Pitagora al cinema

PYTHAGORAS RULES OK

 

Who believes in the transmigration of souls? A month ago, I would have said no-one, provided you distinguish the doctrine from that of reincarnation. But that was before I finally caught up with Le Quattro Volte, first shown at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. It is set in rustic Calabria, in the toe of Italy, where according to its director Michelangelo Frammartino a belief in animism still has a hold. He traces this back to the presence in Calabria in the sixth century BC of the Greek thinker Pythagoras, whose precise doctrine is elusive but who is credited with formulating the idea of the transmigration of souls. 2500 years later I learn from this film that it is still around.

The doctrine is a key to understanding the film which tells the story, in a narrative of great economy and elegance, of how when the goatherd dies, his soul migrates into the goat kid born immediately after his body is shut in its tomb, and how when the kid dies, lost in the forest and cold, its soul migrates into a mighty fir tree, and when following the village festival the tree is cut up and used for making charcoal, the tree’s soul metamorphoses into smoke escaping from the chimney in the last image of the film.

Something nagged at me that I had seen this before, and I tracked it down to Ozu’s penultimate film, The End of Summer (1961). In the final sequence, the family sits in the house mourning the passing of the Old Master. They then notice the smoke coming from the crematorium and stand to watch. Quite separately an elderly peasant couple washing vegetables by the river notice the smoke which, they comment, means that someone has died. She adds piously that it is pitiful if it is a young person instead of someone older. He agrees but adds that new lives necessarily replace those that die, a sentiment which she rounds off by pronouncing, 'How well nature works.' The final image is not of smoke but of crows by the river and then perched on memorial stones. They caw and a gong sounds. The end. (The crows are not baleful, as I first thought, merely part of nature and Ozu might even be suggesting that the man's soul is reincarnated in a bird.)

'How well nature works.' That is Frammartino's idea, surely, in Le Quattro Volte: that humans live in a natural environment which compels their attention and the necessity of connection, and you can best illustrate this by the idea of the soul in the human flitting into an animal then into a tree and then into smoke, absorbed in effect into the cosmos.

© Tim Cawkwell 2011

L'originale si trova qui:

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/film__religion/le_quattro_volte/

 

 

Il cinema francese come ...

Robert Bresson è il cinema francese come Dostoevskij il romanzo russo  e Mozart la musica tedesca. Jean-Luc Godard

Le notti bianche sul Pont Neuf



“Ad un tratto ebbi l’impressione che tutti volessero abbandonarmi e allontanarsi da me … quando tutta Pietroburgo spiegò le ali e se ne andò improvvisamente in campagna. Fu una sensazione terribile rimanere da solo e, in preda ad un profondo sconforto, vagai tre giorni interi per la città, senza capire minimamente cosa mi succedesse.”

In quel momento di sommovimento giovanile tra la fine dei ’60 e l’inizio dei ’70 – chi li ricorda più per quello che sono stati? – Robert Bresson gira il suo film primaverile. Si, perché gli altri variano dall’estate, all’autunno, all’inverno.

A Parigi, sul Pont Neuf, si incontrano un pittore e una sconosciuta giovane, salvata per intervento del primo dal  salto nella Senna.

Il pittore, giovane anch’esso,  subisce,  a causa del racconto dell’amore per un uomo, il fascino della ragazza e se ne innamorerà, sperando di sfuggire alla sua condizione di eterno sognatore.

Il ragazzo sogna l’amore della ragazza che sogna l’amore dell’uomo, il quale comparendo la toglierà dalla vista e dal sogno del salvatore.

Bresson trasferisce l’azione originale, notturna, della Pietroburgo dostoveskiana in una Parigi anch’essa notturna, caotica e rumorosa sebbene apparirà un  lungo momento canoro che contribuirà ad alimentare le illusioni sentimentali dei due protagonisti. Al pittore non rimarranno che immagini e rimpianti e un nastro magnetico con la sua voce che chiama la ragazza.

Il cinema di Robert Bresson è un cinema classico, se gli si po’ appioppare questo termine, e come i classici della letteratura ha bisogno di attenzione, pazienza, va visto come lo scorrere dell’acqua di una fiumara nostrale, quando, verso l’inizio dell’estate, le acque diventano rade e senza tumulti, sapendo che il mare le accoglierà a braccia aperte.

Akai tenshi (Angelo rosso) Yasuzo Masumura





Akai tenshi (Angelo rosso) Yasuzo Masumura

  Tradotto dai distributori in Nuda per un pugno di eroi, è davvero un’opera semplice come sembra? A prima vista si direbbe il film di un Fred Zinneman dotato di genio non solo perché fa venire in mente  Men (vittima di un analogo tradimento e divenuto, da Uomini, il meno austero Il mio corpo ti appartiene), ma perché al di là del contenuto e della storia, ha un aspetto e una scrittura molto americani, del tutto privi di divagazioni, ellissi o digressioni di qualunque tipo.



