RAPSODIA EUROPEAN UNION: AN HOMAGE TO CIVILIZATION AND PRECARIOUS SEVENTH ART.
Di Franco Romano.
FAR WEST MAINLAND.
The first shots of the film talked about the slow take up of a ship away along the Tagus, wrapped in haze. We are in Lisbon, very close to the tip of Estoril, most of the Atlantic stretching away Ireland. After a few shots, slow and punctuated by dialogue between a mother and a daughter, the viewer begins to question the significance of the trip and will after a fairly long time that the two protagonists are intended to Bombay, where the woman's husband and father the child.
The confusion is great! The ship is a means slow: you choose to cruise from various sources, but no longer to get from one place to another, much more so far. The woman's husband also works in aviation, so why not go by plane?
pope will be an orthodox and the captain of the ship to address the protagonist is this question: Why in the ship? The answer is simple and surprising: the lady is a professor of history, wants to know directly the places that are the subject of his lectures and transmit this knowledge to her daughter. It is a realistic and plausible answer, but which gives a value initiatory journey. Around the slow, marked by the movement of the ship in the Mediterranean, De Oliveira embroidery designs a simple call to each new rising passenger and between their three characters. There are three women: French businesswoman (Catherine Deneuve), a former Italian model (Stefania Sandrelli), a Greek singer (Irene Papas). Are the protagonists of the famous film European, represent the style; De Oliveira filmed his homage to the movies, the last of the arts, born in Europe. But Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli and Irene Papas is also a French, an Italian and a Greek, and are also three ladies of middle age, one in which you begin to make the budgets.
All three interpret their part favoring the cliché that wants to order: elegant, refined and a little haughty to the French hen, a little 'goose and the handsome Italian, proud and austere Greek. With the simple staging of three actresses of this caliber and making them act without acting, that is, chatting amiably as if you were on a cruise ship and not on a movie set, De Oliveira is passed between the meshes of an apparent sequence of grain, full of obvious allegory. The three women protagonists, together with the young Portuguese historian and his daughter become the Europe ... Europe is the most northern Mediterranean that (even though a meeting in Athens will open a window to the Orthodox world, which borders Russia to the farthest). There are therefore three women embody the Europe, where, at the captain's table during the dinner before the epilogue, if n'aggiungono a fourth - the young mother a professor of history - and a fifth, the daughter of the latter, which should take up the legacy of the crucible in which our civilization was formed. De Oliveira, therefore, relies on all-female a genealogy with the task of preserving and transmitting the values \u200b\u200bof this European civilization.
All this happens in a microcosm - the ship - under the command of Captain American of Polish origin.
word and image.
At this point a digression is necessary at the beginning of the film takes us back precisely to its strange title: Film spoken. Why so obvious an oxymoron? The film is above all motion picture, to say the brothers Lumière, was silent for a long time and even after the contribution of the word, while important, was an image carrier. It is not expected even today, by a Film dialogue, which is a literary work independent from the film, even in famous cases of collaboration between director and writer, as in films such as Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, whose dialogues were written by Peter Hancke.
The title of De Oliveira, however, is contradictory. In fact, the word is essential in his film are the images that act as counterpoint.
It is the protagonist in four different forms: as a question by the mother of his daughter, then as a response from the mother to her daughter, then as a description of the premises by occasional guide, then as friendly conversation, during dinner at the table of commander. To each of these modes corresponds to a different level complexity.
The daughter asks her mother as a child can do it for eight years and the answers are simple and professor of the school, not circumventing the thorny points, but tend to give a reassuring vision of history. When Maria Juana asks whether Muslims and Christians are still fighting, the mother answered definitely no, simplifying a bit 'too, historians have always some problem with the perception of this!
Our culture can be defined in many ways, but there is no doubt that wherever we look the more we encounter the word, written and oral. Other civilizations, such as quell'africana, American Indian, or native of Australia, have focused on other languages; Europe has favored this, starting with the oldest myth that concerns it.
Roberto Calasso writes in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, when he realizes that his sister Europa was abducted by Zeus, Cadmus the Phoenician part in its research. It does not have with him a powerful army, but also to invent an alphabet, and even the alphabet, making the hieroglyph of a sign and a word that everyone can understand. He does it because he wants to ask, asks where his sister, follows her in all the worlds. Europe is first of all exiled identity, thanks to its word.
