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Il nastro bianco. Il terreno fertile per i semi del Male

allucineazioni — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:55:54 +0000

Voto: 8 (su 10)

Che cos’è il nastro bianco? È un segnale, un simbolo, un monito di innocenza e purezza. Viene applicato ai bambini quando rompono le regole, quando peccano, per ricordare loro di tornare sulla retta via. È un nastro bianco, ma è come una lettera scarlatta. Siamo nel 1913/14, in un villaggio protestante della Germania del Nord, alla vigilia della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Nella comunità, dedita all’agricoltura e all’osservanza di rigide regole morali e religiose, cominciano ad accadere strani avvenimenti. Il medico cade da cavallo dopo che una fune è stata tesa appositamente. L’uccellino del pastore viene trovato trafitto da delle forbici. Il figlio del barone viene trovato ferito. E poi capita anche a un bambino handicappato. È una serie di “funny games”, di giochi per nulla divertenti. Parliamo di giochi perché dietro potrebbero esserci i bambini del paese…

E parliamo di “funny games” perché Il nastro bianco è l’ultimo film di Michael Haneke, l’autore austriaco che in questi anni, da Funny Games a La pianista a Niente da nascondere, ci ha abituato a ogni tipo di sadismo. Che qui va indietro nel tempo e scava nel profondo, per raccontarci le radici di quel male e i semi di quella cattiveria che ci ha mostrato così spesso nelle sue opere. Dietro la facciata puritana della comunità protestante c’è una crudeltà profonda, che appare lontanissima dal messaggio di Cristo di eguaglianza e solidarietà. “Ne ho abbastanza di un ambiente dominato dalla malignità, dall’invidia, dalla stupidità, dalla brutalità, da violenze, minacce, da perverse vendette” sentiamo dire a un personaggio del film. È una donna, una categoria che nel villaggio in questione è trattata nella maniera peggiore. Quello di Haneke è un racconto morale importantissimo. Perché spiega come e quando è nata e cresciuta la Germania più cattiva, quali sono state le idee e i comportamenti che hanno costituito il terreno fertile nel quale sono stati seminati i semi del Male, cioè del Nazismo. I bambini crudeli di oggi, cresciuti a pane e castigo, saranno i Nazisti di domani, creature ai quali un sistema fatto di ordini, obbedienze e punizioni sembrerà la prosecuzione naturale della loro vita.

È un film rigoroso, incredibilmente sobrio ed estremamente cupo e inquietante, Il nastro bianco. Una storia in cui la violenza è quasi sempre fuori campo, mai mostrata come in altre opere di Haneke. È una violenza soprattutto psicologica, che nella confezione raggelata che il bianco e nero di Haneke contribuisce a creare risalta ancora di più. È un bianco e nero di altri tempi (sembra di essere un film di Dreyer, o di Bergman), un bianco e nero classico, con i contrasti poco accentuati, ma con infinite sfumature di grigio. Quasi a voler affermare con forza la volontà di avvicinarsi al cinema d’un tempo, un cinema dal forte afflato morale e spirituale. Haneke gira con maestria, alternando inquadrature fisse del paesaggio, che sembrano quadri, a sequenze in cui la macchina da presa è mobilissima, come nella sequenza del valzer, in cui (come in Eyes Wide Shut di Kubrick) si muove insieme e intorno ai due danzatori, quasi a raccontare la leggerezza dell’unico momento spensierato di una storia opprimente, che si apre e si chiude con una lunghissima dissolvenza da e al nero.

È curioso che proprio quest’anno, e proprio partendo dal Festival di Cannes, due autori come Haneke e Tarantino (Bastardi senza gloria), che hanno fatto della violenza uno dei punti salienti della loro poetica, rappresentandola in maniere estetica, o intellettuale, si siano confrontati con una violenza “storica”, effettiva, come quella della Germania pre-nazista e nazista. Con due opere tra loro agli antipodi (classica contro pop, bianco e nero contro colore, controllo contro passionalità), la loro riflessione sul Male e la violenza, incontrando la realtà, è assunta a livelli ancora più alti. Come spesso accade quando l’Arte incontra la vita.

Da vedere perchè: E’ un grande film, rigoroso, incredibilmente sobrio ed estremamente cupo e inquietante

Carney on Cassavetes

vajrakrishna — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:36:38 +0000

Film critic Ray Carney sheds light on the work of legendary indie filmmaker, John Cassavetes.

By Cynthia Rockwell

Ray Carney is well known for his attacks on the Hollywood filmmaking establishment, and the journalists, critics, and film professors who, in his view, support it “by conducting sycophantic interviews with airhead movie stars, inviting celebrity directors into the classroom, and generally functioning as unpaid publicists for every studio blockbuster that comes along.”

He is also generally recognized to be the world’s expert on the life and work of the so-called “father of the American independent movement,” actor-writer-director John Cassavetes. He has just published three new books about the filmmaker: “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” described as “Cassavetes’ spiritual autobiography”; the “British Film Institute Film Classics” volume on Cassavetes’ first film, “Shadows,” which reveals new facts about the making of the movie, and a viewer’s guide titled“John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity.” He is a Professor of Film and American Studies at Boston University, Chairman of the Film Studies program, and Director of Graduate Admissions. More information about his work is available at the web site devoted to independent film and art he maintains at www.Cassavetes.com.

CR: You’ve written several definitive books on John Cassavetes and his work — can you describe what it was that originally attracted you to his work?

Carney: My taste in movies has always been a little weird — probably as a result of coming to them pretty late. As a kid and a teenager, I lived far out in the country, and saw almost nothing. I went to a few movies in college [at Harvard], but really only began to get interested in film in my 20’s, during my grad school years [at Rutgers]. But not Hollywood movies.

You need to know some background to understand this. So bear with me. Near the end of my college years, I had this epiphany about the importance of art as the ultimate form of human expression. All the time I was growing up, my family had had no interest in art at all. None. My father was a businessman; there was not one really good book or record in my house; and no awareness that arts like ballet or opera even existed. I began college as a math and physics major. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was very good at math and it was all mapped out for me. But then magic happened. I discovered painting, literature, drama, and the other arts (a lot of it due to an “artistic” Radcliffe girlfriend). It was like being hit by a falling piano. I was mystified, bewildered, destroyed. It was a life-changing experience.

I went to grad school to take a Ph.D. in English literature, and by this point was completely flipped out, totally obsessed with art. There’s no proselytizer like a convert. I would invite friends to my house on Saturday nights and force them to sight-read Shakespeare. I read the complete “Faerie Queene” out loud to another girlfriend. It’s the longest poem in English — hundreds of pages of tiny type and it took months (she must have had the patience of a saint to have put up with it). I worked my way through Beethoven, Armstrong, Parker, Basie, Ellington, and Goodman. I hacked a path through the deepest, darkest, late Henry James. I went to used record stores and got every LP Lenny Bruce had ever recorded. I didn’t have much money, but even on a graduate student’s budget, I managed to scrape together enough to go to the ballet every week (sitting up in the fourth ring nosebleed seats at Lincoln Center where the groups of tour bus sightseers talk throughout the performance). I saw every Pinter or Chekhov play that came through New York. Getting to a dance piece by Paul Taylor or George Balanchine was more important than eating or paying the rent.

So when I finally began going to a few movies, I wasn’t looking for stupid sentimental story-telling and movie-star glamour — but for the same kinds of experiences these other works gave me — turbulence, confusion, wildness, challenge, mystery, shock, magic. I found it in a few foreign filmmakers: Bresson, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Ozu, Rossellini, DeSica, Dreyer, Renoir. I became as obsessed with their work as I was with Picasso’s or Parker’s. By sheer chance, I stumbled into a few of what are now called “independent films” — though the term didn’t exist in those days — works by Paul Morrissey, Barbara Loden, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Mark Rappaport, Robert Kramer, John Korty. Cassavetes was in that group: “Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence.” They were entirely different from the foreign films, but just as consciousness-altering and exciting. The rest, as they say, is history. As I look back on it, I realize that my timing couldn’t have been better. It was the early to mid-seventies, the greatest era in all of American film. I was incredibly lucky. The stars must have been aligned.

CR: Your newest book, “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” has an interesting structure. It is a posthumous autobiography of sorts, drawn from years of archived interviews with the filmmaker, but interwoven with Cassavetes’ own words is a considerable amount of your own description and critique of the man’s work and methods. Was the book always conceived as a biography or did the concept evolve over years of research?

Carney: If you don’t toss and turn in your sleep and change your mind a trillion times while you’re working on a project like this, you aren’t alive. You’re not allowing yourself to learn anything. I knew Cassavetes personally and thought I knew all there was to know about him. After he died I spent 11 years talking to people who worked with him. Everything I thought turned out to be wrong. And my understanding of his films changed totally as a result. I realized that they were much more personal than I had thought. A lot of the events in them were veiled portraits of events in his life or emotional events connected with his marriage to Gena Rowlands. Every time I talked to another person, I saw new things. I kept rewriting the headnotes up until the night before the book went to the printer. I’m still rewriting them — scribbling things in my own copy of the book — as I realize new things. No one will ever see that material, but writing through my confusions is the only way I can come to grips with them.

I feel incredibly lucky to have picked a filmmaker who was complex enough to bear this kind of scrutiny without becoming boring or conventional. There are very few questions worth devoting years of your life to. Most of them are religious and have to do with life and death. But where art comes from in our psyches and how it works its magic on others is on the same level. How did Rembrandt get so much of what it is to be human into his portraits? Where did Bach’s music come from? Where is Shakespeare in his plays? “Cassavetes on Cassavetes” is my attempt to grapple with these sorts of questions. How is a great work of art made? What does it cost emotionally? What confusions does it embody? The headnotes are my stabs at an answer.

CR: In “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” the filmmaker mentions several directors he admires, including Frank Capra and Carl Dreyer, both of whom you’ve also written books about. Did Cassavetes inspire you to study these filmmakers or does this simply reflect a connection between their work and your own personal artistic interests?

Carney: Great minds think alike! But seriously, I just write about things that I love and don’t understand. It’s no different from obsessing about a person you are in love with. You can’t stop wondering. What makes them tick? What makes them so amazing one minute or so annoying the next? Writing is just a way of thinking and feeling more clearly than daydreaming.

Capra may seem like the odd man out in all this talk about “art,” but I find his work complex and tragic. When I went to the library to try to read something about it, all I could find was this ridiculous, reductive pop culture analysis — all that stupid stuff about how he believed in the American dream and the common man, as if he were the cinematic equivalent of Norman Rockwell. That had nothing to do with my experience of his films. So I realized I’d have to write my own book if I wanted to figure out why they affected me so deeply. You know the saying — if you want to go to a party, give a party? Well, I wanted to read a book about melodramatic expression, so I wrote one.

CR: While it’s clear from “Cassavetes on Cassavetes” and the “Shadows” books that you greatly admire Cassavetes and his work, you also make a point to describe how Cassavetes could be a pretty awful man at times. Do you include this information simply to give a fair assessment of the man’s life, or do you think it relates to his work in some way?

Carney: Stanislavski’s “My Life in Art” meant a lot to me as a college student because it went behind the scenes to show what it really took to make art. Not the Mickey Rooney “let’s-put-on-a-play” version of creation, but the real doubts, fears, and pains that go into doing anything difficult and brave. I didn’t want to simplify things in the “Shadows” book or in “Cassavetes on Cassavetes.” There are a lot of different people, different moods and feelings, in every one of us. A lot of contradictions. We can be good and bad, generous and selfish, perceptive in lots of ways and clueless in others. My portrait of Cassavetes is deliberately cubistic. It’s fragmented and unresolved. That’s the only way it could be true. It’s up to the reader to decide how to feel about Cassavetes in the end.

