

The Certain Malaise of a Forest Once Glowing
Director: Stev Diedrich
Writer: Yana Diedrich

The Certain Malaise of a Forest Once Glowing is a series of long-shots via crude handsets depicting a scorched forest and the men who wander through it. Some are scavenging, some are hiding, some are trying to re-cultivate. It is unintentionally very black and white, it has very little in the way of professional audio-work, and it ends nearly as senselessly ominous as it begins. The site is located at the basin of the Valley Deep in light of the fires that tore through the land some 40 years ago. Perhaps the Diedrichs' desired to respond to Paolo Limboça's seminal work, Living Fire, a series of poems grappling with the country's indifference for the Valley Deep chemical fires, which tore through Jeffersonian wilds and cities within the span of a month, leaving hundreds of thousands displaced and forgotten (Limboça among the survivors). However, if this is their goal, they are intentionally vague. At times it seems nearly found footage, depicting the urban mythical; a sequence follows a man laden with wood, walking colorlessly into a field, and suddenly stopping, the track-shot halting abruptly with the man off-screen, panning quickly back to show the man motionless, featureless, for what seems an eternity. It is as though witnessing an unearthly scene, or the margins of a natural law. A haunting.
     Handsets continue to see use in the world of horror thanks to their familiar lens, practicality, and how easy they are to hide for footage potentially unwanted, though these films often release to little acclaim (see: Pale, Cinder, or the Whole Man, Snared, etc.). Their ease of access does not necessarily inform the quality of the minds behind the lens. What the Diedrichs do is not pedantic to the genre, in fact it is wholly its own in a way that dives into the subliminal previously unawoken. In order for The Certain Malaise of a Forest Once Glowing to take root, the Valley Deep had to be burned, had to be abandoned, had to become the natural anomaly that it is today. There is no widely understood reason that the land continues to rot, is void of bacterial life, or remains constant at all in an era of incredible ecological upheaval. Neither why it draws the attention that it does. Hollow shapes wandering the ashes to their own purposes, unknown. While paradoxically, the government, the country, largely unconcerned, almost percussively so. What the Diedrichs see is the land uncensored, shutters drawn.

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Yana's writing, save its direction, is not featured for reasons unknown. As it is, it is a miracle that the film sees the light of day and has an audience at all, as this auteur couple keeps their interactions with the industry brief and often stilted, as though ambassadors for a larger purpose and this is merely a formality to a greater sequence. Within the flashdrive that contained their finished product, a readme.txt delineated Yana's discoveries while filming, curiously articulate and removed. "Stegner's New Cycle Principle demands the balance of any ecological community of practice to hinge upon the axis of relational zoning contingent upon consensual aggregation—these men are alone." Though, it is not without its obvious insights, "Where are women—men wander alone." Earlier in the notes, Yana states that her intention with the script for the film was for her husband, Stev, and Stev alone. There is not a shred of evidence that the script even existed outside of the conversations held between the couple. This checks out: the Diedrichs are most understood when cryptic.
     However, this film seems to embrace the anonymous fear that it records, and as such serves no lasting purpose but mystical intrigue. The Diedrich's refusal to set word or tongue to tape confirms as much. My fear is that public (though liminal) praise for its ethereal visage will drown its louder cry for an answer, but a world that could metastasize such a need for this vision is one that would just as soon abandon any message scrawled upon the walls, regardless of its bloodly ink.

6.8/9

This work is replicated in identical to its original, as per the Culture-Safe dictates (9.4114) of Our Lady Diaspora, by the Curator Proper of Catacombian Wells (1.445).