As for the shots they play a counterpoint, and rather than moving images, de Oliveira chose painting and photography, stopping in almost instantaneous properties that will show if they were postcards of art filmed. In this cleverly constructed tunnel
found: the Belem tower shrouded in fog as the ship crosses the Tagus, Gibraltar seen from the sea, an anonymous view of the port of Marseille where a plaque commemorates the landing of the Greeks, Castel dell 'Ovo in Naples the Acropolis in Athens, a view of Istanbul from the sea, the profile of the ship, shooting in the same way, while slow cleaving the waters of the Mediterranean and finally the Pyramids.
Those that follow are postcard images we've seen a thousand times, but this is the simple greatness of the film. It obviously plays a key role obvious why we consider the existence of all this: when we think of the ports that the ship touches the majority of ordinary people see them in the same way that De Oliveira filmed them. However we are not accustomed to recognize the beauty of a place, its genius loci, because the victim habits? By stripping his images from any tinsel intellectual and renouncing every possible special effect, De Oliveira shows things like the common eye sees. It is an idea of \u200b\u200bbeauty now dethroned by another who enjoys the favors worldly manipulative intervention that eliminates irregularities. 1
According to the definition of romantic beauty instead, taken recently by Jung and it Hilmann The thought of the heart, it is the show of things and their habitats. This is precisely the effect that De Oliveira chases in this film show the obvious landscape of our civilization, as if you were to see the Roman Colosseum and a Milanese Duomo ... But we are sure that a Roman and Milanese know today What really are the Colosseum and the Cathedral, also consumed as tourist objects, abandoned or settled indifference of habit?
Back to the word. I stated earlier that it is the protagonist in four different ways. First, we have seen, is the question by a child to a teacher mother, and the second are his answers. The third are the interludes insignificant tour guides, with two exceptions: the meeting with the Pope on the hill of the Neapolitan and Portuguese with an actor in Cairo.
The first, the Pope, in his conversation with the mother and daughter, prosaically plays its role as a tourist guide, until the teacher, pushed by her daughter, did not question why you do the Orthodox cross themselves with three fingers . It is an embarrassing question, which the Pope replied with a hint of controversy implied: "I never understood, in fact, because Catholics make the sign of the cross in their way" and said the girl, with disarming simplicity, that the sign with the three fingers of the figure corresponds to the letter of the Trinitarian Godhead second ... Christians. Simple yes, but very profound consequences: for the letter of the Orthodox rite and its content can not be broken, for other Christians. The girl's impertinent question reveals the over-optimistic responses and protective mother and enters the stage of the conflict within the house doors.
The second meeting is with the Portuguese player, who is in the Egyptian capital to work. The professor acknowledged, he is something flattered. The nostalgia, the need to communicate, the curiosity of a child, pushing the trio in a luxurious hotel where the prints are reproduced in the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal. The elegant tapestries and paintings reproduce that event. Europe opened a way for India other than that which had opened three centuries before the Portuguese around Africa. The three Portuguese players look of the film, shot from behind, tapestries, testimony that the hegemony of the seas was finally passed into other hands.
ELEGANCE FRIENDLY.
brings us to the conversation at the table of the captain that takes place in two stages, with an intermission. The first time they sat together in only three women mentioned above.
The conversation is one you can imagine the table of the captain of a ship, with three women. He makes the gallant and woos the French as it is obvious that, because an upstart who has just learned to memory, the etiquette of seduction can only woo a French. She is annoyed by the courtship of the master and responds with sharp escalation of responses that exceed in free and includes the other person is reciting a script, but his answers are themselves unnecessarily controversial and bitter. As in mirror script, the entrepreneur mixes instances feminist platitudes. It is a woman who has broken with the male world in terms sentimental, but in a profession dominated by men: their lives badly split, which is that feminism was halfway between emancipation and liberation.
