Somewhere to disappear

THE IDEA OF escaping from society has been alluring for me for a long time, so when I read the description for Somewhere to Disappear in the programme of Transatlantyk Festival in Poznań, I knew it was a film I couldn't miss.

Alec Soth confronting his elegant artistic idea with crude reality

It's an hour-long documentary by two young French directors who follow Alec Soth, a large scale photographer, as he travels around the United States shooting a project about people who have rejected mainstream society and live in seclusion of some sort. We get to know an unlikely collection of fringe characters, from a retard relishing the idea of having a place in the forest to run away from a house nearby to a desperately lonely young man living in a cave with his dog to a spiritual weirdo dwelling in the desert. Their stories tend to focus on some kind of grievance that made them retreat from the world. The sights we are offered are anything but encouraging most of the time, containing a powerful load of depressive weirdness and frustration. Soth seems possessed by the idea of finding a perfect reclusion model for himself, but as we meet different characters, it's clear that his concept is little more than a fantasy, a "desire to run away" as he calls it. It's probably only the spiritual guy in the desert who gives a semblence of control and joy in his life, while others are typically troubled cases whose existence you wouldn't wish upon anyone.

As you try to reconcile the ideal of life in seclusion that Both (and many others, including me) entertain with the reality of living in a shack or a lawless community of outcasts and drunks, it's easy to conclude that he was simply looking in the wrong places. The result is a film documenting quite random images of American weirdness as well as Soth's intellectual and emotional voyage into his artistic concepts. I understand that many of those who've seen it can feel short-changed or confused as Somewhere to Disappear offers no easy answers, not even a coherent narrative you can follow and take home to retell to your friends. But if you let the artist lead you through his own discoveries in a territory that might seem familiar in one way or another, you should be fine leaving the cinema. I was.