Moral Ambiguity, Greyness and Imperfection in the Classic, 'Once Upon a Time in the West'

By Shaun Huston 23 June 2011

There are at least four known edits of Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) in existence, with a fifth reputedly available as a bootleg. In the US, there have been home versions released on VHS, on DVD, as both a three-disc “Special Collector’s Edition” and a film-only disc, and through iTunes. The subject of this review is last month’s Blu-ray release of the film.

This accessibility, and proliferation of versions and formats, is at once a boon and a barrier for criticism. On the one hand, each reissue is a new opportunity to draw attention to a film’s particular virtues, including movies originally seen decades ago and that may pre-date the critic.

On the other hand, that same opportunity, taken up by enough writers, produces a mass of repetitious reflection. The Movie Review Query Engine lists 62 reviews of Once Upon a Time in the West. Rotten Tomatoes has 49. And those lists are only a sampling of online criticism, a sampling that does not begin to approach offline sources, including archived reviews from the ‘60s and academic criticism in books and journals.

While every film, regardless of vintage, will always be new to somebody, when addressing a widely known and well-worn work, justifying one’s own work seems to call for novel insight or an original angle of approach. Particularly where the movie in question is an acknowledged “classic”, it’s easy to fall back on simple celebration or well-rehearsed appreciations. This kind of writing does no harm, but it doesn’t add to the understanding of a work, either.

Where viewers and consumers have access to a wealth of both films and writing about film, good, or at least interesting, criticism requires experimentation and innovation. One such experiment is Nicholas Rombes’ 10/40/70 exercise. Rombes, an associate professor of English at Detroit Mercy, explains 10/40/70 at The Rumpus:

This column is an experiment in writing about film: what if, instead of freely choosing which parts of the film to address, I select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case and for future columns, the 10-minute, 40-minute, and 70-minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as a guide to writing about the film, keeping the commentary as close to possible to the frames themselves? No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. Constraint as a form of freedom (see “10/40/70 #1: Star Ship Troopers”, 31 March 2010).

As Rombes implies, what a critic typically selects to highlight, which shots, which characters, which themes, is driven by the writer’s predilections, theoretical and aesthetic, and, in some cases, by the larger consensus that coalesces around a film. By starting from a series of essentially arbitrary images, the critic consents to being forced out of their preferred references and will often be compelled to address aspects and moments that they would otherwise ignore.

For this review, I decided to use Rombes’ experiment as a way to engage with Once Upon a Time in the West in a new way. I have adapted the 10/40/70 exercise into an assignment for my college classes, and when I do that, I change the time codes to five, 45, and 85 minutes. I apply those indices here to the 166-minute “restored version” of the film featured on the Blu-ray, and, in a nod to the almost three-hour running time, I pull an additional frame from 125 minutes.

At five minutes is a close-up of Jack Elam’s gunfighter, credited as “Snaky” and as a member of Frank’s (Henry Fonda) gang of killers for hire, currently working for rail baron, Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti). In the background of the shot is another member of the gang and a vast expanse of sun-baked desert, transected by railroad tracks which run past the station where Snaky and two others are waiting to “greet” Charles Bronson’s “Harmonica”, the film’s protagonist.

Snaky’s reclined posture and casual demeanor signify his comfort with violence and killing, a comfort that is ultimately disrupted by Harmonica’s utter lack of fear once he arrives. The film’s narrative is structured around several such battles of will, each one of which is won by Harmonica, but even he cannot face down the closing of the Frontier by the industrial revolution and the coming of commerce, both of which are present in this image in the form of the railroad and the rail station.

This frame is pulled from the 12-minute opening credit sequence. Heard but not seen is the tapping of the telegraph, the creaking of hinges, the buzz of insects and the rustle of the wind. Once Upon a Time in the West employs a sound design that amplifies environmental noise for dramatic effect, almost making them part of the musical soundtrack. Leone and his sound department juxtapose mechanical and organic sounds throughout the film, underscoring the clash of wilderness and machine that also plays out in the natures of the human characters.