Greece is the real star of the conversation. For her, as for the Orthodox Pope, the letter and spirit are the same (although neither of them know more why) and this gives it a tragic dimension. It is she who asks the questions radicals during the conversation, while touching the pedantry, and is always trying to give you the answers because the others and the others are silent.
the table, each of them speak in your language, but despite this we understand: it's Greek to notice it and tell everybody. The metaphor is clear: there is a culture that binds us and which is manifested in elegant taste of the conversation, conviviality, courtship, and seduction of the dialogue, which is steeped in Greek philosophy. It is the triumph of the word in all its forms.
Among the first part and the second before the epilogue is an interlude during which take place three important facts: first the conversation between the teacher and the Portuguese captain. He invites her to his table for dinner the next day and she refuses decisively and with an almost annoyed tone that contrasts with the delicacy of his ways.
The captain insists, the expectations, while the ship makes a stop in a Middle Eastern port goes to the local souk and buy a gift for the child. Although mother and daughter traveling in the same Arab souk where to buy a dress for Maria Juana.
In the evening the captain repeats the call and shows a gift for the child, so that the mother can not refuse. The conversation
seems to continue as the night before but is no longer the same, although the script has not changed. The enlargement of the table to two Portuguese (subtle and ironic metaphor for Europe that would reduce risks losing), forces everyone to speak English and that is the language of those who do not truly united Europe will probably never be: and Greece to do note with regret, noting that when the United States gained their independence, the U.S. Senate put to a vote which should be the national language and English won by one vote on greek. The captain
gift to the baby is a doll with the chador. The little girl is something proud and almost takes away from the hands of the French observes and manipulates fascinated, as if there was a tinge of regret for the image of women so different from her.
The end is preceded by yet forcing the captain insisted that the Greek singer who performs in that situation, which for her is a pleasure cruise. The woman tried to refuse politely but then adapts. Sings a poignant song, which revolves around a chorus that repeats melancholy as an announcement of death.
A terrorist group has undermined the ship during the last call, there is no time to defuse the bomb, must abandon it, we do not know of these terrorists and we do not see anything, have neither word nor image. The mother Portuguese try to keep quiet, too, because it is in a trance and, in fact, make a slip decisive forget the doll in the cabin and when if n'accorge Juana Maria, the girl comes back to get it back. The final scene all the actors nail their blunders: the captain instead of the last to leave the ship (or rather to sink her as the rule states old) stands stiff and helpless on the lifeboat, while on the mother ship and see his daughter away to safety. The chain of transmission of knowledge of a civilization is broken in two places: on the boat, a command without fathers patriarchal history teacher looks at a mother unable to see the shadow of history. The last scene takes a fixity in the eyes of the mortal blow up the ship captain who see with two walks on board. THE WISDOM OF
SENEX.
The final film made me think again about the slowness of the cinematic language De Oliveira (remember Red Shoes), more allegorical, but also reminded me of the pages that Italo Calvino, in American Lectures, dedicated to the speed . We tend to think that slow and speed are the pair of opposites: Calvin introduces the speed as the displacement by the couple. And it is just around the slow-speed combination that De Oliveira detonates his film in a rapid and tragic death scene. Talking picture, however, work is nihilistic, but an old and old before her death they see, more than any other. The Portuguese director
fahlado Film shot at the age of 96 years! Its not a simple old age, is a life prolonged beyond the reasonable limit of the statistic more benign. It is one man, an ancient Bible, the last witness. In these cases, the older you get the nagging that they take with the whole world, or return to being pueri aeterni delusional, but if they have built over time what Hillman calls the force of character here who know how to turn death before they see them in view of the senex, in a last gift of wisdom. De Oliveria
sees death civilization that has rocked, we launched this warning, shown in its simple beauty. The're missing, says: you're losing your roots, you have little time to save them. The speed with which ends metaphorically to his and our civilization simply means that what has been built in thousands of years, may end in an instant, that civilization is precarious as our lives. The explosion of the metaphorical ship Europe indicates a point of no return, is to his children and grandchildren will not get there, he did until the end, by that great artist is his duty.
OF DESIRE STILL and on the other.
If history and current politics are the protagonists allegory De Oliveira, other filmmakers have given us insights in recent years to reflect critically on personal relationships, gender and it is the other side of the coin and the reverse of the times that we live. In the microcosm of relationships, personal, and in particular those in love, fall all the uncertainties and contradictions of European societies: they are against an intimate and inner part of the division in recent times in history it was believed to lead to a visibility and a different and richer problematic, hypotheses, this, that seems - at least right now - all out of the game. Back in the shadow of private and domestic rather than political staff that they wanted, the continent immense relations between individuals is back largely submerged, if not, once again, for some directors.
