Documentary films know many forms, they can epically reach out in their representation and construction of reality or theatrically narrow it down to the scene, proceed chronologically, veristically or more towards the essayistic side, conduct their research with associations, assign every possibility of truth to the arrangement and the cut of the material or with techniques relying on ambiguity of omission in a more lyrical way. “First Kingdom”, a documentary that is as personal as it is subjectivity transcendent, about dying, death and possible transformations of the body and mind after death, combines essayistic, lyrical and associative forms of cinematic representation in more than ninety minutes. As a viewer, you have to get involved in the image and montage offers that Ioanis Nuguet (under,as it says in the credits, offers "harmonious" collaboration of his brother Adrien) with "First Kingdom" to see and recognize. The film is not for short attention spans.

In addition, you have to want to endure this film, which was broadcast on Arte at a later hour. It is about the death of the filmmaker's mother, shows her last, rattling breaths in the circle of her closest relatives and the subsequent silence up close. There is no explicit dramaturgy that leads to this one, special death or, with a thoughtful short circuit, understands it as the end of a completed life, for example. Dramaturgically, Nuguet constructs more wave movements, transformations of images, cross-fading of motifs and processes of becoming and passing away. After the mother's death one sees photographs of her life in quick succession. The old woman. the older, the young, the child, the baby. A nothing under water in the red glow,perhaps that of a night moon below sea level in Bali, which resembles amniotic fluid images from inside a woman.

Open to interpretation, but not arbitrary

Ioanis Nuguet, whose father was once killed in a diving accident in the sea, invents his pictures around motifs of family ties, their dissolution, the passing away and the return: rituals and the cult of the dead in Bali.

Shadow theater with Balinese puppets, performed against the backdrop of the entrance to the mythical underworld.

The sea traditionally serves as the main motif.

Divers swim through the reef, on the shore spray meets flower-decorated baskets in which the ashes of the deceased go on a long journey.

You can see the mother Laurence in the machine tube, which illuminates her brain layer by layer.

Brain structures made visible in the imaging process, neurological pathways are transformed into tentacle forests by underwater anemones.

The Nuguet family appears with several generations. The frail grandmother weeping for her daughter's death. Ioani's wife at birth, the little daughter, the later son, the mother who, now bald, is ceremonially prepared for her death or reincarnation in Bali. Old, private Super 8 recordings from Provence. Home becomes visible, comfort and tenderness of the neighbor.

The pictorial style of “First Kingdom” is speculative and open to interpretation, but not arbitrary.

Two mottos open the curtain on the film: “Everything we see in the cinema is wrong, and yet it is the only reality we know”, as well as an excerpt from a poem by Kathleen Raine: “Where did the dead go?

Where can we meet them? ”The variety of pieces of music also appears as a leitmotif, among others by Henryk Gorecki, César Franck, Sergej Rachmaninow and Nikolaus Bruhns (1665–1697).

Themes and variations, transitions, different keys, composed picture arcs - “First Kingdom” eludes the impatient, who has firmly established his attitude towards death, until the end.

First Kingdom

, this Monday at 11:55 p.m., at Arte.