CR: In addition to being a respected critic and author, you are a professor of film studies at Boston University with a teaching style that many of your students describe as “inspirational.” Can you draw any connections between your own teaching philosophy and Cassavetes’ philosophy of filmmaking? Or your approach to film criticism?

Carney: I don’t know anything about the inspiring part. I’m just a very emotional person. All my teaching is just my own attempt to understand these amazing things we call works of art. It’s an extended conversation with students in which I often think I learn more from their comments than they do from mine. All I do is point out things: Did you hear that tone in her voice? Did you see how he hesitated in his response? Did you notice the way the next shot wasn’t what we expected? I’m just like one of those architectural tour guides who points out things to look up at. It’s up to the student to make something out of those millions of little observations.

CR: Do you think there’s an advantage to studying or working in film in New England, outside the hubs of New York and Los Angeles?

Carney: Art can be made anywhere. Some of the greatest contemporary films are being made in Iran. New York has lots of artists to talk to and lots of art to see, and that’s in favor of it. But it’s a fashion-conscious city, addicted to money, power, and business values, and impossibly expensive to live in for a starving artist. That’s all against it. Why anyone would live in Los Angeles, I’ll never understand. There’s nothing there. You might as well choose to live on the moon. But I guess you could make art there too. It would just be harder, since the air is so thin and life is so unreal — which is probably why it hasn’t happened yet.

Boston is not bad, though the fashionable parts of the city are too tame, too yuppified and conservative for my taste. Too Harvardized. Too many intellectuals and stockbrokers — if there’s a difference anymore. Neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury and Chelsea are better places to live in that respect. I’m interested in films that are in touch with the lives of people who are not intellectuals or artists. Works with roots in a community of caring people. Works anchored in local neighborhoods and ways of being. All the things Hollywood avoids and hates with a passion. They know it’s always easier to present grandiose David Lynch metaphors than it is truthfully to show how a particular mother and son really interact on a specific day.

CR: Can you list any contemporary filmmakers whose work you admire?

Carney: Tom Noonan, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mark Rappaport are three favorites, though Noonan has only been able to release two movies ["What Happened Was" and "The Wife"] in 10 years. He filmed a third three or four years ago, but doesn’t have enough money to finish it. And even if he does, no distributor has shown a jot of interest in picking it up. Then there’s Charles Burnett, Su Friedrich, and Jay Rosenblatt. “Killer of Sheep,” “To Sleep with Anger,” “Sink or Swim,” “Rules of the Road,” and “Human Remains” are all amazing movies. I don’t read newspapers or newsmagazines, but they give me the emotional news I need to keep going. These artists and others are writing the history of the present. As Ezra Pound put it so long ago, they write the news that doesn’t get old like the newspaper, the news that stays new — forever.

For more information on Ray Carney, visit http://www.Cassavetes.com. John Cassavetes’s films “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Big Trouble,” “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” “Shadows,” “A Child is Waiting,” “Faces,” among others are available for purchase at BuyIndies.com.

Interview source here.

La Passion De Jeanne D'Arc (AKA: The Passion of Joan of Arc) (1928)

Edward Boe — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:34:57 +0000

La Passion De Jeanne D’Arc (AKA: The Passion of Joan of Arc) – 1928

Director – Carl Theodor Dreyer

Starring – Maria Falconetti

Quite possibly Carl Theodor Dreyer’s most influential work, The Passion of Joan of Arc owes a lot of it’s notoriety and it’s impact to it’s lead actress, Maria Falconetti. The fear, and passion thatFalconetti conjures on camera througout the duration of the trial of Joan, is not merely some plot point to enhance the story, it IS the story.

Staged almost entirely within the courtroom or her jail cell, the story of Joan of Arc is fairly straight forward, so much so that most people know the jist of it even if they don’t know that they know it. Joan, the famous saint, and girl warrior, is on trial for her alleged heresy (actually she was only officially tried for wearing in-appropriate men’s clothing). During this trial, everything from her value structure to her manner of dress is drawn into question. Evidence is forged, and heavy eccliesiatic persuasion is used. Through it all Joan held to her beliefs, and was eventually sentenced to death. This is not a spoiler, it’s too well known to have spoiled anything.

From the opening shots of the courtroom, I was immediately struck by how upclose and invasive the camera work seemed to be. Not invasive of the actors, but of me. Shot in striking, uncomfortable close-ups, Joan’s accusers seem warped and distended. Each face (with the exception of Joan’s) takes on a sinister look, frowning, sneering, and conspiring with a simple furrow of the brow. Joan on the other hand, seems to have a perpetually wet, upturned gaze, similar to a lot of religious paintings. She is given more room in the frame and as a result, she serves as a respite for us as viewers when she is on screen.

I tried my damnedest to watch it in it’s original silent state, but after catching myself nodding off a bit, I turned on the optional audio track of accompanying music. Let me tell you…this helps SO much! The music serves as a balast not only for the dramatic action happening on screen, but for pacing, dramatic effect, and as an additional means of engaging the audience.

One thing I was surprised about when watching this, was the over-all quality of image that this version (the Criterion Collection edition) offered. I am used to these older films being so grainy and damaged that they seem almost blurry, so it was quite a surpise to find that the print was clear as a bell, with only a few scratches and flaws in the picture quality. Another final critique, since this story is based on actual documentation of the court proceedings, the reach of the story seemed lacking. I would have liked to have heard more about Joan’s deeds before her trial, whether or not they were truthful or distortions put forth by her accusers, it would have helped to liven up the story a bit.

By and large, The Passion of Joan of Arc was a pleasant surprise to me. The image quality in particular, but also the acting, and pacing managed to avoid the trappings (read: length) that many other silent films fall into. While there were slow moments, the last scene of the rioting villagers being fought off by palace guards was more than enough to smack me across the face.

Ordet

blogdecineyseries — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:00:00 +0000

(La palabra)

AÑO: 1955
DURACIÓN: 125 min.
PAÍS: Dinamarca
DIRECTOR: Carl Theodor Dreyer
GUIÓN: Carl Theodor Dreyer (Obra: Kaj Munk)
MÚSICA: Paul Schierbeck
FOTOGRAFÍA: Henning Bendsten (B&W)
REPARTO: Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Cay Kristiansen, Brigitte Federspiel, Ann Elizabeth, Ejner Federspiel, Sylvia Eckhausen, Gerda Nielsen
PRODUCTORA: Palladium Films

Sinopsis:
Una pequeña comunidad de la Jutlandia occidental, hacia 1930. El viejo Morten Borgen dirige la granja de Borgensgaard. Tiene tres hijos: Mikkel, Johannes y Anders. El primero está casado con Inger y tiene dos hijas pequeñas, aunque en estos momentos Inger está embarazada y esperan el tercero. Johannes es un antiguo estudiante de teología que, por haberse imbuído en sus estudios (sobre todo en Kierkegaard), e identificarse constantemente con la figura de Jesucristo, es considerado por todos como un loco. El tercero, Anders, está enamorado de la hija del sastre, líder intransigente de un sector religioso rival. Tal circunstancia revitaliza la discordia que siempre ha existido entre las dos familias, ya que ninguna ve con muy buenos ojos que sus hijos contraigan matrimonio. (FILMAFFINITY)
—————————————-
Considerada como una de las obras claves del cine, la película de Dreyer supuso una pequeña “revolución” en la cinematografía europea, tanto por su utilización del movimiento y del blanco y negro, como por su trascendencia e impacto en la crítica que supuso su temática: el conflicto religioso. (FILMAFFINITY)

Carl Theodor Dreyer, réalisateur danois

af — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:23:53 +0000

La science nouvelle, à la suite de la théorie de la relativité d’Einstein, a apporté les preuves de l’existence – en dehors du monde à trois dimensions qui est celui de nos sens – d’une quatrième dimension, celle du temps, et d’une cinquième, celle du psychique. On a ouvert des perspectives nouvelles qui nous font reconnaître un rapport profond entre science exacte et religion intuitive. La science nouvelle nous permet une approche plus profonde du divin et elle est sur le chemin de donner une explication naturelle à des choses surnaturelles.

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Réflexions sur mon métier, Petite Bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997

Amor Omnia: Lars Von Trier - Breaking the waves

jeltodoimena — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:59:11 +0000

Dreyerova Gertrud na kraju istoimenoga filma kaže da će joj na nadgrobnom spomeniku pisati Amor Omnia (ljubav je sve) – Trier je Amor Omnia držao kao radni naziv za Breaking the waves – jer doista jest. Njegovim usmjeravanjem, Bess kroz cijeli film (iako je u svojoj ljudskoj slabosti njena okolina, bez mogućnosti i uvida koje nam Trier pruža, smatra ludom) ne “voli” svog muža već kao što Turandot kaže ona jest ljubav. Kao model Isusa koji nam svojim djelima ukazuje na naše vlastite greške i zablude, kamo god se okrene, Bess sprovodi “svojeg” Boga – ljubav i život te istovremeno testira, mijenja i gura okolinu i gledatelja da učine isto.

Stakleni pogled u očima obaju heroina.

Vanguardias Teatrales del siglo XX

roxivalenzuela — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:08:14 +0000

Hemos de aceptar que nunca podemos ver todo lo invisible…

Antonin Artau: teatro de la crueldad.

nació en Marsella el 4 de septiembre de 1896. Se padre era un armador de la ciudad casado con una mujer de ascendencia griega. Estudió en el colegio del Sagrado Corazón. A los 16 años sufrió sus primeros delirios mientras que descubría la poesía. Permaneció 6 años recluido, su mejoría lo permitió, en 1918, volver a la calle. Más tarde reúne sus primeros versos bajo el título de ‘Trictac del ciel’ (1924). A raíz de aquella publicación entra en contacto con André Bretón, quien acababa de hacer público el primer manifiesto surrealista.

Antonin Artaud había llegado a París en 1920. Tenía 24 años y una larga experiencia como interno en instituciones psiquiátricas. Era considerado el más grande de los malditos del siglo XX, junto con Baudelaire, Rimbaud y Verlaine que también escribían en el XIX. Cabe suponer que la inspiración de sus teorías sobre la escena -herederas de las propuestas de Alfred Jarry y recogidas con posterioridad por Jean Genet- poseían de una u otra manera el desequilibrio. Sólo desde la alienación, desde la lucidez de la alienación, claro está, puede alumbrarse la revolución que Artaud concibió para el teatro.

Los desarreglos de Artaud lo habían llevado a esa zona del espíritu a la que apuntaba Breton, “donde la vida y la muerte, lo real y lo imaginario, el pasado y el futuro, lo de arriba y lo de abajo, dejan de percibirse contradictoriamente”, se convierte en uno de los pilares de la Revolución Surrealista. Sin embargo, su ruptura con el grupo (1928) será sonada y no tardará en producirse.

Surrealista aún, publicó un volumen de prosas -’El pesanervios’ (1925)- y, ya comenzándose a distanciar, fundó el Teatro Alfred Jarry. El absoluto fracaso de sus primeros montajes, lo lleva a refugiarse en la teoría. Postula el “teatro de la crueldad”. En líneas generales, éste puede definirse como aquél que apuesta por impacto violento en el espectador. Para ello, las acciones, casi siempre violentas, se anteponen a las palabras, liberando así el subconsciente en contra de la razón y la lógica.