In the first film and the authors that we will see two dancers on the stage of a theater, two men in the room, sat next to each other but strangers, one of two moves and cries, while the other looks surprised. Are two sequences of Talk to Her by Pedro Almodovar. Master the art of Pina Bausch, the continuation of the replicated film by dancing teacher, is the backdrop to the entire film. The two older women dancing on stage as if they were blind and they are both dressed in white, white with a candor that seems to allude to the deathly pallor. Roam the stage, leaves seem to drag by the wind over which they have power and control and, more than the point of death, appear to act in a latency of awareness. The dance art form that embodies in itself the most realistic of the concrete (the body in the same scene as a medium and fine) and all the imaginary complexity that evokes movement, is one of the great metaphor for the whole film, not to event will conclude with a dance of souls.
The second sequence is part of a scene of male protagonists of the film: Benigno, a professional nurse. It is at work, intent on telling the show last night with a colleague, and together they take care of a patient, an aspiring young dancer in an irreversible coma.
The third sequence we enter the life of Marco, the other male lead, a journalist for El Pais. Is experiencing a rather animated talk show: the protagonists are a journalist and a torera named Lydia, who decides to contact Mark for an interview with the newspaper.
The fates of two men who have crossed casually at the theater, can also be found in life, due to a tragic accident.
During a bullfight is attended by Mark, which is another bullfighter Lydia have a previous relationship that just started with the journalist, the woman was repeatedly hit by the bull and survives in a coma. Marco wakefulness during the first night of hospitalization and is in hospital Benigno, which recognizes him as the man who cried in the theater. Between the two, after a certain reluctance on the part of the journalist, the friendship was born. Mark frantically
questioning the doctors, they had the same answer. Lydia for science, although not clinically dead, can not awaken from the coma. However, it is the doctor to make sure that there are cases of inexplicable healing and lists them on time showing that the newspapers have spoken. Benigno, on the contrary, he speaks with his patient in the normal way, as if she could hear. If the reporter asks the uneasy reality principle, nurse it seems lacking.
MOSAIC INCOMPLETE.
At this point in the film were formed two odd couples and other two are missing. Lydia is the most visible character: it is a bullfighter, a great profession for a woman, in a land where the bullfight is much more than just a show. It's a strong woman, emancipated, fighting hard in a world dominated by males: most of the bullfight, may belong to the male world? Lydia is the youngest daughter of a banderillero, a father who throughout his life he dreamed of becoming a bullfighter never succeed, nothing is said of his mother, as if it were entirely absent. Lydia, then, is a creature of his father, but not born, as the Greek Athena, the head of Zeus, but from the bowels, as bullfighting has to do with the archaic rule dark and terrible blood and sacrifice.
Benigno, a nurse, was living until very recently, first with the mother more or less sick. During the last fifteen years of his life, as he will be able to say to the psychiatrist with whom she is receiving treatment, has done nothing and has never had sex with a woman. If Lydia is a victim of a complex father, Benigno is dominated by large dall'archetipo devouring mother and the ghost of the absent father, she lives in an Eden psychic fusion with the mother. If the bullfighter does not have access to the full relationship with a man, as he smothered himself in the woman, Benigno did not become fully human because they are unable to detach from the mother; loves a woman in a coma, unaware that as he is.