At 45-minutes is a medium close-up of Harmonica near the end of his first encounter with Cheyenne (Jason Robards), pictured in the foreground, and from whose position we view Harmonica. The scene takes place in a roadside bar and includes Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), on her way to her husband’s home where, unknown to her, her new family lays dead at the hands of Frank and his gun thugs.

Both Cheyenne and Harmonica exude a cool confidence, seen here in Harmonica’s easy smile, though the older man has a lighter affect. In contrast to the two outlaws, the bartender is tense, worried, like most in the bar, that the meeting of these two men will erupt in violence. In fact, this moment is the seed of a partnership, one that ultimately enfolds Jill. While neither Cheyenne nor Harmonica is a “good” man, in relation to Frank they are at least honorable, and both are personally wronged by Frank. This also provides their bond with Jill.

At 85-minutes is a medium long shot of Frank, ducking to enter the main car of Morton’s traveling home/office. He has just captured Harmonica and is beginning to show himself to be a liability to Morton, attracting unwanted attention and complications to the conduct of business, as well as developing his own ambitions of becoming rich and settled.

The refined and elaborate design of the interior of the car makes the train an even more pronounced and visible symbol of civilization, and the end of the Frontier, than it already is without such detailing. That the gunfighter does not quite “fit” in the car entry is another reminder of the approaching social irrelevance of men like Frank, Cheyenne, and Harmonica.

Finally, at 125 minutes is an extreme close-up of Frank as he exits the hotel where the McBain family property has been auctioned off to Harmonica. Frank sent members of his gang to disrupt the auction and assure an outcome to his own benefit, but the ever implacable Harmonica, with the backing of Cheyenne, is not intimidated.

Frank offers Harmonica $5001.00, one dollar more than the winning bid, for the property. The value of the property lies in its water rights, which makes it a natural location for a train station. This was to be the McBain family’s fortune.

Frank leaves the building having had his offer rejected by Harmonica. Unnerved by this loss and by his ongoing inability to place the other man in his memory, Frank here appears alert and wary as he looks out across the town of Flagstone from the hotel porch. Perhaps he also senses that something is wrong; Morton has contracted some of Frank’s men to kill their leader, men who are at that moment positioning themselves to do that very deed. Frank escapes this ambush with Harmonica’s help, but this is only a reprieve that sets up their final confrontation.

The extra features on the Blu-ray are carried over from the “Special Collector’s Edition” DVD, and include: a commentary track from interviews with directors Alex Cox, John Carpenter, and John Milius, film historians Christopher Frayling and Sheldon Hall, and cast and crew, notably, Claudia Cardinale; a trio of short features on Leone and the making of the film, which incorporate contributions from the commentary cast; a short documentary on the railroad; two stills galleries, and a theatrical trailer.

The one difference in the features package between the earlier DVD set and the Blu-ray is the inclusion of two versions of the film, a “restored” cut and a “theatrical” edit, on the newer disc. The “theatrical” version is the one featured on the DVD. The “restoration” includes about a minute of previously excluded footage. The differences between the two versions are marginal.

In digital high definition, the picture reveals details, particularly in the weathered, ruddy, often grimy faces of the actors, that have likely not been seen with this kind of clarity before. This in no way detracts from the viewing of the film, if anything it highlights the care and craft that went into the production, but Once Upon a Time in the West is, literally and figuratively, a movie about the dirt under the fingernails of its characters, and how everyone has some of that dirt, no matter how they might appear on the outside or to those in society at large. Somehow that deliberate moral ambiguity, that greyness and imperfection, seems more at home in an analog context than in a digital one.

L’originale è qui:

http://www.popmatters.com/review/143872-once-upon-a-time-in-the-west/

Un film sulla volontà di non morire

   Dice Alain Resnais “ Ritengo che se analizzassi troppo seriamente i miei film sembrerei un sonnambulo che si veglia: smetterei di camminare oppure cadrei per terra”. Dice Alain Resnais “ Una delle domande che il film si pone è questa: noi siamo ciò che possiamo essere oppure diventiamo ciò che gli altri fanno di noi nel loro giudizio?”. Dice Alain Resnais “ Sono in realtà dei personaggi di cui uno sta per morire e gli altri si interrogano su questa prossima morte. Ma non sono sicuro che tutto ciò porti ad un film sulla morte, semmai a un film sulla volontà di non morire. Clive, il vecchio scrittore, rifiuta di cedere ed il film descrive la sua lotta contro la morte”.

E dove Bunuel, Visconti, Losey, Bergman e Antonioni sono più pessimisti, o più ottimisti, delle premesse da cui partono, Alain Resnais, più realisticamente, indica la possibile fine fra il suicidio e l’eutanasia.



La bella ed il gladiatore

OGGI

Fabiola di “ mastro “ Alessandro Blasetti è principalmente la storia della Universalia Film e di Salvo D’Angelo suo conducente. Salvo D’Angelo da buon siciliano all’antica era legato al Vaticano ed al Banco di Sicilia ed attraverso questi due “ Enti “ razzolava i soldi da investire nelle produzioni cinematografiche.

 Nel 1949 la Universalia e Salvuccio si assicurarono il fallimento artistico di Fabiola, per contro ebbero il riconoscimento ed i dovuti osanna di tutto il mondo per la produzione di quello che ancora oggi rimane il miglior film italiano di tutti i tempi: La terra trema di Luchino Visconti.

 Martin Scorsese nel suo Viaggio in Italia ricorda il  lavoro di Blasetti come il film della sua infanzia, catturato dalle lotte dei gladiatori e dei martiri cristiani masticati dai leoni.

 Oggi si arriva a stento al suo finale tanto è prolisso di scene inutili. Mario Mattoli nelle sue memorie dice che mentre il “ mastro “ andava avanti e indietro per le arene calzando i soliti stivaloni, ebbe il tempo di confezionare sette film, che nessuno per altro rammenta più. I difetti sono tutti da riscontrare in quel ammasso variopinto di sceneggiatori, che coprivano tutto l’arco costituzionale, chiamati a comporre le parti sceniche.

  Quel che  ancora di Fabiola regge accanto a schegge di buon cinema sono le apparizioni di alcuni attori: Michel Simon, Gino Cervi, Paolo Stoppa e perfino il protagonista maschile Henri Vidal bello e prestante quanto bastava. Delude Massimo Girotti, per una volta tanto, che vi interpreta la parte di Sebastiano, e ben prima del Sebastiane di Derek Barman, con tratti gay per usare una classificazione moderna, insensibile al fascino muliebre di Elisa Cegani.

  Sorprendono, accanto allo svestimento di alcune comparse femminili sulla croce, che irritò la parte vaticana della produzione, alcune angolazioni fatte da Blasetti a Michéle Morgan, con le luci date da Mario Craveri, che la rendono più carina e sensuale di quanto non fosse, scene anche queste poco gradite al Centro Cattolico Cinematografico.

  Del resto se ritorno infante all’infanzia sono d’accordo con Scorsese e mi entusiasmo come se fossi dentro il cinema Loreto di Platì sognando elmi, corazze, spade e reti che intrappolano il gladiatore avversario.

 



Vattene Eugenio

OGGI

AL CINEFORUM PEPPUCCIO TORNATORE

“ Erano loro a darmi il senso, la misura della distruzione morale del paese: i bambini “.

Vittorio De Sica L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti 1935 – 1959 a cura di Franca Faldini e Goffredo Fofi, Feltrinelli

   Luigi Comencini ha diretto spesso l’obiettivo della cinepresa verso il mondo dell’infanzia. Prima e dopo di lui altri registi hanno guardato ai bambini: Vittorio De Sica, il buon Peppuccio ed ultimo Kim Rossi Stuart. Il modello per tutti è da ricercare in quello che ancora rimane il capolavoro: Il  monello ( The kid ) di Charlie Chaplin del 1921.

