Rob Tregenza’s ‘The Fishing Place’ Comes to MoMA February 6-12

Cinema Parallel

American filmmaker Rob Tregenza's newest feature, The Fishing Place, begins its North American theatrical premiere at MoMA on February 6 before expanding to Los Angeles's Laemmle Theaters on March 7.

Best known for his 1988 debut feature Talking to Strangers –– as well as his creative collaborations over the years with idols of arthouse cinema Jean-Luc Godard and Béla Tarr –– Tregenza's latest explores the temporal reverberations of World War II with a distinctive and reinvigorated formal process, challenging traditional representations of the war and its enduring mark on the world.

The Fishing Place is set far from the bloodstained frontlines of the war in the snowy, scenic hinterlands of Notodden, Norway, where an enigmatic woman called Anna Kristiansen (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has just arrived after being released from Nazi custody; the reasoning for her detention left a mystery. Camouflaged as a housemaid, Anna is appointed by a Norwegian Nazi officer (Frode Winther) to spy on a German Lutheran priest (Andreas Lust) whose commitment to the Third Reich is contested. Given three days to complete her covert assignment, Anna encounters changing dynamics of power in the surrounding community as the tides of war turn and the resounding moral predicaments of her own soul.

Cinema Parallel

Throughout the film, we find its central figures in conflict with the surrounding world, unable to operate any moral autonomy in the face of an overwhelming authoritarian system. This translates through a specific helplessness, an abandonment of the pillars of humanity in service of a higher force, in this case, the Nazi occupation. This ruminative philosophical method sets the work apart from other period movies that tackle the World War II era through his explorations of the conditions of wartime and the complicity built into such experiences that many faced to survive and endure.

Shot on location in 35mm, the movie employs a hypnotic visual approach to its characters and their predicaments, with the director also serving as the cinematographer. The camera liberally flows between its subjects with spectral ease, returning time and time again to a uniquely centripetal movement as it pivots around the characters. Tregenza avoids cutting within scenes, allowing the hushed dramas to play out with a muted assurance instead. The Fishing Place experiments with the use of light in the most intriguing of ways: in moments relying on the theater of its natural oscillation to capture the state of the film's reality, caught somewhere between heaven and hell.

As The Fishing Place moves into its latter section, a radical formal shift occurs, allowing the director to reflect on the lasting impact of the war and the meta qualities of filmmaking as an art form freed from the shackles of time. This transformation presents the future-thinking principles of the Second World War and its visions of Europe's destiny. These associations are drawn between the past and the present work in communication with the rising authoritarianism currently being witnessed across the globe.

Upending conventional representations of wartime societies through its formal methodology, The Fishing Place allows for renewed reflections on a period that has so shaped our world and what it has become, much more fascinated with the philosophical nuance of the era than the emotional.

'The Fishing Place' will play at MoMA from February 6 to 12 before expanding to Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on March 7, courtesy of distributor Cinema Parallel. Click here for more information about 'The Fishing Place, or watch the trailer below: