VERDICT: Jonathan Glazer’s lockdown short embraces the urge to dance, re-framing a 16th century madness into an infectious ode to perseverance in the pandemic era.
During 2020, when many of us were confined to cramped quarters and trying to find a way to resist the onset of isolation madness, Jonathan Glazer provided a fitting salve. His non-narrative short film Strasbourg 1518, taking as its oblique jumping-off point an outbreak of dancing hysteria in the 16th century, is a percussive and propulsive dance film that managed to speak to the global moment of confinement as well as being a blast of rhythmic life affirmation.
In July of 1518, a woman in the French city of Strasbourg walked out into a public square and began to dance. What initially just prompted puzzled interest from passers-by soon drew fellow dancers, and over the next few months hundreds caught the fever and dozens died of dehydration and exhaustion. While the content of Glazer’s film doesn’t directly address this historical reference point, the inability to stop dancing is transferred down through the centuries to a handful of professional dancers, alone in bare rooms, and edited together to the fluctuated beats of Mica Levi’s irresistible electronic score with a beat that glitches and palpitates throughout. Both footage and choreography appear to recur, with actions like one dancer washing her hands enacted over and over again, while the editing builds to a frenetic almost stroboscopic pace after a relatively glacial start.
Shot by Darius Khondji, the compositions themselves are fairly straightforward, framing the physical exertions against flatly lit and spartan spare rooms with plug sockets as the most regular point of interest. Emphasising the film’s genesis during a time of social distancing and enforced isolation, it also allows the dancers’ movements through their spaces to give the images their dynamism. In some instances, those movements are jagged with contortions, in others fluid and free, the compulsion to move presented as both burden and liberation. Throughout their hypnotic repetitions, bodies tire and stumble, but they rise once more to continue their endless performance. It gives Strasbourg 1518 the aspect of an ode to human endurance, even if its main selling point may be its manic, mesmeric dancing.
Director, screenplay: Jonathan Glazer
Producer: Bugs Hartley
Cast: Andrey Berezin, Botis Seva, Ditta Miranda Jasjfi
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Editing: Paul Watts
Sound: Johnnie Burn
Music: Mica Levi
Production companies: Academy Films (UK), BBC Films (UK)
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Imagina)
No dialogue
10 minutes