   Di Comencini si ricordano in particolare: Proibito rubare in epoca neorealista, Incompreso a metà degli anni ’60, Un ragazzo di Calabria, successivo all’Eugenio ed anche il celebre Pinocchio confezionato per la TV.

   Nel 1980 quando girò Voltati Eugenio, sceneggiato con Massimo Patrizi, rivolse l’attenzione verso una coppia disastrata di ex sessantottini incapaci di tutto ma sopra ogni cosa di amare. In questo non erano i soli a rifiutare Eugenio; uniti a loro vi erano i genitori della coppia. L’unico che apre gli occhi al bambino e lo scarica nella strada è “ baffo “ ( Memé Perlini ). Tutti si preoccupano, tutti lo cercano ma le attenzioni ed i desideri sono rivolti oltre Eugenio.

   Chiara è la scena che si svolge nella caserma dei carabinieri ( genitori anche loro ) compreso il dialogo tra “ baffo “ ed il maresciallo. Giudicate voi quella realtà ancora immutata; è cambiato solo il modo di registrare i bambini per mezzo di camere: “ baffo “ parla di super otto, oggi si ricorre al digitale.

Acitrezza, ancora cinema

La foto dell'oggi è sempre di Carannante, i fotogrammi sono di G. R. Aldo

Filmografia ( parziale ) di Corrado Alvaro

Corrado Alvaro

San Luca ( RC ), 1895 - Roma, 1956

·  Casta diva   [1935] Sceneggiatura (dialoghi italiani)

·  IL DIARIO DI UNA DONNA AMATA   [1936] Sceneggiatura

·  UNA DONNA TRA DUE MONDI   [1936] Attori, Sceneggiatura

·  TERRA DI NESSUNO   [1939] Sceneggiatura

·  Fari nella nebbia   [1941] Sceneggiatura

·  SOLITUDINE   [1941] Soggetto, Sceneggiatura

·  UNA NOTTE DOPO L'OPERA   [1941] Sceneggiatura

·  Noi vivi   [1942] Sceneggiatura

·  FEBBRE   [1943] Soggetto, Sceneggiatura

·  LA CARNE E L'ANIMA   [1943] Sceneggiatura

·  LA STORIA DI UNA CAPINERA   [1943] Sceneggiatura

·  RESURREZIONE   [1943] Sceneggiatura

·  Carmela   [1944] Sceneggiatura (adattamento e dialoghi)

·  PATTO COL DIAVOLO   [1948] Soggetto, Sceneggiatura

·  Riso amaro   [1948] Sceneggiatura

·  Donne senza nome   [1949] Sceneggiatura

Ingmar Bergman meets Johan Sebastian Bach

The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 1)

By Chadwick Jenkins 13 October 2006

Last year, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman attended a seminar examining his filmic oeuvre. During a discussion led by Lutheran bishop Lennart Koskinen concerning the relationship between God and the characters in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), an audience member purportedly shouted out: “What do you believe in, Ingmar?” The director responded: “I believe in other worlds, other realities. But my prophets are Bach and Beethoven; they definitely show another world.”

Those readers unfamiliar with Bergman’s work may be slightly put off or perhaps mildly titillated by the seemingly casual blasphemy or they may feel that the aged Bergman is simply delivering himself of a well-worn platitude (that music somehow connects us to the eternal, the infinite, the divine) in order to deflect the issue at hand. Bergman enthusiasts will doubtless recognize a pained ambivalence that has haunted the auteur throughout his life and that has served as the driving force behind so many of his major artistic creations. They will easily call to mind the protagonist from The Seventh Seal (1957), a Crusader returning home, who proclaims his entire life worthless if he cannot know with security that God exists. In that film, even the personification of Death disavows any knowledge of God’s existence; he merely escorts the deceased from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead but he has no awareness of what lies on the other side.