Del teatro pasó a buscar trabajo como actor de cine. Así será el Marat de “Napoleón”, que Abel Gance rueda en 1926; el hermano Krassien de “La pasión de Juana de Arco”, dirigida por Carl Th. Dreyer en 1928, y el Savonarola de “Lucrecia Borgia” (1935), donde vuelve a colaborar con Gance.

Su actividad cinematográfica lo llevó a escribir guiones, lo que no le impidió seguir elaborando sus teorías teatrales. De esta manera, en alternancia a la publicación de sus novelas -’Le Moine’ (1931), ‘Heliogábalo’ (1934)- da a la estampa el ‘Manifeste du Théâtre de la Cruanté’ (1932) y otros ensayos sobre la misma materia: el descubrimiento del teatro balinés, marcó profundamente sus concepciones de la escena.

Luego del gran fracaso viaja a México, donde su delirio empeora. Regresa más tarde a Europa (1937). Sus delirios vuelven a llevarle al manicomio apenas toca tierra. Permanecerá diez años recluido. En su regreso a Paris, en 1947, es reconocido como el padre de la nueva escena. Una recopilación de sus ensayos aparecida en 1938 con el título de ‘El teatro y su doble’ ha hecho que el antiguo alucinado ahora sea un genio.

Convertido ya en el gran visionario del teatro contemporáneo, publica ‘Lettres de Rodez’ (1946) y ‘Van Gogh, le Suicidé de la Société’ (1947). Su obra más conocida, ‘Para acabar con el juicio de Dios’ (1948), es póstuma. Antonin Artaud muere el 4 de marzo de ese mismo año, unos meses antes de su llegada a las librerías.

La obra de Artaud es violenta, sangrienta, “cruel”. Él mismo marca el rigor tremendo con que piensa efectuar la desconstrucción de la vida en la escena de su Teatro de la crueldad.

Los años de reclusión le llevan a sentir un profundo odio por el mundo de la psiquiatría. Para él, los médicos que afirman “curarle” son sólo seres que envidian su genialidad y la califican de locura. Son, nos dice en Van Gogh, el suicidado de la sociedad, quienes llevaron al pintor holandés al suicidio.

Como primera representación del teatro de la crueldad, en La conquista de México (La conquête du Méxique),cuenta, con una escenografía que funde al público con el espectáculo, la historia de una opresión, la historia del hombre blanco y del carácter pútrido del que está dotado en obras como El teatro y su doble. Otra obra fue Heliogábalo, obra marcada tanto por una investigación rigurosa en extremo como de la violencia lírica propia al poeta maldito, Artaud presenta una poetización de la historia del emperador romano Vario Avito Basanio, apodado El-Gabal o Heliogábalo.

La crueldad de su manifiesto teatral se ve prefigurada en la anarquía del tirano: la gratuidad de una vida dramática, la sangre, la poesía hecha realidad.

La analogía entre el teatro y la peste del prólogo de El teatro y su doble se refleja igualmente en la novela histórica. La gratuidad que trae la peste, cuando vemos a los burgueses robando como ladrones cualquiera, matando, huyendo, corriendo, es la misma que provocan los ritos del dios sol que el joven emperador de Roma realiza entre lujos y lujuria extremos.

El Teatro de la crueldad se funde en un solo espectáculo la música, los gritos, la insensatez, el teatro y la danza.

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold La Biomecánica

Nació en Rusia el 28 de enero del 1874. Nació en una familia de orígenes alemanes. Comenzó su carrera dramática en la Escuela Dramática de Moscú guiado por Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko, cofundador del teatro de arte de Moscú, donde posteriormente Meyerhold trabajaría como actor. En 1902 abandonó el Teatro de Arte de Moscú y se comprometió con una serie de proyectos teatrales en los que tenía el papel tanto de director y productor como el de actor. Estos proyectos le sirvieron para experimentar y crear nuevos métodos de puesta en escena.

Meyerhold fue un defensor ardiente del simbolismo en teatro, especialmente cuando trabajo como productor principal del drama Vera Kommisarzhevskaya en los años 1906 y 1907. Entre los años 1907 y 1917 presentó obras clásicas de una manera innovadora, llevó a escena el trabajo de autores contemporáneos polémicos como Fiódor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius y Alecander Blok. Adaptó las tradiciones de la Comedia del Arte a la nueva realidad del teatro contemporáneo.

En su libro Sobre teatro (1913) elaboró el concepto de teatro condicional. Con la llegada de la Revolución Rusa de 1917, Meyerhold se convirtió en uno los activistas más entusiastas del Nuevo Teatro Soviético y se unió al Partido Bolchevique en 1918. Tuvo un alto puesto en el Consejo del Teatro Bolchevique y abrió su propio teatro, que hoy continúa llevando su nombre. Se enfrentó fieramente a los principios del academcismo teatral, que eran incapaces de adaptarse a la nueva realidad. En sus obras utilizó escenarios desnudos, objetos en lugar de decorados y la disposición intencional de movimientos.

Meyerhold inspiró a artistas y directores de cine como Sergei Eisenstein, que empleó en sus películas actores que trabajaban según la tradición del director teatral.

Posteriormente se opuso al realismo socialista y en 1930, cuando Joseph Stalin atacó todo arte de vanguardia y experimentación, sus trabajos fueron considerados alienantes para el pueblo soviético. En 1938 se cerró su teatro y un año después Meyerhold fue encarcelado.

Algunas de las puestas en escena de Meyerhold son Misterio bufo (1918), de Maiakovski, El bosque (1924), de Ostrovsky y El inspector general (1926), de Gogol.

A partir de 1919, año en el que Meyerhold y Maiakovski se encuentran en un período en el que el director de escena adquiere una total libertad; se convierte en coautor y transforma el texto de la pieza, digamos, en conformidad con las necesidades revolucionaria. Aprovecharon la gran floración de pintores cubistas y constructivitas, llamando a su lado a A. Ekster, quien le realiza los decorados de Salomé, de Wilde (1917), y Romeo y Julieta.

El momento en que concluye el trabajo preliminar del director en la elaboración de la puesta en escena necesaria para la representación, es el de la atmósfera escénica en la que el actor debe vivir y obrar. Para la creación de esta atmósfera que libere el actor de su aplasta- miento y le conceda el espacio necesario para expresar libremente su arte, se propone una construcción escénica que devuelve su triple dimensión en el espacio al cuerpo del actor.

Esta construcción podrá pasar, mediante la inclusión de niveles distintos, de la esfera de la construcción horizontal a la de la construcción vertical. Este principio se refleja con bastante claridad en la escenografía de Ekster para -Romeo y Julieta- o la de Vesmin para -El hombre que fue jueves-. En ambas la verticalidad preside el diseño y determina, en su sección de planos horizontales, una multiplicación de las áreas de juego y lugares de la acción, con la consiguiente ampliación del espacio escénico que queda inscrito en la esfera.

Bertolt Brecht: el Distanciamiento

Asistió a la escuela primaria desde 1908, y finalizó sus estudios en la escuela secundaria de Augsburgo en 1917, año en el cual casi no obtiene el titular de bachiller por su implicación en un escándalo escolar. A partir de 1920 Brecht viajó a menudo a Berlín, donde entabló relaciones con gente del teatro y de la escena literaria. En 1924 se trasladó definitivamente allí y empezó a trabajar como dramaturgo junto a Carl Zuckmayer en el Deutsches Theater de Max Reinhardt. Desde 1926 tuvo frecuentes contactos con artistas socialistas que influyeron ampliamente en su ideología. Sus primeras obras ya sufrieron el influjo del pensamiento hegeliano, que conocía desde su primera juventud, así como las obras del discípulo de Hegel: Kalr Marx.

A los 29 años publicó su primera colección de poemas Devocionario doméstico y un año más tarde alcanzó el mayor éxito teatral de la República de Weimar con La ópera de cuatro cuartos, con música de Kurt Weill.

Brecht siempre quiso influir en el público con sus actuaciones, concientizarlo y hacerlo pensar, para lo cual fue configurando una teoría dramática antirrealista que procuraba distanciar al espectador del elemento anecdótico; para ello se fijó en los incipientes medios de comunicación de masas que la recién nacida Sociología empezaba a utilizar con fines políticos: la radio, el teatro e incluso el cine, a través de los cuales podía llegar al público que pretendía educar.

Su meta fue alcanzar un cambio social que lograse la liberación de los medios de producción. En ello incluyó tanto el ámbito intelectual como el estético. Pueden observarse estas metas ya en sus primeras obras como Baal, Tambores en la noche y en su colección de poemas Devocionario doméstico.

La Ópera de cuatro cuartos critica, por ejemplo, el orden burgués, del que se burla representándolo como una sociedad de delincuentes.

Un año después, Brecht llevó a cabo un proyecto de propaganda de sus ideas comunistas a través del cine. Kuhle Wampe (o ¿A quién le pertenece el mundo?), dirigida por Slatan Dudow y con música de Hanns Eisler, muestra las opciones que el Comunismo puede ofrecer a un pueblo alemán azotado por la crisis de la República de Weimar. La película fue prohibida un año después, cuando el régimen nazi llegó al poder en Alemania, manteniéndose la prohibición durante el periodo de 1933 a 1945. A comienzos de 1933 la representación de la obra La toma de medidas fue interrumpida por la policía y los organizadores fueron acusados de alta traición. En mayo de 1933 todos sus libros fueron quemados por los nacionalsocialistas. Tiempo mas tarde, con una posición económica dificil, tuvo que viajar a Londres y Paris, e incluso a Nueva York, para que se le permitiera la representación de sus obras e influir de este modo en la sociedad y la política.

Aparte de sus obras teatrales, escribió también contribuciones para varias revistas de emigrantes en Praga, París y Amsterdam. En 1939 abandonó Dinamarca, donde vivió durante un año en una granja cerca de Estocolmo, y en abril de 1940 en Helsinki. Durante esta época escribió su obra La vida de Galilei. En esta obra de teatro retrató en parte su propia situación en la sociedad. A comienzos de 1949 se trasladó con un pasaporte checo a través de Praga a Berlin Este. Vivió en la «Casa de Brecht» en Weissensee y fue director general del Deutsches Theater. En otoño fundó junto con Helene Weigel el Berliner Ensemble. A continuación trabajó de una manera muy comprometida para el teatro y tuvo incluso algunas actuaciones por invitación en capitales europeas. Este hecho le causó algunas tensiones con la dirección del SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: Partido Socialista Unificado de Alemania) así como con representantes de la burocracia cultural y de la vida del teatro.

Diversas obras fueron rechazadas, como por ejemplo Santa Juana de los Mataderos y la película Kuhle Wampe. El teatro brechtiano está creado para un público intelectual; no escribe historias entretenidas que impliquen al espectador, ni era su intención. De hecho, busca el distanciamiento o alienación del espectador –e incluso del actor– con respecto al personaje. Es, por ello, un teatro de difícil acceso, que es necesario poner en su contexto literario e histórico. La mirada de Brecht es dura, profundamente pesimista –eso le llevó a tener problemas con el pretendido socialismo real feliz–, descreída, fría, como participando del distanciamiento que predica para el espectador. Además, concibe el teatro como un instrumento para transformar el mundo, lo que imprime un marcado carácter didáctico a sus obras: algo que puede resultar molesto para el aficionado a un teatro menos militante.

Jerzy Grotowsky: Teatro de la pobreza

Exponente de la vanguardia escénica de este siglo, continuador del método de Stanislavski; el maestro que estudió como nadie el oficio del actor. En la década del 70, en la era de los grandes festivales internacionales de teatro, los grupos jóvenes se inspiraban casi totalmente en las ideas estéticas de Grotowski. Los jóvenes actores y realizadores se hallaban poseídos por Grotowski, Stanislavski y Antonin Artaud. Estos tres maestros eran la llave maestra hacia los secretos de la creatividad teatral.