Alicia, a young aspiring dancer in Benigno deals exclusively, is the daughter of the psychiatrist with whom the nurse is being treated. It was her father after the accident, to propose that Benigno was attending to her, trusting in the nurse's latent homosexual tendencies. Alicia's mother does not know anything, but the dancing teacher considers his favorite girl, almost a daughter, in fact, he often goes to visit the hospital and speaking, as benign, as if she could really hear it. She is the true spiritual mother of the girl and the initiation into the dance is a second birth that complements the biological. Finally
Mark the journalist. We know little about him, only that he had a troubled love affair with a woman. The last male protagonist is El Niño de Valencia (Valencia's baby), a bullfighter from the nickname at least ironic, that a painful and troubled relationship with Lydia, the bullfighter; report that overlaps with that Lydia has with Marco. El Niño is a man of Valencia sweet, too sweet to be a bullfighter! Both Lydia and strength in his role as father of the projection, as El Niño is forced to make the grotesque mask of the bullfighter, Lydia loves him but is not really Mark! ... When he realizes that he had invited Lydia El niño de Valencia last fatal bullfight to reconcile with him and not to leave, disappointed part of a long journey. Let us now
the other pair: Benigno and Alicia. The nurse has treated almost exclusively, and speaks as if she were alive. What I love most telling are the movies or the theater which assists; especially silent films, of which Alicia was passionate spectator. One evening
Benigno attends a film that hits it and tells it very excited to Alicia. Almodóvar frames the man who begins his account while he is washing the patient in the frame next to the director no longer shows the two men (Benigno and Alicia), but it represents pictures in black and white silent film that is Benigno telling to his patient. The director then creates a double register of meaning, the speech becomes silent film, besides the usual titles of any silent film, thanks to the story of Benigno. In this way the viewer to be in the same position as Alicia, the main character in a coma, Benigno which tells the story. The story of the movie, and that is what is happening in that hospital room, becomes the reality that runs silent and invisible, while the fiction film leaps to the foreground is a sequence highly dreamlike and almost hypnotic, the story of this film .
history that fills this sequence is very simple, realistic as it is represented, but this is typical of the realism of the dream.
Its protagonists are two: a man and a woman. She is a scientist who moves between mathematics and stills, and he lives in his shadow, is dedicated in absolute terms, but among them there is no real love relationship. The woman has discovered a formula for which he produced an amazing liquid. He agrees to act as a guinea pig, drinks it and begins to shrink. She appears on stage with an over-sized body reminiscent of the Queen of Lilliput, Gulliver's Travels it while he is gradually reduced. If science is a cross between a large and modern un'Atena devouring mother, he is the eternal Son, the man cut in half, even reduced to a pure and abstract male principle. When the size become those of the sperm, the man decides to commit suicide back in the vagina of her: when this happens, the scientist, in his sleep - that is, unconsciously - has an orgasm.
After this scene, Almodovar returns to the main story: we see Benigno tells the final story ends and wash Alicia.
The film goes back to Marco, a journalist. It's on a beach far away from Spain by the newspaper and learned that Lydia, the bullfighter, is dead, and decides to return. Call a benign but can not talk to him, because in the meantime the nurse has been jailed on charges of having sexually abused Alicia.
The woman, in fact, is pregnant and the is he responsible. Identifying with the man's sperm Benigno silent film acting (in the sense that psychoanalysis gives the word), a behavior that is both arrest, criminal and innocent. The act made him liable to the obvious impact on the reality principle, its a crime that leads him to internment in a psychiatric prison. The contemporary revival of Alicia from the coma, however, is also at odds with the logic and borders on the mystery and miracle and can not be accepted neither by logic nor by the worldly science. The awakening of Alicia, however, can not even redeem the act done by Benigno and can only live with that gesture, as if the two events belong to two different orders that are grazed but can not meet. This is what we call tragic, because the tragedy has no solutions, or rather has not if you stay within the rational order of discourse. The catharsis is a shift from this order and the entrance to another: the surrender to the mystery and reconciliation through the same emotion. Marco's tears on the grave of benign, some not being able to escape internment, kills himself "to be reunited with Alicia" (which he still believes in a coma or dead), along with the dance of souls that is the show that was Alicia prepare before the accident, are the two moments of cathartic film.
The show also assist Alicia, convalescent, and Mark. The two look at each other at a distance and broke an immediate sympathy. He, Mark, is the man who has metabolized his Oedipal conflict (so that his parents never speaks throughout the film because they need it most) and may be open to women, she is no longer the Sleeping Beauty and may be open to the affair. The dancing teacher, however, warns Mark and throws her a dirty look with loving care: "Nothing is easy!" And, in fact, is the dance of the soul that goes into the final scene in the film: a show of life, death and rebirth, which alludes to a sexual encounter, but on stage, not in the pit where Mark and Alicia continue to look! Maybe you will meet, but talking to her is not a movie with a happy ending, if ever at the end happy or comforting, or cathartic.
