The House is Yet to be Built

(aka The House, the True One and the One that Follows, is Yet to be Built, Sílvia das Fadas, Portugal, 2018)

The Ideal Palace of the Postman Cheval, the Red House of William Morris, Robert Garcet’s Museum of Flint, Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tarot Garden, and Stan Ioan Pătraș’ Merry Cemetery … What do these remarkable and unusual construction projects scattered around the world have in common?

They have been called many things: Outsider Art, glorious amateurism, visionary follies, Utopian dreams …

Sílvia das Fadas, in collecting her own filmed perceptions of these special places, brings out a further aspect: a politics of community and equality, the longing for a better society that is prefigured in the fanciful, material arrangements of rocks and stones.

Using natural sounds and recited passages from Bertolt Brecht and Simone Weil, this is a properly monumental film (although only 35 minutes long) in the tradition of Huillet & Straub, Thom Andersen and James Benning.

© Adrian Martin October 2019