Jerzy Grotowski, antes que nada, fue un maestro en el arte de la dirección escénica (sus puestas en escena de Akropolis o Apocalipsis cum figuris, en 1970, asombraron al público y a la crítica mundial). Tenía una pequeña compañía, la digía con un objetivo sagrado.

A su entender el teatro no puede ser un fin en sí mismo; como la danza o la música en ciertas órdenes de derviches, el teatro es un vehículo, un medio de autoestudio, de autoexploración, una posibilidad de salvación. El actor tiene en sí mismo su campo de trabajo. Dicho campo es más rico que el del pintor, más rico que el del músico, puesto que el actor, para explorarlo, ha de apelar a todo aspecto de sí mismo. La mano, el ojo, la oreja, el corazón son lo que estudia y con lo que estudia. Vista de este modo, la interpretación es el trabajo de una vida: el actor amplia paso a paso su conocimiento de sí mismo a través de las penosas y siempre cambiantes circunstancias de los ensayos y los tremendos signos de puntuación de la interpretación. En la terminología de Grotowski, el actor permite que el papel lo “penetre”; al principio el gran obstáculo es su propia persona, pero un constante trabajo le lleva a adquirir un dominio técnico sobre sus medios físicos y psíquicos, con lo que puede hacer que caigan las barreras. Este dejarse “penetrar” por el papel está en relación con la propia exposición del actor, quien no vacila en mostrarse exactamente como es, ya que comprende que el secreto del papel le exige abrirse, desvelar sus secretos.

Por lo tanto, el acto de interpretar es un acto de sacrificio, el de sacrificar lo que la mayoría de los hombres prefiere ocultar: este sacrificio es su presente al espectador. Entre actor y público existe aquí una relación similar a la que se da entre sacerdote y fiel. Está claro que no todo el mundo es llamado al sacerdocio y que ninguna religión tradicional lo exige. Por una parte están los seglares -que desempeñan papeles necesarios en la vida- y, por la otra, quienes toman sobre sí otras cargas, por cuenta de los seglares. El sacerdote celebra el rito para él y en nombre de los demás. Los actores de Grotowski ofrecen su representación como una ceremonia para quienes deseen asistir: el actor invoca, deja al desnudo lo que yace en todo hombre y lo que encubre la vida cotidiana. Este teatro es sagrado porque su objetivo es sagrado: ocupa un lugar claramente definido en la comunidad y responde a una necesidad que las Iglesias ya no pueden satisfacer.

El teatro de Grotowski es el que más se aproxima al ideal de Artaud. Supone un modo de vida completo para todos sus miembros y contrasta con la mayoría de los otros grupos de vanguardia y experimentales, cuyo trabajo suele quedar invalidado por falta de medios. La mayor parte de los intentos experimentales no pueden hacer lo que desean debido a que las condiciones externas pesan demasiado sobre ellos: dificultades en el reparto de papeles, reducido tiempo para ensayar debido a que los actores han de ganarse la vida en otros menesteres, inadecuados locales, trajes, luces, etc. La pobreza de medios es a la vez su queja y su excusa. Grotowski hace un ideal de la pobreza: sus actores renuncian a todo excepto a su propio cuerpo, tienen el instrumento humano y tiempo ilimitado. No es, pues, asombroso que se consideren el teatro más rico del mundo. Estos tres teatros -Cunningham, Grotowski y Beckett-, tienen varías cosas en común: escasos medios, intenso trabajo, rigurosa disciplina, absoluta precisión. Al mismo tiempo, y casi como condición, son teatros para una élite.

Merce Cunningham suele actuar en salas humildes y el escaso respaldo con que cuenta, y que escandaliza a sus admiradores, le tiene sin cuidado. Beckett raramente llena una platea de mediana capacidad. Grotowski no acepta más de treinta espectadores. Está convencido de que los problemas a los que ha de hacer frente, tanto él como los actores, son tan grandes que un mayor número de espectadores llevaría al desleimiento del trabajo. Todos ellos parten de su hambre, todos ellos se afanan en disminuir su propia necesidad. Y sin embargo, la misma pureza de su resolución, la elevada y seria naturaleza de su actividad, colorea inevitablemente sus elecciones y limita su campo de acción. No pueden ser esotéricos y populares al mismo tiempo. No hay muchedumbre en Beckett, no hay ningún Falstaff.

Estos teatros exploran la vida, pero lo que cuenta como vida es restringido. La vida “real” excluye ciertos rasgos “irreales”. Si leemos hoy día las descripciones de Artaud sobre sus producciones imaginarias, vemos que reflejan sus gustos personales y la corriente de imaginación romántica de su tiempo, ya que tiene una cierta preferencia por la oscuridad y el misterio, la salmodia, los gritos sobrenaturales, las palabras sueltas en vez de las frases, las formas amplias, las máscaras, los reyes, emperadores y papas, los santos, pecadores y flagelantes, la vestimenta negra y la piel desnuda y arrugada por el dolor. Un director que trate con elementos que existen fuera de él puede engañarse al considerar su trabajo más objetivo de lo que es en realidad.

Por la elección de ejercicios, incluso por la forma de alentar al actor a que encuentre su propia libertad, un director no puede evitar que su estado de ánimo se proyecte sobre el escenario. El supremo objetivo para el director sería estimular tal efusión de la riqueza interior del actor, que transformase por completo la naturaleza subjetiva de su impulso original. Por lo general, el esquema del director o del coreógrafo se transparenta, y aquí es donde la deseada experiencia objetiva puede convertirse en la expresión de la fantasía personal del director. Podemos intentar captar lo invisible pero no debemos perder el contacto con el sentido común: si nuestro lenguaje es demasiado esencial perderemos parte de la fe del espectador. Como siempre, el modelo es Shakespeare. Su objetivo es siempre sagrado, metafísico, pero nunca comete el error de permanecer demasiado tiempo en el nivel más alto. Sabía lo difícil que resulta mantener la compañía con lo absoluto, y por eso nos envía continuamente a tierra; Grotowski reconoce esto al hablar de la necesidad tanto de la “apoteosis” como de lo “irrisorio”. Hemos de aceptar que nunca podemos ver todo lo invisible. Así, tras hacer un esfuerzo en esa dirección, tenemos que afrontar la derrota, caer e iniciar de nuevo la marcha.

Fuentes

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundolibro/2001/10/26/anticuario/1004095910.html http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Artaud#Bibliograf.C3.ADa http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Meyerhold http://dramateatro.fundacite.arg.gov.ve/teoria_teatral/meyerhold_maiakovski.html http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht http://www.temakel.com/teatrodaggrotowski.htm

Rocío Valenzuela.

Lisbeth Dreyer "Øystein Øyenstikker og andre små kryp i hagen"

kragerø bibliotek — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:52:56 +0000

I billedboka om Øystein Øyenstikker lærer du om de forskjellige insektene som du kan finne i hagen din. Det er små dikt for hvert insekt, sånn som Maia Marihøne, Kanutte Knott og Skage Skrukketroll. En fin liten bok med rim, og fine men enkle bilder til.

Martyrs. Pascal Laugier: amo giocare con lo spettatore. E dedico il mio film a Dario Argento

allucineazioni — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:18:38 +0000

Ho visto cose che voi umani non potete nemmeno immaginare. E ora le potrete vedere anche voi. Arriva finalmente nelle sale venerdi 12, distribuito in 62 copie da Videa-CDE, quello che si candida prepotentemente a essere l’horror dell’anno, Martyrs, del francese Pascal Laugier. Se gli horror sembrano dividersi in due scuole, mostrare il meno possibile o mostrare tutto, il film di Laugier sceglie questa seconda via: mostra tutto, e subito, impietosamente. La storia è quella di una ragazza, che, dopo essere stata segregata e torturata da bambina, ritrova i suoi aguzzini e si presenta alla loro porta, una domenica mattina, per vendicarsi. Ma questo sarà solo l’inizio di una storia incredibile che cambia più volte direzione, come se ci trovassimo in un videogame e, una volta completato uno schema, passassimo al successivo, irto di difficoltà sempre maggiori. “La struttura narrativa è nata scrivendo il film” ci ha raccontato Pascal Laugier, a Roma per presentare Martyrs. “Volevo fare un film sulla vendetta, e man mano che lo scrivevo vedevo che la violenza era la vera protagonista del film. Così gradualmente sono arrivato al concetto di martirio”. Ma il joystick del gioco è saldamente in mano al regista: è lui a giocare con lo spettatore, spiazzandolo di continuo proprio grazie al suo script sorprendente, che fa ricominciare il film almeno quattro volte quando sembra giù finito. “Quando ho scritto la sceneggiatura ho voluto giocare con questa struttura fatta di attese, per stupire lo spettatore. È stato uno dei piaceri della scrittura: in quanto spettatore detesto sapere con dieci minuti di anticipo quello che accade in un film”.

Martyrs è un film che mette a dura prova lo spettatore. Un film fatto di sangue, tagli profondi, escoriazioni. È un film raccapricciante e disturbante come pochi visti finora sul grande schermo. Ma se si limitasse a un insieme di violenze sarebbe un film come tanti: il suo pregio è proprio il voler andare al di là, verso concetti filosofici, come quello di martirio che dà il titolo al film. “Ho fatto molte ricerche storiche scrivendo il film” spiega Laugier, una persona che, nonostante i film che gira – come spesso accade – è sorridente e affabile. “E sono rimasto affascinato nel vedere che in tutte le civiltà, quali fosse il luogo d’origine e la loro natura – monoteista, politeista, senza Dio – c’è sempre la figura di un uomo che prende su di sé le sofferenze di tutti gli altri per arrivare a uno stato superiore. E questo succede dall’alba dei tempi, probabilmente perché l’idea di soffrire senza un motivo è insopportabile per l’essere umano. Tutti noi nel mondo occidentale abbiamo delle sofferenze quotidiane, e tutti ci poniamo inevitabilmente delle domande. C’è la sofferenza fisica, e poi quella metafisica, che sentiamo nel quotidiano. E di cui non riusciamo a trovare il senso. E i medici nemmeno. È questo il grande enigma dell’umanità”. “Ho lavorato con un’amica per alcuni mesi sul tema della sofferenza” continua il regista. “Abbiamo incontrato medici, abbiamo fatto molte ricerche sulla religione, e così ho scoperto l’etimologia della parola martire, una parola che va dal latino al greco, e nella sua origine non ha a che fare con la sofferenza, ma con l’idea di vedere qualcosa che gli altri non vedono. Da cattolico ho sempre pensato che l’origine del termine avesse a che fare con il dolore, ma non è così”. È curioso che anche Martyrs, proprio come un altro film estremamente violento uscito in questi giorni, Antichrist di Von Trier, nasca da una profonda depressione, che Laugier confessa apertamente.

Quelle di Laugier sono immagini che ci inquietano al di là della violenza, ci turbano nel profondo. Per farlo il regista francese si nutre di visioni iconiche e indelebili legate al dolore e al martirio. Come quelle de La passione di Giovanna d’Arco di Dreyer, o la foto della tortura dei cento pezzi citata da Bataille. “Quella foto, che è stata pubblicata e commentata da Bataille, mi ha ispirato nella scrittura del film” conferma il regista. “Le altre foto dei martiri sono quasi tutte ricostruite: su internet è facile trovare foto di persone che stanno per morire. Quello che è difficile da trovare, e che vediamo in questa famosa foto di una tortura cinese, è il momento del rilassamento muscolare, quel momento tra la vita e la morte in cui il soggetto non ha più paura, ed è altrove, vive altre cose. È ancora un mistero per la scienza: molti scienziati sostengono che sia il cervello che per aiutare il corpo a morire rilasci una sostanza che aiuti la persona a passare a quello stato, e tuttavia ci sono persone che al momento della morte sono terrorizzate”.