The meeting, in a loving relationship between two individuals can be born free and created for themselves a second time, after being dead to their complex, because the biological birth is not enough. Not even the second birth, however, is a guarantee, opens only one possibility. Moreover, even the end of Almodovar's other films we resubmit the same situation: I think the wonderful All About My Mother, where the cathartic moment is with the return of the transsexual father's dying with him his mother reads the diary of the dead child in a accident and at that time is restored to a heartbreaking moment, the core that had created that life.
Almodovar, Talk to Her in tackles for the umpteenth time, the theme of love relationships and desire, beyond the norms of Christian morality (and not just Catholic), with a penalty of ethics and a sense of tragedy that has few parallels not only in other contemporary artists, and we still turn to a director to continue this tribute to Europe and the cinema.
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SUN.
In The Ignorant Fairies and more recently against Saturn, harmony can only be sought in the community that would be simplistic to define homosexual tout court. Ferzan Ozpetek seems to assume that you can not find happiness in a relationship to two, whether or not heterosexual character. Whether Almodóvar for Ozpetek, single persons, taken in themselves, are all fragile, still missing something, good examples alternate with sudden falls, empty chasms that open like in personality that seemed solid and well structured until recently before. While Almodovar, however, there are only individuals and their relationships to Ozpetek is the ideal community of fairies ignorant that they can find each other compensation which enables everyone to continue to live.
In the first of two films, the contrast between the nuclear family and the ideal community is clear. The tragic death of a man who looks like a normal husband, opens the doors on its second life. His wife, following the faint traces of a mysterious message and an equally mysterious phone number, finds herself in a world of relationships other than totally calm and home I thought I knew. What he discovers, as well as the homosexual relationship of her deceased husband, is an aggregate of people, from whom she - despite bitter quarrels between intolerance and misunderstanding - feels increasingly drawn to. It is thanks to them that will re-open to life and loving relationship: first meeting with a young man who goes on a journey that returns but because he feels the call of the communities than that of any other possible relationship with the man who had been the companion of her husband. In
Saturn against the community is the same, the contrast with the nuclear family less clear, indeed, the least convincing part of the film is its final one, perhaps too conciliatory with the original family of the late Lorenzo, although it must be said that the character mother's hairdresser and her dialogue with Sergio is one of the most extraordinary film. The interview takes place in the big house, where Minnie and her husband went after having learned of the death of his son. Minnie tries to hide his injury awkwardly homophobic:
"Minnie:" She is so? "
Sergio: "So how? "
Minnie:" Like them, like him short. "
Sergio:" Sorrowful? "
Minnie:" No. .. Gay! "
Sergio:" I Gay? No, I'm queer. "
Minnie:" Oh, here. But it is not the same thing? "
Sergio:" Yes, but I'm old. "" The protagonists of Saturn
are against David, a writer of fairy tales at home which gathers a large group of friends: Banking Antonio married to psychologist Laura Angelica flower-loving. Nival Then, Turkish interpreter Kate married Robert, a former partner of David, with whom he maintained a friendly relationship, but now lives with David Lawrence. Finally, Roberta, friend and colleague of Lorenzo, a weakness for Astrology with drug problems.
The love plots among themselves and with others, and others outside the core group, are common to other films Ozpetek.
During a dinner at the house of David, however, Lorenzo has taken ill and fell into a coma. On the bench of the hospital community must face the irreparable loss, but also the difficulty of living death in full transparency. According to the law they have no relationship with Lorenzo, are just friends. Fortunately, as always happens in Italy, the opprobrium of the rule being filled in by humanity of the protagonists: the nurse, doctors, until the family came from Lorenzo, won the initial distrust exhibited by his father in particular, comes into line with the community. In the end it is the group to provide a barrier to contain the pain as well as excess.
