The title Last Landscape encompasses a work of choreography for dancer Josef Nadj and musician Vladimir Tarasov in a film that explores the dance piece alongside what it is based on, in other words its origins, sources and creation process. Josef Nadj defines this double project as a “self-portrait facing the landscape.” The landscape in question actually exists a few miles from Kanizsa, the small town in Voivodine (ex-Yugoslavia) where he was born. It’s a landscape which has appealed to him since he was a boy. This self-portrait is willingly partial, like the paintings or self-fictions a painter creates in his studio, or a writer on the blank page. In short, it is a self-portrait of the artist at work, in which the “work in progress” is envisioned as a return to the sources of his art. Josef Nadj views Last Landscape as a kind of pause for fruitful reflection on the origin of movement, and more specifically on the origin of his movement. The film operates by taking us back and forth between the landscape and the stage, between the real / symbolic initial experience that sparked the Nadj / Tarasov duo and its realization in the “present of the performance.” The self-portrait takes shape in the oscillation between color and black and white, between real sound and music, between rigidity and mobility, between images of the natural surroundings throughout winter, spring, summer and fall, and what we could call the projection of a mental space.