Martyrs è stato un film duro da girare, soprattutto per le attrici. “Ho lavorato con Mylene Jampanoi e Morjana Alaoui per due mesi a Parigi prima di girare il film” svela il regista. “Non hanno mai fatto prove vere e proprie: non si può provare una scena in cui una ragazza è picchiata a morte. Le prove consistevano nel prendere confidenza tra loro e con me, nell’accettare di piangere davanti a me, di mettersi negli stati che generalmente si nascondono agli altri, in modo che avessero fiducia nel mio sguardo su di loro”. È stata una lavorazione che ha messo a dura prova tutti: la protagonista si è rotta tre ossa, e la stessa troupe ha trovato spesso insostenibile assistere ai continui ciak per certe violenze, che sembravano vere.

È un film carico di violenza e cattiveria, quello di Laugier. Ma dentro c’è anche tanto amore. Per un genere che al cinema sembrava destinato al declino. “Nel melodramma o nella tragedia la morte è un punto d’arrivo” spiega il regista. “Nell’horror è un punto di partenza con il quale i protagonisti dovranno fare i conti. Penso che tutto il cinema horror parli di questo, del fatto che come veniamo al mondo ci viene posta subito la questione della morte. È per questo che lo ritengo il genere più onesto e malinconico del cinema”. Un genere che sembra rinato proprio grazie alla nuova ondata francese, con artisti come lui, Alexandre Aja e Xavier Gens. Chiediamo perché la rinascita di un genere parta proprio dalla Francia. “Perché qui in Italia di horror non se ne fanno più” risponde. “E qualcuno in Europa deve prendere il testimone per far sì che il cinema europeo sia meno noioso. Mi spiace che l’Italia abbia smesso di fare un tipo di film che per me sono stati importanti. Per questo dedico il film a Dario Argento. Perché so che ai giovani cineasti italiani non interessa molto di lui, mentre io credo che sia un genio. Il cinema italiano è stato grande. E aspetto che ricominci a esserlo”.

ORDET. La palabra

elocho — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:01:54 +0000

La historia, ambientada alrededor de 1930, trascurre en el seno de una familia acomodada. Entre los

trisagios, tormentas, miedos, dioses, NaI y un buen seguro.

jabola — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:20:52 +0000

En el último escrito del domingo día 24 me metí a filósofo de perra chica, sobre la rosa y lo efímer

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

blogdecineyseries — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:52:00 +0000

AÑO 1928
DURACIÓN 110 min.
PAÍS [Francia]
DIRECTOR Carl Theodor Dreyer
GUIÓN Carl Theodor Dreyer & Joseph Delteil
MÚSICA Película muda
FOTOGRAFÍA Rudolph Maté & Goestula Kottula (B&W)
REPARTO Renée Jeanne Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, Maurice Schutz, Michel Simon, Antonin Artaud, André Berley
PRODUCTORA Societé generale de films

SINOPSIS: Año 1431. La joven francesa Juana de Arco, que declara sentirse inspirada directamente por Dios, se enfrenta a su procesamiento y a una posible condena a muerte. (FILMAFFINITY)
—————————————-
Adjetivada como una “sinfonía de primeros planos”, la historia del juicio a Juana de Arco le sirve al director Dreyer para hacer uno de sus rigurosos ejercicios sobre las pasiones humanas y la actitud ante el sufrimiento. Glorioso blanco y negro, ritmo pausado y una bellísima Renée Jeanne Falconetti -actriz de escasas películas- para una de las joyas del cine universal. (Daniel Andreas: FILMAFFINITY)
—————————————-
“Inolvidable obra maestra en la que destaca el impecable trabajo de la actriz de teatro Renée Falconetti, del decorador Herman Warm y del director de fotografía Rudolph Maté.” (Fernando Morales: Diario El País)
—————————————-
“Aún hoy, una imbatible lección de cine. (…) un blanco y negro que deja sin habla.” (Días de Cine)

http://rapidshare.com/files/100569797/PASJUANARC.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100577415/PASJUANARC.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100580748/PASJUANARC.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100583896/PASJUANARC.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100586901/PASJUANARC.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100589848/PASJUANARC.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100592441/PASJUANARC.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/100593133/PASJUANARC.part8.rar

Subtítulos español para intertítulos
http://rapidshare.com/files/100703187/PassiondeJeannedArcLa1928-Spanish_Xsubt.com__41

A palavra

albertodossantos — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:46:50 +0000

`A Palavra` (Ordet, 1955) não é um filme sobre religião. É sobre fé, algo bem diferente. Fala sobre modos de ter fé, e a possibilidade de a fé reabrir os caminhos da vida, mesmo depois de uma grande tragédia, de um grande desencanto.

É um filme da época da guerra fria, do pós-guerras, do tempo do grande desencanto, do mundo em perplexidade, que teme o extermínio. E o autor afirma que, presente a fé, não a fé arrogante ou intelectualizada, mas a fé pura, ingênua, da criança (a fé que, dentre todas as retratadas no filme, é a que vence a morte simbólica), a vida pode recomeçar.

A ressurreição, assim como a morte, é simbólica: não é Inger quem morre e ressuscita, mas aquilo que ela representava no conjunto de personagens: a esperança, o otimismo, o amor para com todos, a felicidade simples, a vida verdadeira, o enlevo de viver.

Mas o autor não alardeia a fé num deus desta ou daquela seita, nem mesmo num ser transcendente. Não se trata de um filme sobre fé em Deus. A fé que Dreyer expressa é mais corajosa, mais temerária: é fé no homem. O filme afirma que, dadas certas circunstâncias ideais, o rancoroso pode perdoar, o arrogante pode aprender a humildade, o desesperado pode reencontrar a esperança, um homem pode amar o corpo e a alma de uma mulher, a pureza da criança pode influir nos corações cansados e endurecidos dos adultos.

Como o grande artista que é, Dreyer fala também de cinema, e quanto uma personagem diz que até na dor existe beleza, é do filme que está falando.

24 abril 2009

Close-Up on Joan of Arc: from Jacques Rivette’s “Jeanne de Pucelle” to Carl Dreyer’s “La passion de Jeanne d’Arc”

floreign — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:09:54 +0000

I am still under the effect of a rather random arrow of time when it comes to watching films. Mainly, this means that, since I am making up on new releases over time (when they are no longer new releases), I am at the mercy of certain momentous interests and fortuitous coincidences as to the time the films I am watching in a particular period were made. Well, sometimes it works for me, and other times not.

I remember many years ago, when I finally got to see the entire “Nixon” directed by Oliver Stone. There’s nothing particularly bad about this film, except that it’s almost a dry historical account of the most important events of his political career, obviously culminating with the famous Watergate scandal. In retrospect, it has a lot of good background information, and very little, if any, fictional element. But this richness in details makes this film good scaffolding if one wants to watch the amazing “Secret Honor” directed by Robert Altman. There is one heck of a close-up on a political character which will be difficult to be ever surpassed.

The two parts Jacques Rivette film “Joan the Maid” / “Jeanne la Pucelle” have this historical quality. We see the re-creation of the fifteenth century of a France at its lowest point during the 100 hundred year war. There’s little humor involved, the director limits himself to watch Joan (Sandrine Bonnaire) going through her adventure of freeing Orleans from the British troops and coronation of her king, then through her prison ordeals culminating with her being executing by burning on a stake for heresy. This is not quite a “period drama”, though. At least, if we are to compare this film to the late Eric Rohmer’s “Astrea and Celadon” , with which it has some similarities in style, we are focusing more on the legend, and in this case the legend is the character Joan, including her frequent contacts with the saints who inspire her in her deeds.

We do not see epic battles. Instead, we get to see a few people fighting here and there, winning some and losing some. Needless to say we don’t get to see any special effects. Everything is so concrete that you begin to wonder where God and the other saints in all that soup are. So yeah, we are mainly seeing the humans. Normal people, including the Dauphin and the haunted Joan, evolve or devolve throughout the film.

We get to see a less known side of Paris (the non French one, back then it belonged to Burgundy, a British ally) and the king’s humiliation, when he admits to have made a pact with Bourgogne. We also get to visit a castle where Joan is detained for a while and we even get a glimpse of the motivation that drives the castle’s seigneur to deliver her to England. Further, we get to witness the trial proceedings, which to me look like a rigged trial against a political dissident carried out in a communist country. We finally see what makes her abjure and then recant her abjuration, which leads her straight to the burning stake, with barely a communion granted at the last minute. Joan is sent to Heaven while the Holy Cross is shown to her from the sides.

Yes, lots of good material here. Well, the natural question comes then: where’s the close-up? The answer regarding the close-up to a film made in the mid 90’s is in a film made in the late 20’s. Or it can be one of the answers, if you like this better. At least, this was what I saw in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc” .

Passion, that is, like the narratives of the lives of saints, containing the accounts of the ordeals they have gone through. It is worth mentioning that Joan of Arc, despite being excommunicated for heresy, was eventually beatified in the twentieth century, not long before this film was made. Starting from the records made by hand in the fifteenth century, Dreyer’s film focuses on her trial in Rouen, which is condensed to one day.

If one wonders what the charm of the old and perhaps silent films is, watching “The passion of Joan of Arc” can release much of the mystery, for it is a beautiful example of how emotion was expressed in film in a time when the talkie was nonexistent yet (there are a few late recreations of this fashion for communicating expressions, two titles come to mind: Mel Brooks’ “Silent movie” and Aki Kaurismaki’s “Juha” , both are “technically” silent films). We are given the chance to observe first-hand the emotional expressions of Joan, here played by Marie/Renee Falconetti. No, this time we do not have a pretty girl to watch. Instead, Joan’s face is everyone’s face, when dealing with accusations, schemes and betrayals, verbal abuses and she has little in control over what will happen to her. This is when we see her dressed like a man, with a male haircut, wide wondering eyes, freckles, tears and so on. She knows what she had seen, and remains undeterred by suggestions that she has in fact communicated with Satan. Even at the sight of the instruments of torture, she cannot understand why the heretic is her, and her torturers are in fact people of God. The only shed of light comes from the prison’s window, cross-shaped, which leaves on the floor a distinct shadow of the cross (yes, we can definitely recognize here what Lars von Trier had done with it in his “Epidemic”). But this cross is fading whenever the judges are stepping on it.

The illiterate girl falls into the trap of believing one priest as being the messenger of her king, but on the other hand she does not fall into other theological traps (“are you in a state of grace?”). But instead, she irritates her judges by telling that regardless of God liking or not the English, their fate is to leave France, except the ones who will die. Another sensitive aspect is her male outfit. She is even made to choose between remaining in this outfit (which by now we identify with her personal integrity and pride) and participating to the Catholic mass. A trick into a trick built into another trick.

Long story short, she can’t win. This actually means the fight is too uneven and the outcome has already been decided for her: the English want to make from her an example, so that the French will fear fighting against the English, due to the punishment associated with this. What she can do is choose between her death and her soul’s death. In other words, she can either sign a statement in which she abjures her stated heresies, or she will be excommunicated and executed. She takes the advice of some people in her court and she signs, but also marks a cross on the document, this meaning “I actually didn’t mean that”. Well, formally she has complied with the request, and instead of death, she gets the smaller sentence: life imprisonment and humiliation.

