The Short Films Of Carlos Gananian
Back in early August a faithful reader of ScreenAnarchy turned me on to the existence of Carlos G Gananian, a young Brazilian film maker turning heads with his latest piece of work - a vampire film titled Akai. The trailers for his work showed simply enormous promise, showcasing a 1970's influenced visual style and an obvious gift for composition and lighting. After finding those trailers I managed to contact Gananian directly and he more than graciously offered to send along copies of all three of his short films and having just had the chance to watch all three in sequence my only possible conclusion is that Gananian is a simply enormous talent, gifted in absolutely every aspect of film making and a man certain to explode on the international scene the moment he finds a feature length project worthy of his talents. He really is that good.
The first film included is Gananian's 2003 student short Behemoth, a six minute short that plays out entirely without dialogue relying purely on Gananian's visual skills to tell the story of a man attempting to raise a demon. Those visual skills are more than up to the task. Behemoth - indeed, all three of Gananian's shorts - features only two characters, though not the same ones. First here is a long haired, shirtless, blood soaked man sitting cross legged and chanting in the middle of a pentagram. Opposite the seated man is the target of his incantations, a bald, nearly naked man hung cruciform against an intricate, horn-evoking design. The set design is appropriately sparse, limiting its scope to only the essentials and layering those with a fine attention to detail. Here and elsewhere Gananian shows a particular attention to blood, making it a thick, viscous, thoroughly compelling liquid. Camera angles and color schemes are extreme, both showcasing an evident fondness for giallo and while this sort of scenario has a limited number of possible endings Gananian executes his chosen option with such style and assurance - not to mention a fantastic bit of make up - that it packs a mean punch.
Ganaian would follow Behemoth in 2005 with the stranger-by-far Coagula. If Behemoth showed an attraction to the religious horror subgenre - one that has seldom been treated with the seriousness it deserves for decades - Coagula shows him dabbling in the extreme theatricality of giallo. Again we have a two person scenario played out entirely in a single room. In this case we have an unnamed woman strapped down to a table by a bizarrely outfitted assailant, heavily made up almost to the point of clown make up with hair that looks to have been carved from clay. As was the case with Behemoth, Coagula builds to a single moment no less effective for being evident in advance, again thanks to a fantastic piece of physical makeup and Gananian's skill behind the camera.
With the student works out of the way the question becomes whether Gananian could make the transition to more formal methods of film making and whteher the skills that served him well in the short-shorts would translate to longer form work. Both Behemoth and Coagula, after all, were essentially built around a single effects shot, both were an excercise to see if he could execute that one sequence and while he shows an unusual ability to connect emotionally with his characters in those short spans would he be able to sustain a longer piece of work?
The answer to this question comes with the twenty minute vampire film Akai and the answer is a resounding yes. Set in a grandly decayed mansion whose sole resident preys upon escorts culled from newspaper want ads, Akai is a haunting, gothic, gorgeously shot piece of work that plays out almost entirely without dialogue: Akai features the first and, so far, only line of spoken dialogue in any of Gananian's films. Again he relies almost exclusively on his visuals to tell the story and again he succeeds magnificently, creating a fully realized world seemingly without effort and creating a deeply nuanced and conflicted take on the vampire mythos in the process. It would likely require the introduction of some additional characters and plot points to do it but Akai holds the seeds of a stellar feature should Gananian choose to go down that road but regardless of whether it be this story or some other he no doubt has a bright future ahead of him.
