The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.

"Blue" a movie by Derek Jarman

First posted: 08 January 2010

For accustomed to believing in image,

an absolute idea of value,

his world had forgotten the command of essence:

thou shall not create unto thyself any graven Image,

although you know the task is to fill the empty page.

From the bottom of your heart,

pray to be released from image.

A lot of people, speaking about a film, tend to create some categories in which they can place it. The category that I avoid in every way is: “I don’t understand it, ergo I don’t like it” where people place the filmmakers that I love.

This speech comes from my “need” of or, I might say, pleasure in talking about a movie, beyond all these useless classes, using it as a launch pad for a less fatuous conversation.

A film, in my opinion, is beautiful when it can impress me, inspiring in me some impressions: it doesn’t matter whether those that feelings are or not likeable, enjoyable or not. Beside that, I think that the most beautiful and interesting thing is being involved, such as being “pulled” ahead along a inner mental “path”, by the film (a sort of streaming images thrilling our icastic-vertigo): let oneself go skip technical “factors” or or the simple logical comprehension of it… just watch it!

I remember my urging “need” to stop a movie (“unsatisfied”… by something unexplicable…), “No country for Old men” by Coen brothers, due to the tension that I felt, or the psychological nausea created by some scenes of “Antichrist” by Lars Von Trier, or even the rapture I feel every time I contemplate a film by Tarkovsky, or the fear created by “Shining” by Kubrick in which the image and the editing prepare us for what we’ll see but the soundtrack make us fall, suddenly, into a silent terror.

About that, I could present, like an exemplary “pillar” and artistic counterpart of this concept(contained in my article and discussed here from a personal point of view) “Blue” by Derek Jarman.

This movie hasn’t got images, the viewer can only watch a blue screen, symbol and allegory of the beginning and the end of a show, followed by some voices, sounds and songs: all that a blind man can “see”.

The director, through the film, tells us about his dawnfall (his physical and psychological crisis) because of the HIV contraction (commonly know as AIDS). Following, with our closed eyes, this voice, that speaks about himself, through small scraps of memory, taking us through a blindness course and, later struggling, feeling deep sorrow and “agonia”, against the “lithania” of death itself, it pushes us to taste the dramatic, abissal event of the incoming collapse of life forms, tough suggesting a slight sense of infinity, of unending sorrow culminating into the appalling breath of new life (blossoming over the ashes and after the massacre of the ego, of the human psyche, of the mundane body).

The movie is punctuated, tickled (as in a Schopenhauer/Leopardi’s “pendulum” of the life cycle, rounding the edges of the extreme emotional, existential poles of our “dasein”), obsessed by the blue colour, the chromatic scale of every deep blue, static and dynamic, brilliant and pale, clean and rough… this “absorbing” blue palette, gamma is the stage of similarities, conflicts, introspections. (Is the so-called Yves Klein “blue” a sort of specular alter ego of Jarman’s blue…?). The same image is denied because it “is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world” leaving us in an empty incomplete ocean of unlimited opportunities.

"The Reader" a movie by Stephen Daldry

First posted: 08 september 2009

I have watched, the last February, “The Reader” by Stephen Daldry. It didn’t received enough advertising and not great acclaim from italian critics, but I don’t agree with them: in my opinion this is a film not to be missed by cinemas lovers. 


The trailer, deliberately, doesn’t show the real development of the plot but some simple flashes of the first sequences, in particular, to underline the title “The Reader”. In fact, the movie faces a very sensitive subject, not about love as many have said and thought, but about the simplicity of an uneducated woman, her inability not to understand the SS corps who she had chosen to belong to and the way in which, after war, the German “leaders” have tried to make their own faults to fall over the low ranks of the army. 


The whole plot revolves around the figure of this woman, played by Kate Winslet, who asks her lover Michael (David Kross in the first half of the film, Ralph Fiennes in the second part) to read a few books aloud. She refuses the well-deserved promotion at work, because it stands for a desk job, and she decides to join the new SS corps. The focus, then, shifts to the life of the boy (she abandons him to join into the army) who dedicates to law studies. A professor, of a course that Michael attends to, decides to bring his few students to a trial intented against Nazi crimes perpetrated against Jews. Here, the boy will recognize the woman who he had his first relationship with, among the defendants. 


The sensitivity of the film director leads us through a dimension beyond the fault, obvious, that the Nazis had, to come to an attempt of understanding the soul of an illiterate woman who, ashamed of an educational lack, lays on all the obscenities committed, even by others, without seeing that. She only did the orders that they imposed her. To the question: “Why did you bring people to death?” She replies, “because there was no place in the fields, and we had to create places for the people that were coming, what should we have done otherwise?” and to the question: “By which criteria did you decided who to bring to death?” she replies: “the older women because they were not able to work and we needed healthy people”. The film plays, at this stage, around to the ignorance of judges and the public, present at the trial, about the uneducation of the women and the belief that she’s only a monster to remove. Now, it arises, from this situation, an ethical question for Michael to overcome: “Should he tell or not what he noticed, that is the fact she is unable to read?” because this small detail, in part, could clear the situation and free her from accusations. 


The hidden theme line, which the film is based upon, brilliantly traced and managed by the director, shifts our focus on the humanity of the characters and their fragility, and it gives up offering us a different view point (skipping the black and white scheme of things). The director also doesn’t care too much about the historical context, in order to portray a situation, not deeply rotted in the contingent events. Without being able to know what the characters may think, however, we’re feeling the sensation of understanding them and, during the film progression, without realizing it, we see how easy it was for us to relate with a character so simple and, at the same time, so complex as Kate Winslet’s. Although we’re conscious of her mistake, we can get aware that she fully belongs to the human kind (with her qualities and faults) and she doesn’t symbolize or represent the conventional archetype and prejudice related to the “SS” fanatics or things like that. So she shouldn’t work (in our collective imagination) as a scapegoat for the expiation of nazi crimes. 


Actually, in my personal view, in this movie the main subjects to focus on aren’t love or justice. There’s no catharsis or superficial triumph (i mean that kind of triumph that covers and conceal the emptiness of useless conventions, social matters, dominant values etc.); the main topic is the dedication (of the director and of the public) to a dramatic, tragical figure, that is the key axis of a plot inspired by the pleasure to tell a story without mediations and compromises. So, for a while, the dangerous chance to forget such serious matters and facts won’t be able to steal our civil conscience and human awareness.