In Rivette’s version, her changing of mind is caused by the harsh treatments in prison, the French filmmaker is even staging a rape attempt. Here, Dreyer hints to an access of remorse when she gets the prisoners’ haircut: she is also stripped of her dignity. Realizing what she has done, she “abjures the previous abjuration” and ends up on the stake which was prepared for her long before that.

In the execution scene, carried out in Rouen, we get to know another character; the crowd. They are definitely aware of Joan’s ordeals, but they simply do not have the power to stop it. They are witnessing her death (beautifully shot), and realize she remained one of them, and the judged killed a saint. A public revolt ensues, but once again the city is ready for this, so the soldiers reply wielding chain maces against them and eventually kick them outside of the city walls.
This is where Joan’s legend will live on, and from where it will return with a vengeance. Now, Joan’s spirit is inseparable from the French popular spirit, and this is what (as we are suggested in the film) will ultimately change the war’s outcome.

This was my second incursion into Dreyer’s films, after viewing Ordet, and from this perspective I am not very competent to lead to the fine details. All can I see is that his films are growing into you, and will leave an indelible mark. Yes, Dreyer’s spirit is living into us, even without us knowing anything about it. This encounter is so rewarding…

The 10 Anti-Rules of Filmmaking

vajrakrishna — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:13:36 +0000

How (and How Not) to Do it:
An Open Letter to the Next Generation of Filmmakers.

By Ray Carney.

Carney is professor of Film and American Studies, and head of the Film Studies Program at Boston University, as well as author of more than ten books, including the critically acclaimed The Films of John Cassavetes and The Films of Mike Leigh, both published by Cambridge University Press. (Check out the Website http://www.cassavetes.com for further essays, articles, interviews, publication updates, etc.) The following ten “anti-rules” of filmmaking from Carney run counter to almost every conventionally held belief regarding the “correct” way to make movies. When I recently met Belgian film critic Alfons Engelen, another proponent of creativity in filmmaking, he reminded me that Carney wasn’t alone in his approach. “Cinema is only one hundred years old. So only a dozen letters of the film alphabet are known,” said Engelen while we awaited the next screening at Figueira da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal. “Therefore, look for something new, never done before. As a filmmaker, cameraman, actor or actress, editor, make something new, never done before… fresh.”

In response to several interviews I have given attacking Hollywood filmmaking, a number of readers have asked me if I could provide a more positive statement. In a word, now that I’ve hatched-murdered the studios, could I offer a few rules on how to do it right? I hesitated at first, since as far as I am concerned, rules are the problem with most of the movies we now see. The shortcomings of Hollywood is that its confections are whipped up from recipes (you know: a dash of romance blended into a cup of suspense with a dollop of social relevance thrown on top to create the perfect post-dinner entertainment). I had no desire to offer my services as a French pastry-chef of independent cinema. Real art is not created from formulas. No matter how fancy the name we give them (“story structure,” “creating a character,” the “three-act screenplay”), rules and formulas are ways of avoiding what art is really about. That’s why I initially thought a how-to-do-it essay was a bad idea, but after mulling it over, I decided that maybe there was something worth saying. So, for anyone who is interested, I hereby offer ten anti-rule rules.

1. Accept no imitations.

Imitate no one and nothing. I teach university film courses. Most of them are devoted to screening and discussing cinematic masterworks: Renoir’s Rules of the Game, Dreyer’s Ordet, Ozu’s Tokyo Story, De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, Rosellini’s Voyage in Italy. But sometimes I wonder if seeing these films doesn’t do more harm than good to the young filmmakers who are my students. The problem is that too many of them seem to take the wrong lesson away from the courses. They think I show them classics so that they can go off and make movies that look like the ones I screen. They think I want them to weave spaces and bodies together the way Renoir does in Rules of the Game, or to keep looking around and behind their characters, through windows, into doorways, and around corners, the way De Sica does in Bicycle Thief, or to slow events down, silence the characters, and induce meditative states the way Ozu does in Tokyo Story. The right lesson, of course, is precisely the opposite one. I show masterpieces not to persuade students to look like these movies, but to inspire them to dare to look utterly and completely like themselves. That’s the lesson all great art teaches us. De Sica, Dreyer, Renoir, and Ozu didn’t get to be great artists by imitating someone else, by making movies that resembled the ones they had seen, but by being brave enough to break all of the then-established rules in order to express their own distinctive, unique, personal visions of life. They teach us the value not of imitation, but of resisting influences, even their own. And they teach us how hard it is to do that – how hard it is to create a style that will be true to our own vision of life, and how bizarre and idiosyncratic such a style will always look (at least at first blush). Audiences jeered these masterworks when they were first screened.

2. Film what you really are.

One of the reasons Hollywood films can get away with being so fraudulent is that most of them are set on a fantasy island populated with characters who bear no resemblance to anyone who ever lived on planet Earth. Dare to make a movie about yourself. It doesn’t, of course, have to be true to the superficial details of your life (thought that wouldn’t hurt), but at least make it deeply true to your honest feelings and beliefs, your genuine doubts and uncertainties, your actual interests and fears. Dare to film what you really are, what you really feel, what you really see around you. Don’t be afraid of being too personal. Your most private emotions, most secret puzzlements, most idiosyncratic obsessions are the only legitimate subject of your art. That’s another lesson the masterworks teach us.

A further reason to hold tight to your actual experiences and feelings to avoid the clichés that lurk everywhere waiting to entrap you and your characters. As soon as you take one step away from your actual life, your work is in danger of turning into a cartoon or a soap opera. It’s easy for Spielberg to slide into sentimental pieties when he presents what other people, in another country, felt and suffered fifty years ago. What would keep him honest would be to show what he himself actually feels like when he goes to lunch to close a big deal, or how he treats his wife and children that evening if it falls through. The Hemmingway-parented bullshit detector is that much more sensitive if your characters and situations are close to your own life. It’s just too easy to fool yourself, to cheat of exaggerate for effect, if your movie takes place in a galaxy far away. Make sure there is no “them” in your movie. It should be all “you.” Make sure you are as kind to your characters (or as hard on them) as you would be on yourself. Make sure they are as interesting and complex (and self-justifyingly self-deluded) as you are. Let them never think they are doing anything wrong, just as you never do.

A corollary is that your characters should be at least as intelligent and self-aware as you are. Half the movies in Hollywood would evaporate if a character simply asked himself why he is behaving in such an idiotic way. Every character ever played by Schwarzenegger or Stallone would stop dead in his tracks and sign up for counseling if he were allowed to have one second of normal self-awareness. Why am I lugging this bazooka around anyway? Why do I feel such anger towards everyone? What did my parents do to me to make me feel this way? These are, of course, Neanderthal examples. But why do characters even in movies by allegedly highbrow directors (Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Steven Soderbergh) invariably understand less about themselves and their true situations than the audience does? Why are they all so limited? It’s time we had a few characters who were smarter, more sensitive, more morally complex than the average viewer is. Why do we need movies that make us feel superior? It’s time we had a few characters who humble or chasten us, who don’t yield to trashy journalistic understandings of what makes us tick. Look at Rossellini’s General Della Rovere or Dreyer’s Gertrud for illustrations.

3. Film what you don’t know.

Does not contradict the preceding: though if it did, it wouldn’t really make any difference. I only mean that there is no point in writing, casting, directing, and editing a film if you know in advance where you are going to come out, how you feel about your characters and events, and what it all means. If you can storyboard your film, save your time (and that of your actors and crew), skip the shooting, and publish the storyboard. There is no need to make the movie. If you don’t learn anything, no one else will either. If you don’t change your feelings about your characters and events as you go along, your audience won’t either. If your mind isn’t twisted into pretzels, theirs won’t be either. If your heart isn’t torn and conflicted by the situations your characters are in, you haven’t created complicated enough situations. You’ve reduced life to the “lite” experiences televisions or the newspapers give us.

Your movie should help viewers see things about their lives that they didn’t realize before they went into it. Of course, learning something, because forced out of your mental and emotional ruts, is precisely what never happens in Hollywood films. Movies like Pulp Fiction, L.A.Confidential, and Wild Things represent a button-pushing sense of art where the only goal is to force the viewer to jump through a set of pre-programmed emotional hoops. Art becomes a game of emotional tiddlywinks where you’re judged not on whether anybody actually got anything valuable out of the whole experience, but on finesse points – on how well you keep the nonsense moving right along. The director and producers decide what points they are going to make before they begin. They cast, shoot, and edit the movie so as to be sure to make them. They audience goes in and “gets” them. Then the critics come along and assign marks for how well they did it all. The reviews of these movies remind me of the chestnut about the comedian’s convention: A comedian calls out number 43 and everybody laughs. Another gets up and calls out number 12; there is even louder laughter. A third calls out number 37; nobody laughs. Explanation: Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.

There experiences in these films are canned. Nobody involved in them – from the writer and director to the actors and editors – actually learn anything new. No one changes his mind. No one is forced out of his or her old patterns of understanding. They are vast emotional recycling operations. You put clichés in; you get clichés out. The only sermons the director or his viewers stumble on are the one’s he’s already cleverly hidden under his own stones when he began. It’s the difference between the way Picasso painted and filling in the outlines in a colouring book.

That’s not art. That’s not even good conversation. All valuable acts of expression are acts of exploration. (Even a minor one like writing this piece. Why would I waste my time doing if if I already knew in advance where my argument would take me?) Film the parts of your life you don’t understand in order to try to understand them. Film the aspects of your dealings with others where you don’t know what went wrong (or whether anything went wrong). Use film to blaze a trail through the emotional jungle we all live in. Consciousness cannot precede expression. Every movie Tarkovsky and Cassavetes ever made was an attempt to understand a part of their experience that they didn’t understand before they began it. Along with spoken language, art is one of the greatest inventions in the history of the Universe for discovering the meaning of our lives, our times, our culture.

A corollary: Dare to fail – abysmally on occasion. If you function as a genuine explorer, you can never know in advance where you’ll come out (or if you’ll come out anywhere valuable). It’s always safer to cook from a recipe, and always risky to throw the book away, but that is the only way you’ll ever make anything new. Like any other mass-produced product, if Hollywood films never rise above a certain average level of achievement, by the same virtue they never fall very far below it either. With a non-standardised approach, nothing is guaranteed. Your film may be a disaster. It may not work out. But that is the case with all truly creative experiments – Charlie Parker’s solos, Paul Taylor’s dances, Einstein’s late theorems. Working the way a documentary filmmaker does, discovering your purpose and meanings as you go along, necessarily means performing without a safety net. But the greatest art is always made by taking the greatest chances. The road not taken is the only path along which real discoveries can be made (which is why imitating yourself is as deadly as imitating someone else).

4. A movie should be at least as strange as life.

I don’t know about everyone elses experiences, but the emotional lives of myself and the people I know are stranger and more complex than anything I’ve ever seen in Hollywood films. Their characters are too logical, knowing, and articulate by half. They have clear motives and intentions and act in accordance with them. If they have problems, they know what they are, and have game plans for dealing with them. They execute complex courses of action in pursuit of a definite goal. I don’t know anyone in life who is this clear about things – including myself. I don’t have intentions, motives, and goals in this way. I don’t know what I really want most of the time. I don’t understand my emotions. I don’t know why I do or feel most of the things I do. When I am in real emotional trouble, I am the last one to realize it. Having a real problem is not knowing you have it. (Think of your former boyfriend or girlfriend for confirmation of this.) I don’t have a road map for where I’m going. I usually don’t even know where I have gotten to until long after I have arrived. The people I know (including myself) are more mixed up, more contradictory in their behaviour, more changing in their feelings than characters ever are in the movies. Who of us is a character in the Hollywood way? (Dear reader, what is your character?) Even the most ordinary life is stranger and less rational than these movies assume.

