From One Generation to Another

How I wish that I did not remember correctly. In my memory, I am a 6-year-old who has just started school in the beginning of the 1950s, sitting at my desk. The teacher drops a paper on the floor. I lift it up, take a look at it, as I can already read, and hand it over to her. She says disapprovingly that curiosity has no place in civilised behaviour. My first run-in with the prevailing attitudes and customs is now concrete. It will be continued. I belong to the generation that will later call into question the values of “home, religion and fatherland.”

Bolesław Matuszewski, who foresaw the extensive possibilities for using film in his text Une nouvelle source de l’Histoire (1898), also considered its limitations. He stated that history does not always happen where expected, and it is easier to present the events rather than their causes. If history for us is more than just a catalogue of wars, then, what is it? Could it be an attempt not so much to know, but rather to understand earlier generations, our past and current co-travellers?

The film The Woman with the 5 Elephants (Die Frau mit den 5 Elephanten, 2009) is a multifaceted dive into the history of Europe during the last century. A journey from Ukraine to Germany and back, a journey into language and culture. When the woman, who has translated Dostoyevsky’s mammoths into German, irons linens and considers the connection between the words textile and text, or when she explains what happens to us as we follow Raskolnikov’s actions, her face and being are more important that the insights we get. A wordless encounter that cannot be translated. A close-up of a humanist.

I am haunted by the feeling that during this era of greed both knowledge and understanding are sought to be outsourced to information banks, out of reach of human interaction. Will globalisation become a similar henchman of greed that Christianity became or democracy is now? Indeed, we sell our ailing democracy through armed forces to countries that have a history much longer than ours. Since Gutenberg, values have been passed on from generation to generation in various ways, fast or slow, from the immediate environment or the world of media. Are we able to live with the many overlapping changes without losing a feel for our neighbours and thus also for ourselves? Do permanent values even exist? Should they exist?

When I was small, I spent a great deal of time together with my grandmother Olga Aleksandra. During a day, she might speak only around ten sentences, even though she was a teacher’s widow. Yet, much more was transmitted without words: Presence. A connection to one´s own being and the surrounding world. I felt something similar while watching The Last Rodeo (El Gaucho, 2009), a film about the affection between a father and son.

According to the frame story, the father wants to pass on the model of a rodeo rider to his son.  The film’s images, however, convey much more. The main characters naturally have a different attitude toward suffering horses. Or do they? Will the son become a rodeo rider? Is following a role model as straightforward as it appears to be?

Are we losing something essential of the knowledge of earlier generations without noticing our loss? Is knowledge and experience getting lost underneath the garbage of commercial information? When did the last humanist debate take place? Socrates’ quote “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing” is not only a paradox, but an incitement to curiosity and reflection of received knowledge. Do we have the patience?

Timo Linnasalo
Film director and editor

Translation by Anna Volmari