Still Life
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Aaron Salazar
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A series of tableaus in which the dead lie in landscapes while the world stubbornly keeps moving — wheels spin, radios play, animals graze on. Classical music scores the indifference.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most films about death need ninety minutes and a sobbing widow; this one trusts a wheel still spinning to do the work. That's an editor with conviction.
Death as composition: each frame a painting where the corpse is incidental to the breeze — Salazar's Andersson-via-Wyeth tableaux is conceptually sharp and tonally precise. Elegiac classical music doing exactly the right amount of work.
Death-as-composition: corpses incidental to the breeze in tableau after tableau, with classical music scoring the indifference of grazing horses and spinning wheels. Roy Andersson rigor for elegiac landscapes is the right reference.