When Hollywood wants to present a character who behaves less “normally,” it gives us a hockey masked slasher, has Jack Nicholson turn into the Joker or a Wolfman, or has Jim Carrey do one of his wild and crazy impersonations. But these characters separate the weirdness from everyday life too much. They make it seem too exceptional and rare and fleeting. They imagine our strangeness too externally and superficially. Our casual remarks cut more deeply than Freddy Krueger’s razor-fingers. The masks we wear are much scarier than Jason’s – and not removable. Our animal natures can be far more savage and unpredictable than a wolf’s. Our emotional lives are much spookier and more mysterious than anything in a John Carpenter movie. You can’t pound a stake through this aspect of experience. You can’t lock it up at the end of the movie. Everyone I have ever known – landlords, bosses, businessmen, parents, lovers, and friends – has an interior life that is knottier and more out of control than Hannibal Lecter’s. Capture some of the real strangeness of our emotional lives. If you don’t think it can be done, look at a tape of Cassavetes’s Faces or Tom Noonan’s The Wife. The kinks and twists in their characters’ psyche put a horror movie’s to shame.

5. Leave the ‘toons to Disney.

It’s a truism that most American feature films and the performances in them are indistinguishable from cartoons. But the problem is deeper than our cultural infatuation with superheros or the cults that have grown up around Robert DeNiro’s or Sharon Stone’s cartoon versions of acting. Even most so-called serious movies (from Easy Rider to Thelma & Louise, Malcolm X, and Schindler’s List) are dumbed down to the level of comic books. Characters are generic; situations are archetypal and representative; and the morality is as black-and-white as a children’s book. The actors might as well wear signs around their necks telling us how we are supposed to interpret them. The audience is more or less told what to know and how to feel every step of the way.

American film needs to move beyond the Boy’s book and Harlequin romance stage. We need films where characters are not generalizations and stereotypes, but particular, prickly individuals. We need figures who are neither good nor bad, neither heroes nor villains, whose motives are impure and mixed. We need films where the drama is not premised on external conflicts, but on internal confusions and ambivalences. Why can’t we have movies about characters that viewers will not be able to figure out and situations they will not be able to make up their minds about? We need movies that go into the grey and fuzzy places – movies that capture the murky irresolution of life as it is actually lived. We need scenes that explore the in-between places of life, where there is no clear problem and no clear solution. We need scenes that are pitched at tonal in-between places, scenes that don’t allow the audience the luxury of figuring them out too easily or settling back into simple relationship to them. If you think it can’t be done, check out a competent stage production of any of Chekhov’s plays. He made a career of doing it.

6. Make adult movies.

Another way to put the preceding is to say that it’s time we recapture the “adult movie” category from the pornographers. There are enough movies for teenagers. It’s high time we had some genuine adult films – movies made by adults, about adults, for adults, where there is more on the character’s minds than getting laid or stoned or shot. One way to go about making adult movies would simply be to leave our everything that is there strictly to suck in teenage boys (the nudity, sex, car chases, tough-guy theatrics, shoot-outs, thriller plots) or girls (the lovey-dovey romance stuff, dating game comedy, mood-music melodrama, and soap operatics).

The standard reply is that a movie that lacks these sort of things wouldn’t be “entertaining” enough to sell tickets. But it’s a circular argument: what is being invoked to justify childish movies is a child’s definition of entertainment. We need to forget about being entertaining in this sense, and redefine entertainment to include sophisticated adult interests. Complex adult social interactions, the play of adult emotions, the difficulties of a difficult life are the most interesting things in the world with an adult perspective.

Our movies are too simple, too obvious, too easy, and ultimately too boring. An adult movie will necessarily be hard and challenging, just as all real adult relationships are. Kids may want things easy, but an adult knows that no important experience (or person) yields up its meanings casually or lightly, and that the more it resists you or forces you out of your habitual patterns, the more exciting and valuable it is. That’s as true in art as it is in life. Great works necessarily make demands on us; they test us; because they force us to enter into new states of awareness, new ways of knowing. You can’t experience a really great work of art in a relaxed or passive way. You can’t listen to Bach on your back. He forces you to answer his energies with your own. He rouses you to activity. That state of tension, engagement, and activity is not an accidental side-effect of a great work, but the very heart and soul of what all important art does.

The moral of the story is that there is no reason to apologise if a viewer has to see your movie two, three, or more times, or to struggle for months or years to work through it emotionally. I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Stalker at least ten times each, and still can’t get comfortable with them, am still puzzled and mystified by aspects of them. That’s not what’s wrong with them, but what’s right – like the best, most challenging, exciting experiences and people we come up against in life. Even if it’s not true in aerobics, in art (as in life) “no pain, no gain” really is a reality. New experiences, fresh insights, new points of view are going to leave your emotional muscles a little sore at first. They’ll have you panting to keep up with them. It has to do with the way our brains are wired. Our emotions are inertial. Our hearts always rest on the last experience. Every genuinely new way of seeing and feeling is disorienting – because it does brain surgery on us.

Of course, given our channel-surfing, easy-listening culture, many people will still prefer Happy Meal movies. They may storm out of your film muttering about its incomprehensibility; but what if they do? You are better off without them. If people aren’t willing to exert themselves to the degree the work demands, they can’t have the experience you want them to have even if you physically chain them to their seats (or psychologically chain them by adding sex scenes, shoot-outs, and suspense). If they are determined to lie on their backs, they are not going to hear Bach anyhow. If you play Beethoven to the supermarket crowd, you succeed only in turning the Ninth Symphony into Muzak. You can’t make someone have an experience they aren’t ready to have. You can’t give someone an emotional gift they are not mature enough to receive. They may need to grow up some more, live a little more, or fall in love before they are ready for your film. And, of course, they may never be ready for it; but that is their loss, not yours. Don’t dumb it down in an attempt to reach everyone, or you will lose the very viewers you should most care about reaching.

7. Forget sets, props, locations, costumes.

Insides are where it’s at. Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year getting the cars, furniture, haircuts, and period music right. Spielberg thinks nothing of constructing an entire city block or a country estate in order to re-create a past era. Unfortunately, in his obsession with the authenticity of objects and events, he overlooks the fact that the only thing that matters is emotional reality. The people who make these movies are clearly more comfortable dealing with props and costumes than feelings, which is why they will fuss over the most minute details of the sets, but don’t see the emotional fraudulence of the scenes that take place in them.

Take sex scenes as an example. I’ve seen hundreds of them in Hollywood movies, but I don’t think there has been even one where the woman was embarrassed by the size of shape of her breasts or hips or where the man was anxious about his ability to perform. I’ve seen scores of depictions of one-night stands, but I’ve never seen a single film where the two strangers express a profound sense of emptiness, regret, shame, or violation after making love. I shouldn’t even use the word love. There is lots of glycerin, lust, and infatuation in these movies of course, but where is the trust, admiration, devotion, self-sacrifice, or deep emotional vulnerability that constitutes real adult love.

What is true of romantic attraction is true of the other feelings in these works. They are cheap, plastic knockoffs of real emotions – with only the faintest, superficial resemblance to the actual ones. (It doesn’t take a Hamlet to make us realize that even reptilian emotions like anger and revenge are more complicated than the Hollywood versions of them – more tangled up in double- and triple-thinking.) The feelings in these films are as clichéd and unreal as the plots or the mood music on their soundtracks. The characters bear about as much resemblance to humans as computer animations do.

Ninety-nine percent of the American movies released in a given year simply recycle five or ten of these fake emotions over and over again – canned, condensed, instant anger, revenge, lust, fear, romance, and a few others. They are like well-worn counterfeit coins passed from hand to hand, from film to film, as promissory notes for the real thing. The very fact that we can assign these emotions names at all proves their fraudulence. Our emotional life never comes to us in such simple bundles. It can never be labeled like this (since it is not static, but a continuous flowing and melting transformation). Most of the feelings we have every day of our lives are utterly unnameable and indescribable. We aren’t even conscious of most of them.

All of this, needless to say, represents a great opportunity to independent filmmakers. The artist moves beyond the known world of clichés, exploring the emotional wildernesses that are not on our charts. He or she moves into the “here there be dragons” sections of our souls and maps the true emotional geography of the present, reporting back his or her findings for the benefit of the rest of us.

8. Plot – not.

One of the most limiting aspects of American films is that the plot is all that matters at virtually every stage of the process. Movies are pitched, scripted, and budgeted on the basis of the cleverness of their plots. In the directing and editing process, characterizations, emotional nuance, mood, and psychology are thrown to the winds to keep the plots zipping along from event to event. Filmmakers like Spielberg actually pride themselves on “telling a good story” in this children’s-book sense of the phrase. The great works of literature – Huckleberry Finn, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays – are not reducible to their plots; only hacks like O. Henry and Agatha Christie confused narrative art with “telling a good story” in Spielberg’s sense. No one ever sat through the classics of cinema for their plots. Who ever watched The Passion of Joan of Arc for its plot? Reduced to their plots, Ozu’s movies are hokey melodramas. Plot has almost nothing to do with a great film’s complex pleasures.

What capitalistic, materialistic myth have we enslaved ourselves to? Why do we think life is about achieving something or attaining a goal? Why do we think it’s about getting somewhere or doing something? Why do we make movies about actions and events? Whose life is reducible to its events? Whose soul can be summed up by its actions? What we are is infinitely more interesting than what we do. Dare to make a film that shows that people are more interesting than the trivial events taking place around them. Show how what we do to ourselves emotionally is more interesting than anything anyone else does to us. Dare to push the pause button on the narrative and let your actors actually interact with each other. This is different from merely turning them loose to chew up the scenery in the Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, or Nick Cage way. Interaction is subtle, nuanced, and responsive; not flamboyant, ostentatious, and scene-stealing. Dare to make a movie where everything is not all tied up narratively with pink ribbons in the final scenes. Why does everything have to be resolved and explained? Make a movie that is narratively inconclusive or open to different interpretations.

A strictly personal request: make a tragic film. America is the culture that invented the sitcom and the happy face, and we seem to have lost sight of the enormous expressive power – and truth – of tragedy. Tragedy has almost disappeared as a cinematic form in America. Suffering and loss reveals things about our hearts and souls that no happy ending ever can. In rewarding their central characters with money, power, fame, and success at their ends, our films tell us a lie about life. Why deny your own emotional experience – your endless frustrations and setbacks – this way? These films define life’s value too economically, too externally, too materialistically. In its deepest wellsprings, life is not about attaining rewards (or punishments), but about testing our spirits, deepening our souls, and enriching our consciousness. Make a film about that – a film in which a character may lose the world but gain her soul.

9. Why should your movie look like a movie?

Who says you have to use master shots or shot-reverse shots or close-ups or music on the soundtrack or anything else that other films have? It’s another occupational hazard of being a film teacher that after I spend a few weeks with students some of the possibilities of cinematic syntax, many of them think I am telling them that they should shoot their films like Hitchcock, light them like Sternberg, edit them like Eisenstein, or score them like Bernard Hermann. What I’m actually trying to teach them is the lesson a novelist or poet presumably learns from reading great writers: to invent new forms of language to express their own particular thoughts and feelings. Don’t hesitate to bend the form past the breaking point if it will allow you to catch the little wiggle in life that only you see and feel. No more than there is a right way to paint a painting or score a symphony is there a correct way to light or shoot a movie, a best way to edit it, a right or wrong way it should look. Hollywood has brainwashed us by flooding the market with movies that look, sound, and feel almost identical. But the question to ask is why would anyone want their movie to look like a Hollywood one? Why would you want your hand-crafted personal expression to look like it rolled off an assembly line? It’s the uniqueness of our voices that makes us interesting; the most boring voices in the world are those of professionally trained radio announcers. Let your own squeaky, twitchy, nervous voice emerge; don’t polish and smooth the roughness away.