Bergman’s oeuvre is rife with such metaphysical anxieties. There is the monstrous image of the Spider-God in Through a Glass Darkly, and the trivial Echo-God of Winter Light (1963) that merely reflects the notions of the believer while having no real substance of its own. Countless characters in his films suffer from the combination of a torturous need for the presence of God and the utter conviction that no such being could exist. Perhaps no other artist has wrestled so long and so publicly with the discomfiting consequences of his agnosticism.

However, I am interested here in the other part of his statement. In almost anyone else’s mouth, I would certainly consider the answer to be a platitude (perhaps innocent, perhaps meretricious) but throughout his career Bergman has evinced an undeniable affinity for and deep understanding of music. This is particularly true in relation to the music of JS Bach. (Although Beethoven was also cited as a prophet, his music appears far less often within Bergman’s films—most of its appearances occurring in a smattering of his early works.) Moreover, in film after film, Bergman seems to reserve Bach’s music for particularly revealing moments within the narrative structure. Bach’s music functions to give access to a rarified atmosphere of revelation and emotional depth; it reveals something previously inaccessible within a character (to him- or herself and to us as the audience). Far more than simple emotional underscoring, Bach’s music plays a vital role in several of Bergman’s films, partly as a narrator and partly as a character in its own right, its presence intangible and yet palpably felt.

Bach would seem to be a particularly suitable composer for Bergman to employ in his attempts to articulate his simultaneous longing for and denial of the existence of God. A composer with the highest artistic ideals and willing to make great demands on both himself and others in order to achieve those ideals, Bach worked the majority of his career as a composer for the Lutheran church. Bach’s prodigious output included several large-scale works for voices and orchestra (cantatas, passions, magnificats, and a mass), concertos, and numerous works for chamber groups or solo instruments. He was highly disciplined and incredibly productive. His father being a pastor, Bergman was raised in a highly religious Lutheran family (although he never felt entirely comfortable with the religious rites of Swedish Lutheranism). He too has been admirably productive and part of his attraction to Bach may indeed have derived from the Baroque composer’s diligence and devotion to his craft.

Indeed Bergman seems to have turned to Bach at a moment in his career when his life and filmic technique were undergoing a rather abrupt change in direction. In the spring of 1959, Bergman met the Estonian-born concert pianist Käbi Laretei. Bergman saw one of her performances broadcast on television and asked a mutual friend to introduce them. Despite the fact that she was married to the conductor Gunnar Staern, Laretei and Bergman soon moved together to Dalarna where he developed the screenplay for The Virgin Spring (1960) while she practiced piano. That September they were married (she was his fourth wife). Bergman later described the marriage:

It was all a new and heroic production which rapidly turned into a new and heroic disaster, two people chasing after identity and security and writing each other’s parts, which they accepted in their great need to please each other.

Perhaps in his search for an identity with Käbi, Bergman increasingly turned to music as a source of pleasure and artistic inspiration. He even announced that he was going to take a yearlong sabbatical from film and theatrical productions in order to study the music of Bach. Although he never actually took such a sabbatical, his newfound interest in the music of Bach registered palpably in the films that he now produced. Indeed, one might see a correlation between Bergman’s attempt to come to terms with Bach’s music and the striking change in his approach to filmmaking.

The earlier films of Bergman are mostly large productions with a varied cast. In these films, Bergman places an emphasis on Expressionistic gestures and a clever use of surreal imagery (e.g., the Expressionistic figure of Death in The Seventh Seal and the faceless clocks and animated funeral carriage of Wild Strawberries [1957]). However, beginning in the early ‘60s, most notably with Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman shifts toward what might be termed a chamber aesthetic for his films. Now the scripts focus in on a limited number of cast members (there are only four roles in Through a Glass Darkly) and consequently the characterizations are far deeper and more intense. The locations are typically few (Through a Glass Darkly takes place entirely around a house on the Baltic island of Fårö) and the plotlines largely eschew the vagaries of his earlier works to focus on a stark realism greatly heightened through the use of natural light employed by his new collaborator, cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It seems to be no accident that the first true “chamber film” by Bergman is also his first to feature the severe but darkly emotional chamber music of Bach.

