terça-feira, 29 de maio de 2007

Rivette

“One could see there successively at 6:30 p.m. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and at 8:30 Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls. And it was fabulous precisely because one could see Griffith and Warhol together on the same night. Because it was then that one realized that there are not two or three kinds of cinema, there’s only one cinema. It was the perceptual interaction of the present and the past of the cinema that was so exciting.”

...

After years of obscurity, Jacques Rivette's puzzling Out 1 finally makes it to Chicago.

sexta-feira, 18 de maio de 2007

Amok, l'âge de la terre

Il est plus facile de décrire l'impression qu'a causée le film que le film lui-même qu'il est plus facile au narrateur lovecraftien de décrire l'affect shoggothique que l'aspect de la créature. Comme le narrateur en question, on a envie d'écrire: "Tous les mots que je pourrai tracer seront incapables de suggérer au lecteur l'horreur de l'effroyable spectacle que s'offrit à nous." Spectacle, on l'aura compris, qui du moins ne manque pas de grandeur - ce qui ne fut pas forcément le cas de maints films de la Biennale, y compris couronnés. Mais on ne couronne pas un monstre, on le fuit ou le tue. En gros, c'est ce qu'on fait (l'un et l'autre) les spectateurs, la presse, le jury. Et même si c'est compréhensible, c'est dommage, car on a détruit là une bonne partie des chances (si tant est que le terme de chance soit celui qui convient) de voir en Europe cette oeuvre stupéfiante.

L'AGE DE LA TERRE, comme son nom le suggére, ne vise à rien de moins qu'à retracer tout à la fois l'histoire du monde, celle du Brésil - ancienne et récente -, à prendre à la fois la mesure de ce pays-monstre, de ce pays-continent, et de la politique planétaire. N'allez pas croire que cela signifie que les analyses y abondent. D'un bout a l'autre de ce film, à une ou deux oasis près de rationalité journalistique, le vu-mètre ne cesse d'osciller entre la transe de macumba et les vociférations les plus effrayantes. La caméra semble maniée par les moignons putrescents de quelque fongosité blasphematoire (pour rester dans le style lovecraftien). Si le point y est, ou la lumière, ou le cadre, on croirait que c'est par hasard. Avec ça, un montage d'une sauvagerie inouïe, un montage d'assassin, de fou du hachoir. Le metteur en scène apparaît à l'image une ou deux fois, c'est pour montrer un visage de damné, donner dans le vide un violent coup de machette sanglant. Quant au discours, au "sens", qu'en dire? Tous les énoncés y passent, comme à la moulinette: révolutionnaires, marxistes, tiers-mondistes, fascistes (et des plus dégoûtants; ironie sur les tortures, "j'ai été torturée, extrêmement torturée, j'avoue en avoir éprouvé du plaisir", dit une jeune femme, symbole de la bourgeoisie intellectuelle de gauche), enfin macumbistes et chrétiens. Le Christ apparaît sous les traits d'un Noir du sertão, qui multiplie le Coca-cola. Etrange, étrange film, qui fait paraître de sages et pâles exercices les précédents de l'auteur.

Jamais je n'ai eu à ce point, en présence d'un film, l'impression de me trouver devant une terra incognita absolue, cette énigme, le tiers-monde. Jamais rien ne m'a donné, dans le cinéma, ce sentiment d'étrangeté continentale, comme ce film de Glauber Rocha. Mais aussi, de singularité désespérée, de solitude panique. Cette monstruosité traversée de clowns allégoriques hurlant sans fin les mêmes phrases, comme des plans-séquences qui n'en finissent pas, cette destruction in progress, au milieu du film d'auteur, off, tente de définir, d'un torrent verbal. J'ai retenu deux mots: desperaçao lysergica. "Un film de desperaçao lysergica." Provisoirement, on peut s'accrocher à cette définition.

PASCAL BONITZER, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 317, novembre 1980

terça-feira, 15 de maio de 2007

domingo, 13 de maio de 2007

Leone at War

If, like perception, film is a true hallucination, some films really are hallucinations. They persist as an image, a single image. Or a theme. Or a theme tune by Morricone. Everybody's seen them, or thought they've seen them or thought that everybody had seen them. They're no longer to be distinguished from the impact they had, the landscape they've opened up or the clones that have followed them. So much so that whenever we come across them on the small screen we are staggered when we find in them again that state of freshness they - and we too - had at their birth. This is the case for instance with Sergio Leone's first three westerns (called 'Spaghetti westerns' no doubt because one hundred per cent durum wheat is probably the stuff of good humanists, of which their director, deep down, is one) and with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which FR3 will show on Monday evening.

The film starts with what in the end was left of it, with that exhibitionism that makes entrances into shot and into the action comparable (this has been observed so often that it's a cliche) to the great arias of verismo opera. Three actors who belong to three worlds of the cinema (Wallach comes largely from working with Kazan, Van Cleef was Ford's second string and Eastwood isn't Eastwood yet) indulge in three jubilatory recitatives and slowly prepare to argue about a lost haul of $200,000. Everything is enacted through their eyes ( rather than their acting), eyes that are there more to be seen than to see. Whether widened or narrowed and mean, these organs of sight do not prevent their owners from missing the only reality of the time: the Civil War.

For this is where the TV re-viewing of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly turns out to be an absorbing experience. The real film does not resemble the memory it left behind. There aren't three but four characters, and where it takes forty minutes to introduce the first three, it takes even longer to allow the fourth - the war - to creep into the picture and carry more and more weight. So much so that between the moment when we learn that the booty is buried in Sad Hill cemetary and the moment when we finally reach it, the word cemetary (and its image) has changed meaning. The film's undertaking is to remind us that in a cemetary there are more corpses of dead soldiers than buried treasure. How subtle is Leone's didactisism; there's no mention of a war, it's encountered in the course of the film and suddenly you realise it's been there for a long time and is horrifying.

The beauty of this film and what makes it a great film about War in general is that Sergio Leone isn't mixing genres. Either out of artistic honesty or out of a prescient awareness of what awaits the cinema. He comes up with a new way of showing bodies streaming along in dust coats and figures adrift in the desert of a landscape too vast for them. Tautological figures, disconnected from virtually everything, their only know-how a touch of cunning and a lot of style when it comes to handling objects. Faces that advertising, fashion and the video promo have looked at a lot thereafter. At the same time, once the screen fills up and the war crams it with little flesh and blood soldiers, Leone films differently. In wide shot, with the greatest delicacy and a respect for distances and characters that can only remind us of that other great sentimentalist who had little time for photogenic slaughter: John Ford. Precisely as if Leone were prolonging Ford's legacy for a few years while simultaneously showing the new landscape, the one coming after and altogether of a different order.

It can happen (though this is a defect) that a film contains several films. It is seldom that a film is located precisely at the crossroads of the paths between a classical art whose secret will be lost and baroque proposals whose formulae will lead to a calamity. It is seldom that a director is honest (or schizoid?) enough simply to juxtapose, without any possible reconciliation, what it scarcely compatible any longer. It is even more unusual that instead of suffering from this split, his talent thrives on it. It is probably the later Leone of Once Upon A Time in America who will suffer, when he wants to restore the classicism at the heart of a cinema that will by then have absorbed Leone's mannerisms beyond recognition. In 1966 it is different. Sergio Leone is universally ahead of the times and universally behind the times, he is therefore timely.

Serge Daney

1 December 1988

quarta-feira, 9 de maio de 2007

sexta-feira, 4 de maio de 2007

terça-feira, 1 de maio de 2007

- Observe, e simplifique.

Bruno Cremer, Un jeu brutal.

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