Oh, Ringoooooo

OGGI

La trama lasciatela scorrere, quello che conta è il nome Ringo, il  TECNICOLOR - TECNISCOPE, Fernando Sancho e Bruno Nicolai alle note musicali  con alle spalle il fantasma Morricone.

Quentin Corbucci: The way of Itay

Quentin Tarantino Tackles Old Dixie by Way of the Old West (by Way of Italy)

All images from Everett Collection, except illustration (second from right) from Photofest.

By QUENTIN TARANTINO

This year, Quentin Tarantino’s Christmas present to the world is “Django Unchained,” the violent story of a slave (Jamie Foxx) on a mission to free his wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the man who owns her (Leonardo DiCaprio). Tarantino’s biggest influences for the film, he says, were not movies about American slavery but the spaghetti westerns of the Italian director Sergio Corbucci. Here Tarantino explains how Corbucci’s movies — including “Django,” which lent its name to Tarantino’s title character — became the inspiration for his own spaghetti southern. (Interview by Gavin Edwards.)

Any of the Western directors who had something to say created their own version of the West: Anthony Mann created a West that had room for the characters played by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper; Sam Peckinpah had his own West; so did Sergio Leone. Sergio Corbucci did, too — but his West was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre. His characters roam a brutal, sadistic West.

Corbucci’s heroes can’t really be called heroes. In another director’s western, they would be the bad guys. And as time went on, Corbucci kept de-emphasizing the role of the hero. One movie he did, “The Hellbenders,” doesn’t have anybody to root for at all. There’s bad guys and victims, and that’s it. In “Il Grande Silenzio,” he has Klaus Kinski playing a villainous bounty hunter. I’m not a big fan of Kinski, but he’s amazing in this movie — it’s definitely his best performance in a genre movie. The hero of “Il Grande Silenzio” is Jean-Louis Trintignant, playing a mute. By taking his hero’s voice away, Corbucci reduces him to nothing.

And “Il Grande Silenzio” has one of the most nihilistic endings of any western. Trintignant goes out to face the bad guys — and gets killed. The bad guys win, they murder everybody else in the town, they ride away and that’s the end of the movie. It’s shocking to this day. A movie like [Andre de Toth’s] “Day of the Outlaw,” as famous as it is for being bleak and gritty, is practically a musical in comparison to “Il Grande Silenzio.”

“Silenzio” takes place in the snow — I liked the action in the snow so much, “Django Unchained” has a big snow section in the middle of the movie.

Corbucci dealt with racism all the time; in his “Django,” the bad guys aren’t the Ku Klux Klan, but a surreal stand-in for them. They’re killing Mexicans, but it’s a secret organization where they wear red hoods — it’s all about their racism toward the Mexican people in this town. In “Navajo Joe,” the scalp hunters who are killing the Indians for their scalps are as savage as the Manson Family. It’s one of the great revenge movies of all time: Burt Reynolds as the Navajo Joe character is a one-man-tornado onslaught. The way he uses his knife and bum-rushes the villains, rough-and-tumbling through the rocks and the dirt, is magnificent. I heard he almost broke his neck doing the movie, and it looks it. Before “The Wild Bunch” was released, “Navajo Joe” was the most violent movie that ever carried a Hollywood studio logo.

As I was working on an essay about how Corbucci’s archetypes worked, I started thinking, I don’t really know if Corbucci was thinking any of these things when he was making these movies. But I know I’m thinking them now. And if I did a western, I could put them into practice. When I actually put pen to paper for the script, I thought, What will push the characters to their extremes? I thought the closest equivalent to Corbucci’s brutal landscapes would be the antebellum South. When you learn of the rules and practices of slavery, it was as violent as anything I could do — and absurd and bizarre. You can’t believe it’s happening, which is the nature of true surrealism.

l'originale è qui:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/quentin-tarantino-django.html?_r=0

Signor tenente i tedeschi

OGGI

AL CINEFORUM PEPPUCCIO TORNATORE



Questo film di Luigi Comencini che oggi il cinema italiano può solo sognarlo lo propongo perchè sto rileggendo per l'ennesima volta Horcynus Orca di Stefano D'Arrigo che gli scrittori italiani d'oggi possono, anch'essi, solo sognarlo. Il libro lo leggo pensandolo in bianco e nero come il film e se Alberto Sordi non è 'Ndria Cambria, i resti dell'esercito italiano dopo l'otto settembre coincidono.