Given his anguished agnosticism, it is perhaps not surprising that Bergman seems to have been drawn primarily to Bach’s secular works—particularly the suites for solo cello. And yet the filmmaker clearly emphasizes the spiritual aspect of this putatively secular music in his comments on Bach. According to Bergman, Bach’s music “gives us the profound consolation and quiet that previous generations gained through ritual. Bach supplies a lucid reflection of otherworldliness, a sense of eternity no church can offer today.” Bach’s secular music retains (perhaps in muted or even sublimated form) the spiritual transcendence of his more overtly religious work; it provides us with a kind of qualified religiosity more suitable to an age of disbelief and radical doubt, disdainful of sacral rites shrouded in gloomy mystery. And yet the sacred as a basic human need underwrites, according to Bergman, all of Bach’s music; the religious sublime serves as the indispensable substrate for the expressive human warmth that suffuses this music.

One only arrives at such expression through a steady devotion to rigorous work and a careful concern with craft. Through a Glass Darkly contains a short play that the young Minus wrote for his estranged father David, a successful but largely vapid author. In Minus’s parable, staged with the assistance of his sister Karin and her husband Martin, the artist-hero seeks to live a fully aesthetic life; he endeavors to make his life an actualization of pure Art. Thus he derides those who produce mere works of art—base products derived through vulgar craftsmanship—and yearns to attain the perfect form of Art through ceding his life to Death in a union with the spirit of a forlorn princess. However, when the bell tolls and it comes time to join the princess in this rarefied death, the artist-hero experiences doubts. Why give one’s life as an act of Art if no one witnesses the sacrifice other than Death? Why not use the despondency of the princess as material for mere works of art? “Such is life”, the young artist says, and wanders home to take a nap.

This parable cuts both ways. On the one hand, it is a condemnation of the approach to art that David has pursued. He has sacrificed the art of living to the feeble art of his writing. He has failed to engage with his children. He maintains a fatherly pretense, assures them that he misses them every minute that he is away, then immediately announces that he will soon depart for yet another trip abroad. He blames his writing for his absence; but it is clear that the writing permits him to evade the frayed bonds with his children. What is worse, Karin discovers in his diary that he is considering using her increasing insanity as she succumbs to schizophrenia as material for another book—a last-ditch attempt to attain some kind of Truth in his art. On the other hand, the parable warns against the illusion of a truly aesthetic life. One does not live a purely artistic existence; one must work, must produce. Such work, although it always threatens to be parasitic in relation to life, must nevertheless not be permitted to divorce itself from lived experience. A purely artistic life is a meretricious bit of false consciousness; it is pernicious insofar as it justifies a lack of engagement with the real conditions of living that must always inform art.

This engagement (an embrace that sometimes connotes comfort and at others mortal struggle) pervades those moments in Bergman’s films when the characters listen to or perform music. A particularly apt example comes from his film Autumn Sonata of 1978. This film centers on a visit between the elderly concert pianist Charlotte and her estranged daughters, Eva and the mentally ill Helena. In one scene, Eva recalls one of the rare visits of the eternally absent Charlotte and her cellist lover Leonardo. Helena, then in the early stages of her illness, childishly fell in love with the charming Leonardo and the cellist gave the child her first kiss. The following evening, Leonardo, mildly intoxicated, performed the Bach cello suites—Eva says that he played badly but beautifully. We hear the Sarabande from Bach’s suite in E flat major as we see Leonardo’s back and Helena facing him, sitting erect in a small wooden chair. Her face is resplendent. The music seems to articulate something simultaneously full of hope and foreboding; the slow dance adumbrates impending loss and yet captures a present tenderness. Perhaps, as Bergman insists, it does manage to supply a “lucid reflection of otherworldliness”, but it is an otherworldliness grounded in these sounds, produced at this moment; it is a palpable otherworldliness manifested in and through sound, produced by one corporeal being and received by another.

