A poignant picture of solitude
The images draw you into a liminal world that seems to exist out of time and space in Maja Novaković’s feature documentary debut, At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking.
Without dialogue
Filmed, produced, and directed by Novaković in a remote rural corner of her native Bosnia and Herzegovina, this is a film virtually without dialogue. Images of profoundly beautiful simplicity weave seamlessly around the quiet observation of an old man living alone with his horse, some kittens, and a few dogs high in the hills above a wooded valley.
It is winter for most of this film, and if there is a plot, it is in the inexorable movement of the seasons, although there is precious little of spring, summer or autumn here.
The unnamed, heavily bearded man exists in a solitude that could occupy any century in the past thousand years. He lives simply, cooking on a wood-burning stove, chopping wood by hand (and using an axe to break ice in a horse trough), and occasionally conversing with neighbours who never linger long despite his entreaties to step in for a brandy or a coffee.
Time and the past – glimpsed in a cobwebbed framed wedding photo from the analogue age—that might just be the man with his bride in younger years – seem to weigh heavily on him. He goes about his daily tasks with little by way of distraction, looking out of his window at times, his face a poignant picture of solitude. His loneliness echoes through the heavy, slow motions that accompany him as he paces up and down a dusty wooden corridor. His only cheer seems to be caring for his horse and playing with the dogs and cats.
It all seems like a dream.
Diurnal beats
The director makes no attempt at narrative. The diurnal beat of extinguishing a candle at bedtime, lighting the stove in the morning, and engaging in forestry or animal husbandry on the mostly frozen but exquisitely beautiful winter days creates the frame for a film that offers itself up for meaning to be made by its viewers.
It all seems like a dream. Who is the young boy who appears, sharing the bed with the old man? A grandson, perhaps? The ancient rhymes and riddles the child recites put this film beyond today into a timeless one. The child slips in and out of the film with no explanation, barely an entrance and an unnoticed exit.
Sitting in a barn by a smoking fire, the old man’s wrinkled face creases into tears. At memory? From aching solitude? Or from woodsmoke? Perhaps it matters not.
At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking has a searing, poetic beauty that leads viewers to places inside their souls that have been long unvisited.