A filmmaker friend of mine, Robert Kramer, made a movie called Starting Place. There are many amazing and powerful moments in it, most of which represent completely new imaginings of the possibilities of what you can say on film. There is an extended conversation in which Kramer repeatedly cuts away from the principle figure’s face to show views of his feet and hands (and not as a twitchy indication of guilt in the pseudo-Freudian cliché 60 Minutes employs). There is another conversation in which Kramer intercuts tights close-ups of a woman’s eyebrows and hairline and ears rather than showing her whole face. What Kramer does is simply what every artist does: he gets us to see with fresh eyes, to think and feel in new ways. But to do that, he has to fracture and dislocate conventional cinematic forms of presentation. He must reinvent language to make it capable of carrying the meaning he wants it to bear. It’s a question of who is the master, and the true artist is always the master of the form he uses. And make no mistake about it: If you don’t use the forms, they will use you. If you don’t twist and torture them, and beat them up, they will twist and torture you and beat you up. If you don’t ride them, they will ride you. They will homogenize and blandify your ideas. They will bend and flatten your eccentric wiggles and curves into their own cookie-cutter shapes and mass-produced meanings.

10. Who’s afraid of the dark?

Why do movies have establishing shots? Why does mood music tell us what characters are thinking and feeling? Why are characters’ goals and intentions made visible? Why must everything be explained? Life isn’t like this. I don’t know what people I talk to are thinking. I can’t see inside their hearts and read their minds. Why do we expect to be able to do that in our movies?

In fear of losing viewers, Hollywood explains more or less everything. The goal is not to leave viewers in the dark for a single minute. It’s why most Hollywood movies are improved by catching them on television a half-hour or so after they have begun. Characters and events become much more fascinating when we can’t figure them out. Why do we want things in our movies to be clear? Why do we want actions, events, and outcomes to be logical and rational (since so much of life is not this way)? Why do we insist on knowing, knowning, knowing so much about everyone and everything? Life is full of mysteries, darkness, unknowns, randomness. What we are is, of course, the greatest mystery of all.

A little dark would be preferable to this blinding insight. Make a movie where people’s surfaces are as opaque, their insides are invisible, as they are in life. Make a movie where people don’t progress step by step toward goals. Make a movie where the ending does not clear everything up. Read The Sacred Fount or The Awkward Age if you want to see it done in words. Cherish the mystery of experience. Respect what can never be known – even about those closest to you: friends, relatives, and lovers. In a word, honor life.

That’s ten, and as good a place as any to stop. The perceptive reader will have detected long before now that these ten rules are really only one rule repeated ten times: Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which leads to one meta-rule that overrides all of the others: Violate any of these rules rather than betray the truth.

A paixão de Joana D'arc (Dreyer, 1928)

Júlia Machado — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:42:18 +0000

VERONIKA VOSS

pompiere — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:37:09 +0000

Un film di Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Con Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Annemarie Düringer. Titolo origin

Kristna värderingar?

cappuccinosocialist — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:10:45 +0000

Jag lyssnar på Peace In The Valley med Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. Sam Cooke sjunger så hjärtat vill brista. Han berättar om dagen när han skall finna frid i dalen. Om när det mäktiga lejonet skall ligga ner sida vid sida med lammet. Jag känner en stark, medryckande känsla. Kanske borde man börja gå i kyrkan ändå?

Jag ser Carl Theodor Dreyers klassiska stumfilm La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (En kvinnas martyrium) från 1928 för första gången. Det är en av de bästa, mest suggestiva och känsloladdade filmer jag sett. Domstolens inkrökta dogmatism kontrasteras oerhört effektivt mot den lidande, fattiga Jeanne, vars största brott att döma av rättegången verkar ha varit att ha burit manskläder. Hon får höra av domstolen: “Kyrkan öppnar sina armar för dig, men om du avvisar den kommer den att förneka dig“.

De kallar henne djävulens barn, men inte för att hon på något sätt skulle sakna tro – alla kan se att hennes blick brinner av tro, utan av helt andra skäl. Jag funderar över kyrkans historia som förtryckande institution. Jag kommer att tänka på hur den bokstavstrogna, amerikanska högerideologin lägger beslag på religionen i sin vidriga maktutövning. Vi vet att man oftast tror på bokstäverna när man är för dum för att se någon andlig innebörd. Men många hänvisar också till vad som bokstavligen står i olika bibeltexter ord för ord, eftersom det är det enda de kan finna som argument för sina dumheter.

Idag läser jag om Hugo Chávez på wikipedia: “Other indirect influences on Chávez’s political philosophy are the writings of Noam Chomsky and the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Bible (Chávez describes Jesus as the world’s first socialist).” Det låter fint och jag blir glad och varm i hjärtat. Du behöver heller inte googla länge för att läsa om att Patriarken av Moskva varit på besök hos Chávez. Chávez har också varit på besök i Vatikanen, även om han såklart inte köper vad som helst. Jag får lust att åka till Venezuela och fira gudstjänst med några marxistiska befrielseteologer.

Lite längre ner i samma artikel står det: “Several public figures have even gone so far as to call for the assassination of Chávez, most notably US Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.^”Jag blir stel och kall.

Jag kollar upp den här Robertson, för att se om det verkligen kan stämma. Och jodå, enligt USA Today sa han verkligen detta on the air 2005. Enligt samma artikel har Robertson även sagt: “that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Med andra ord en spritt språngande galen person. Ändå känner jag att man på något sätt “tillåter” sådana som honom att personifiera begreppet kristen. De kan ta allt, till och med det radikala kärleksbudskapet i Nya Testamentet, och förvrida det till sin motsats. Varför kommer de undan med detta? Är det för att de tronar på ett berg av Coca Cola, bombplan och miljarder dollarsedlar? Ja, det är nog en del av förklaringen.

Det mest sorgliga i det hela är att utav Chávez och Robertson är det den första som misstänkliggörs mest i svensk media. Förknippas han med någon religion är det med högerns värsta skräck: Islam. Venezuela kommer nämligen enligt dessa grupper användas som någon sorts startpunkt för något hemskt som exempelvis Iran ska göra med USA. Robertson representerar samtidigt mångas uppfattning om kristendomen av idag. Dåren kallas kristen, den kristne utmålas som en dåre.

Jag ser TV-programmet Existens om något som de kallar “kristofobi” i analogi med begreppet islamofobi. Sådana kristna som Pat Robertson slår verkligen ett slag för en sådan fobi när vi ger dem tolkningsföreträde. Det enda kristna i dagsläget är att kraftfullt ta avstånd från och bekämpa den utbredda och allmänt accepterade islamofobin, inte att börja leka blame game och säga “jag är minsann också diskriminerad”. Då visar man dels att man antingen tappat alla proportioner eller medvetet vill förvirra folk. Och dels, som KG Hammar så väl påpekade i programmet, låter man något egoistiskt stå i vägen för sin kristna omsorg om bröder och systrar av annan tro. Jag upprepar bibelcitatet från mitt förra inlägg:

“och lär er göra det goda. Sträva efter rättvisa, stöd den förtryckte. För den faderlöses talan, skaffa änkan rätt ” (Jes 1:17)

Det är dags att förnuftiga människor med hjärtat på rätta stället nu tar ställning mot denna USA-baserade politiska extremism som lyckats smuggla sig in under beteckningen kristendom och snart monopoliserat hela begreppet. Medan dessa krafter mobiliserar hymlar vänsterkristna gärna antingen med att de är kristna, med att de är vänster eller både och. Rösta vänster i kyrkovalet! Visa att du sympatiserar med den unga, fattiga, kvinnan Jeanne d’Arc och inte med de gamla, rika männen som dömer henne och mördar henne. Visa att du sympatiserar mer med socialisten Hugo Chávez’ och hans förebild Jesus än med Pat Robertsons mordiska, förvridna ideologi.

Om man vill hävda att Gud är god och vill människors bästa, kan man inte ständigt motarbeta alla goda initiativ och stödja idéer, projekt och system som förtrycker, begränsar, skadar och dödar skapelsen och människan. Den Yttersta Domen kommer möjligen att bli den fest som Andrei Rublev talar om i Tarkovskijs film, men inte för framgångsteologer och hatpredikanter som Pat Robertson.

The Master!

dcairns — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:13:28 +0000

The new issue of online movie smasheroo Senses of Cinema is up, and for the first time in ages I

Dreyer Drives Me Mad

rm144 — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:25:21 +0000

BAMcinematek just concluded its DREYER retrospective. And I now count Dreyer among my top three favorite directors along with Mizoguchi and Herzog.

He knocked me on my ass. I’m still reeling from the experience and I just ordered the Criterion set of ORDET, DAY OF WRATH, and GERTRUD + a terrific documentary on Dreyer, CARL TH. DREYER-MY METIER, in which many of the actor reflect on working with him*. I’m in awe that the technology exists making it possible to own these master works. It’s as if I could have a Vermeer in my home.

In the halls of BAM we discuss moments in Dreyer films every day. Last night was the final Dreyer screening: VAMPYR and again our heads are spinning. I wish I could see it again. Right now, for breakfast. I want to watch again the magnificent scene of the shadow man with a peg leg walking along a wall. Then, all of sudden the shadow is next to a real man. And the man and the shadow move together. I gasped.

I gasp a lot with Dreyer. Other gasp moments:

-ORDET: when the two fathers–one on the left who looks like Father Christmas and one the right, a religious fanatic–discuss the fact that their children are in love and want to marry the religious dude lights and smokes a pipe. As he insinuates that if the Father Christmas guy is willing to be converted, he’d let his daughter marry, the smoke from his pipe moves slowly leftwards. The puff of smoke is directly in front of the man on the left as he becomes conscious of this manipulation which is utterly abhorrent to him. It is an exquiste marrying of the physical and the methaphorial.

-ORDET: When the doctor is leaving Father Christmas guy’s home after assuring everyone that the man’s daughter-in-law is on the mend everything that happens is flabbergasting. I had goosebumps. 1. The Jesus-son begins to walk on a diagonal from the lower right to the upper left, heading to the door of the sick room, 2. The doctor’s headlights move throughout the room, signaling death’s arrival. I watched in four times in a row. I could watch it again right now. (My Criterion package hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe I’ll watch it in the Archive Room at work for a little treat later today.)

-DAY OF WRATH: When the young wife and her son-of-her-husband lover go to the river and go boating (YoungWitchWife and AffairMan-son Go Boating). The scene hits a pinacle at the tree that almost appears to be weeping into the water. The juxaposition of her joy and hopes and his dread are almost unbearable. You just know who is right and now you are going to have to watch the young woman’s destruction on every level: physiologically and psychologically. These people are trying to destroy her spirit, her soul.

Dreyer isn’t for the weak of heart or for the impatient. But if you are in the mood or need food for the soul, he’s your man.

I just googled Dreyer/Criterion to find the exact title of the documentary and saw the the Criterion set is temporarily out of stock on Amazon! I’m guessing others were just as inspired as I was to grab Dreyer for themselves.