This, it seems to me, is the kind of religious transcendence that Bergman deems possible. It may seem rather paltry in comparison with the direct experience of an all-knowing, all-loving deity who suffuses the universe with a teleologically driven unfolding of divine intent and preordained meaning but it is the best we can hope to actually achieve and perhaps all that there really is. It is salvation of a limited but absolutely necessary kind, salvation that emerges in our feeble, stunted yet indispensable attempts to come to grips with each other. This salvation arises not in moments of divine grace but rather in moments of human effort.

It is no coincidence that the excerpt we hear in Autumn Sonata is the Sarabande from the E flat Bach cello suite. Of the ten films that feature the music of Bach, half of them (Through a Glass Darkly, Hour of the Wolf [1967], Cries and Whispers [1973], Autumn Sonata, and Saraband [2003]) employ a Bach sarabande; his latest (and what he promises to be his final) film is even named for the musical genre. The sarabande is a dance form that originated in Latin America and Spain (the zarabanda); the first literary mention of the genre comes from a 1539 manuscript from Panama. The dance was banned in Spain in 1583 owing to its lascivious movements and blatant obscenity. Nonetheless it remained one of the most popular of the energetic Spanish dances in the decades surrounding the turn of the seventeenth century. In the 1620s a French variant emerged that solidified the basic structure of the dance form and by the 1630s the rhythms of the dance began to take on the characteristic profile of a triple meter in a slow and stately tempo with an emphasis on the second beat. By the time of Bach, the sarabande was one of the slow movements within the standard Baroque dance suite. It now attained a somber and intense affect, consisted of balanced four-bar phrases, and was arrayed in a bipartite structure (AABB). Bach composed more sarabandes than any other dance type. In his hands, the genre takes on a meditative, pensive quality. The sarabandes of the cello suites in particular are redolent of a personal utterance, a furtive revelation whispered to a confidant.

The history of the sarabande would seem to have hermeneutic value for understanding Bergman’s employment of Bach’s music. Originating as a salacious entanglement of two sexualized bodies, the dance became the embodiment of balance and reserve, intense feeling communicated through poised eloquence—vivid corporeality transmogrified into ethereal spirituality and yet the original bodily element still undergirds that transcendence. The dance would seem to be the perfect metaphor for a human experience of muted divinity, a need that refuses to be squelched, and a desire that does not abate. The Bach sarabande exudes rational balance in its form and its symmetrical phrases while the sensual persuasiveness of human warmth sings through its mildly contrapuntal texture. In Bergman’s chamber films, the sarabande mirrors the director’s tendency to construct a film out of a series of duets, searching dialogues between characters that greatly need to communicate with each other but only manage to engage in a hopelessly desperate dance; they conform as best they can to the societal constraints imposed by the symmetry and the carefully wrought structure that surrounds them but they at all times threaten to emit a cry that cannot be contained, that somehow escapes those confines. The characters reach out to each other from across an abyss. What better way to represent that than through Bach’s music reaching out to us across the abyss of so much time and so much lost faith?

L'originale è qui:

http://www.popmatters.com/column/the-profound-consolation-the-use-of-bachs-music-in-the-films-of-ingmar-berg/

Il cinema non si addice a Luigi Chiarini

Isa Miranda, backstage di Patto col diavolo

Così quest’anno a Venezia, Patto col diavolo di Luigi Chiarini, cupo melodramma d’amore campagnolo, cercava visibilmente di trovare in una storia di conflitto fra pastori e boscaioli un alibi secondo il gusto del momento.

André Bazin in Che cos’è il cinema?, Garzanti ed., trad. Adriano Aprà

Ricomparve anche Chiarini. Scrissi per lui Patto col diavolo, con Amidei. Brutto. Brutto. Corrado Alvaro, autore del soggetto, quando lo vide in proiezione disse “ bene le pecore! “  Un film noioso, brutto, Chiarini aveva questo sogno della regia. Aveva già fatto Via delle cinque lune, che non era neanche malvagio. Volle fare questa cosa noiosissima e se l’era molto lavorata, con Amidei. La Miranda era una donna molto simpatica, che allora si metteva da per tutto come il prezzemolo. Ma era già un po’ scaduta come diva.

