This short film viewed on YouTube at first glance rough and poorly realized has an important exception: it is a pleasant film despite its imperfections of mise-en-scene. The Jew Aryan Kaganof (despite his beautiful pseudo) embodies the drunkard, a role that corresponds very well to his imperfection. He spends his time attending an abandoned bar in the South African province. The Director Ingvaldsen, on the other hand, is Swedish and was spotted by Kaganof when he was briefly an assistant professor at the University of Malmo in 2008.
Five years before I had the bad luck to watch Kaganof’s real alcoholic state in Utrecht (the Netherlands) at the vernissage of the “SMS” exhibition at the local Central Museum. I remember very well that after the opening we met four in a restaurant of the same city: Miljeana Babic (a Balkan visual artist), Nicola Deane (the wife of Kaganof today), he and me. It was the first time that I became a witness of the alcoholic state of my former favorite director. The title of the film parodies the famous whiskey firm but Kaganof has plunged into oblivion after our last and final dispute in 2012 in The Hague of the previous country. It was at a local festival that had screened out unsuccessful South African short films to justify the low level of his last feature film, four years before.
Since I knew the alcoholic state of Kaganof since 2003 I was not surprised to see the English translations of Guy Debord’s leftist essay “La société du spectacle” and the distressing spectacle of the transformation of his former promising cinema in a field of “leftist” banality that does not correspond at all to contemporary reality, Dutch, South African or even Greek.
But I liked the choice of the last as an actor for the short film of Ingvaldsen since Kaganof still had a physical charm. He was not yet fat or the head of a family, proof of his lack of originality today. Only a few poems of his own are still important, but not his new political films with outdated leftism. And to honor our favorite site “Soiled Sinema” (TyE’s) I will make an anti-Semitic comment and I will tell you that if Kaganof was in good psychological health, not drunk or alcoholic he would not be Jewish. But you can also say it upside down.