Ozpetek, unlike Almodovar, faces the crisis of the institution with more radical family, both at the same time denouncing the hypocrisy that governs relations, is the paradoxical lack of care and protection of its components, what the latter that should be taken for granted. Moreover, the statistics are clear: the majority of crimes against the person (from rape to murder, through a series of intermediate oppression and persecution of various kind), occurs within the household. Ozpetek offers original answer to the problem of mediation between eros and emotional security, the combination of the traditional bourgeois family, heterosexual and Catholic is unable to provide. 2
utopia represented by this family exogamic modern tension that animates this, like other films by the Italian-turkish. The community, which for convenience will continue to define you ignorant, trying to build a network of relationships that are between group solidarity, the need for security that everyone was entitled Eros and the instinct that is played outside of this context of emotional security. Ozpetek offers an original idea, far from the way that films offer as holliwoodiani examples from both celebrated and forgotten today, Kramer vs. Kramer a few years ago, the host of plays and comedies. In the latter, in particular, largely dominated by a few clicks.
The first one could be defined as a simplification of romantic love. Every relationship of love is always eternal (even the fifth marriage) because Eros is like a phoenix rising from its ashes and that the removal of previous loves.
The lighter version is shown in films and comedies where, passing through a stormy relationship, and another, all come together (old and new couples, old and new children), some important moments of the year, for example Thanksgiving or Christmas: with goats, pigs, smiles, many gaffes and the same jingle bells. In both cases, the relational model based on the household is not in any way problematized, but repeated and inflated by an infinite repetition compulsion.
and literature.
Let me conclude this essay with a return to literature, asking several questions: why the sense of tragedy does not dwell in or near most literary works, despite the appalling tragedies in the last century, and the moonlight of this, we are throwing him every day? Because the voltage utopian in the sense that I have tried to trace and seize the film dwells so little considered in works of fiction contemporary? Why prevail dystopias, which are something other than tragedy, because it does not provide any cathartic moment?
beginning with the tragic. Contemporary fiction seems to shrink, with very few exceptions (Cormac McCarthy, for example), or you need to go back in time to the works of writers like Primo Levi, a poet like Celan. There are few works that have within them the power, unless you intend for his parody tragedy or tension utopian harmony and the factories of much contemporary fiction that mimics the books of the Harmony collection.
The answers concerning the tragedy we know them.
they say, going to Niestche, which has become the tragic impossible in the modern world, since the gods are dead. Apart from the arrogance of that statement is intended to be universal and should instead be restricted to Western culture, it is not entirely true even in our context. If that were the case, would also apply to the cinema instead of tragic works in the sense of the word has proposed and is proposing the time. A list of influential filmmakers certainly incomplete but I think may suffice: Theodor Drayer, Ingmar Bergman, Liliana Cavani, Marco Bellocchio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars Von Trier, Pedro Almodovar. Neither is true, as the dawn of cinema could be said that this is possible because the film was directed by the masterpieces literature of the past and filmed the story in a chronological sense, overlaying the camera to the linear time fixed by the convention of the omniscient narrator. It was a cinema that had not yet developed its own independent language with its own syntax and grammar. Today even the opposite tends to happen: the cinema is to provide narrative models that are thoroughly looted by contemporary novelists, although almost always taking the example of the so-called special effects: think of the first chapter of Veronesi's Quiet Chaos.
I believe that the current situation has been determined by a double pincer: the ever increasing reliance on best-seller that distinguishes American culture and suicide native place in Europe on horseback he 60s and 70s. Let's start with this second problem, and then from our house.
More and more, is not used to distinguish between entertainment and literary fiction. Since some garde critics, I think Julien Gracque in France and in Italy Umberto Eco, for example, have made it impossible to distinguish between high and low literature, it became obvious to confuse the two plans, not only, but from a vision of this kind arises, as a corollary, a sort of break lines of criticism. The risk we run, and in a context like the Italian provincial him run more, that is, as always being the epitome. In United States, where the mingling of art and entertainment, culture and cultural industry is much more deep rooted, have begun to introduce some distinctions. There are libraries of literature where you can buy Melville, but not Stephen King or Dan Brown to buy their books should go to other libraries, classified in other ways. From The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius we can live together in alphabetical order on the same shelf, with the latest fashion doodle.
The problem of the absence of criticism has also led to obvious phenomena of malpractice which is hard to ignore, because you can never do without a critical exercise by the same authors. If there is, however, the solid side of a self-critical, the extra duties performed by the writers in a broader measure than in the past and in the absence of impartial instance, leads to fatal games of exchange and training of critics who are actually fulfilling the reviewers command to the needs of the publishing of reference. If something escapes from the shackles of this narrow pincers are praiseworthy exceptions and not more than that. Remain of course the authors who continue to go their own way and this could also mean that takes place in a dungeon (and the assumption would be positive), what was once taken for granted and that is that art is never a time , or outdated, according to the definition of beautiful Marina Cvetaieva.