Suso Cecchi D’Amico

L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti 1935 – 1959 a cura di Franca Faldini e Goffredo Fofi, Feltrinelli

Il mare è amaro

Acitrezza com'è oggi nelle foto di Salvatore Carannante e com'è nel film LA TERRA TREMA di Luchino Visconti. 

Il paese, i paesani e Corrado Alvaro

Il mio paese è cinema a sua stessa insaputa. Ora che li ho visti, i miei compaesani, davanti alla macchina da presa, mi sono accorto che sempre, quando si muovono, quando si fermano, quando si raccolgono in gruppi o dai gruppi si separano, fanno 'inquadratura', anche se non sanno cosa essa sia. Tutto questo non è artificio loro né visione artificiosa in me che lo noto, ma deriva dalla naturale armonia di movimento e di atteggiamento di questa gente che ha alle spalle i greci antichi e gli arabi, cioè dei popoli armoniosi e ben proporzionati in ogni esteriore manifestazione di vita secondo una consimile proporzione morale che li regge ». Corrado Alvaro

"Sparlavano di me per mettermi in cattiva luce presso i miei compaesani"Dicevano che invece di scrivere libri avrei fatto meglio ad arruffianarmi con qualche ministro per riparare le strade di San Luca o sollecitare le pensioni sociali della povera gente. Mi hanno sobillato il paese intero, non ci posso mettere piede. Quando sento nostalgia, vado da mio fratello prete a Casignana, (*) un villaggio dirimpetto al mio. Da lì sto delle ore a contemplare San Luca. Laggiù, nel cimitero a ridosso della valle, riposano mio padre e mia madre". Corrado Alvaro

Corrado Alvaro, Quasi una vita, Bompiani ed.

(*) P. S. Massimo Alvaro fratello dello scrittore Corrado fu  compagno di studi al seminario di Gerace dello zio Ernesto Gliozzi jr. Subito dopo l’ordinazione aiutò lo zio Ernesto Gliozzi sen nella conduzione della parrocchia di Casignana ed alla morte dello zio, nel 1948, fu nominato parroco della stessa.

Verismo e tragedia in Aspromonte

   La retrospettiva sulla Calabria nel cinema prende avvio, è un dovere, con Patto col diavolo diretto nel 1949 da Luigi Chiarini e scritto da Corrado Alvaro; lo scrittore frequentò per qualche tempo, era il 1935, il Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia al suo nascere e diretto dal Chiarini stesso. L’opera ebbe la sua prima alla Mostra del Cinema di Venezia di quell’anno.

   La pellicola, qualunque sia il suo valore artistico,  irreperibile, perché i dirigenti del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, della Cineteca Nazionale ed i programmatori dei palinsesti RAI lo snobbano, portò male al regista come allo scrittore.  La critica lo stroncò ed i parlamentari calabresi quanto mai solleciti ne chiesero il sequestro per aver recato

 “ offese all’onore e alla dignità del popolo calabrese “.

   Lo scrittore tentò di ammalgamare il verismo verghiano con la tragedia greca, mentre Luigi Chiarini anticipò, quasi, le ricerche di Ernesto De Martino e Diego Carpitella. L ‘Aspromonte ed i paesi alle sue falde furono cinematografati per come erano allora: indietro nel tempo. Tutto questo lo si intuisce dai pochi documenti scritti e dalle foto di scena reperibili nel web.

   A questo punto mi sorge una proposta: dato che esiste un mezzo gratuito e divulgativo come You Tube, perché i capi del Centro Sperimentale e della Cineteca non editano periodicamente i film in loro possesso, anche per un breve periodo di tempo, come già fa l’Istituto Luce con i suoi documentari. A loro non costa niente digitalizzare le pellicole ed uploadarle nel tubo.