If so, however, this would undermine a fundamental principle born in Europe between 700 and 800: that the public as customers would have freed the artist from the protection of the prince. Not only this has not happened but the public has created a much greater dependence: the concept of democracy can not be unduly extended it to all. Art is always and aristocratic elite, even if it is an elite cross, at least partially free from dependence on factors that Marx would say in a language structure. The enlightened one person, one vote principle, unduly to transpose into other fields, it produces bad democracy and degradation. Nor can we more than welcome as walk the path suggested by Walter Benjamin few decades ago: the politicization of art as an aesthetic response to the policy. Drowned in the art that hypothesis is reduced to propaganda, in the opprobrium of socialist realism, the inability to distinguish between poetry and slogans, speech and art, as happened in the years after '68.
The second aspect is the dependence on best-seller, a kind of plague that does not concern only the publishing world but a system of economic and social relations that go beyond. The average lifespan of a book in bookstores, according to all the experts, is two months, if Dante Alighieri's Divine released today Comedy would not enter the charts. The books, libraries, must move at the same dizzying speed and glowing with which they move the financial movements: the best seller is the cultural equivalent of 'repos', a financial contract that promises amazing profits within three months and that needs to be supported by continuous movement of capital invested by a financial product to another, in a dizzying swirl where the investor does not know where and how to invest and why. For the consumer of books things are even worse for his finances, there is a consultant which, with anguish and relief at the same time, the poor unfortunate choices in delegating its entirety. In the chaos books does not help anyone experienced the bookseller is now a figure who belongs to the archeology of knowledge and libraries are the stores where they sell everything.
who tried to oppose quest'andazzo is a bold slice of small publishers (not all) who live precariously on the edge (from a economic point of view) of the big publishers.
As always and as always, art can only come away from the world as news and background noise. The concept of enlightened public, has not liberated the artist from the sovereign, but that massively increase the number of writers and artists, which means the number of those who are at least partly dedicated to this activity completely free. In the past this would not be possible, but the art accessible to all is a myth of modernity that will be dropped behind us. The artist is only if you really want to be and must learn to say no a lot and very few, as always, for thousands of years now. This retreat from the Enlightenment and democratic assumption, however, is not intended as a simple and impossible to return to the past. The expansion of public law or access the products of art is not in itself negative, provided, however, that you know to come to terms with the diversity of taste, with the need to focus, in this sense, what most lacking in contemporary Italian fiction it is a task in itself from critics.
European cinema has been more capable in recent years, to resist more effectively and with reliance on best sellers, both to the approval of the language, dictated by the majors. Why this happened is not easy to understand and is not the subject of this essay, but it happened and I believe that this can be a valuable lesson for everyone because it means that resistance is possible.
a photographer friend actually made me understand how the manipulation takes place, showing a photographic record of a famous review of tourism promotion. The photograph in question, full-page, showing a glimpse of the savanna, from bright colors, perfect; animals in the background, all you need to create a captivating image for tourists. In fact more than a bush made him think of a public garden. In fact that was not the original image. Armed with a lens, the photographer friend of mine showed me all the work that had been made to remove, to clear the savannah so tame as possible. It had been done away with even the lion intent to the meal, perhaps because they are too inappropriate to the image of a tranquil paradise that you wanted to suggest.
2 I could argue that there are also secular families, but keep the same stop my definition of family mono nuclear Catholic because basically, at least in Italy, I can not find a fresh take on the issue. The last serious debate on the issue was thanks to the then magazine Il Manifesto, in the referendum on divorce. From then on it was basically stopped thinking on this issue. The recent revival of interest around the so-called civil unions and I say or the debate that is open after the innovative standards undoubtedly introduced by the Government of Zapatero in Spain, do not move that much about the issue since the lesbian and gay movement claims for itself the concept of family, creating a situation which sometimes takes on the characteristics of the paradox. The model, in short, holding, despite recent criticisms by the movement 'We emerge from the silence'.
