"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.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

First posted: 23 september 2009

Science Fiction: I had a conversation, with ups and downs, with a professor because we didn’t share the same idea in defining this wonderful world. In his opinion, it is inextricabily linked to the robot, like Asimov’s works, indeed I think it is like the creation of an alternative world and that it shouldn’t be necessarily connected to the new high tech discoveries, like Ballard’s works for example.

This discussion focused on a specific book that I liked very much: “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.

Some time ago I tried to talk with a girl about this book but the answer to my question (how much did she appreciated it, what kind of interest did she find reading the book itself) was disappointing: “I prefer Truffaut’s film.”

The fact is that I didn’t care to know whether she liked it or not, but what she thought about this book, which was her viewpoint about that work, if something in it amazed her, if the text itself had inspired any kind of empathy, mental involvement, intellectual stimulation, aspects that could turn out to be  similar to a clockwork mechanism of orbiting spheres, mirroring the structure of her mental disposition and intellectual “ontology”.

The problem is that, currently, all tended to support evasive answers without substance; i wish that someone could try to do one more little step of the normal tendency to superficiality, trying to struggle to an higher degree of analysis towards a comprehension, in this case about a textual level, so people will stop rambling about nothing and and their brain will start to collapse under the pressure of the concentration.

The nowadays trend works just with mindless people, who revolt against the plesure of thinking; Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man” and Eliot’s “Hollow” man, that is human beings not capable of free thinking and personal reflections.

The same book, that I just mentioned, is, more or less, based on this concept and extends it to an higher Will, represented by a totalitarian state which attempts to stifle the born of any form of independent thought, because it is judged too dangerous and unmanageable.

In this form of politics, the enemy is represented by books (my lifeblood) because they’re the only media able to give us the opportunity to be active and, so, to use our reason and comprehension to understand what we’re reading and, also (why not?), to use our precious imagination.

In this fictional world the firefighters’ work isn’t to extinguish fire but their quest is burning books.

What i liked when I started to read “Fahrenheit” was the “cinematic” writing style, I mean a dry and clear way of writing  with a wide use of adjectives that can evoke images, creating the sensation of watching a series of film sequences and not reading a book.

We can find this feature also in the story, easy to read, fluid, even if it hides, in the unsaid undergrowth, a world apart: the beauty of a girl who attracts a firefighter thanks to the strange things she said, about some books told her by her uncle, her unusual vanishing and what this event causes in the man’s mind, who starts to understand his need of reading books and, so, of thinking autonomously; couple problems regarding the fact that the wife is addicted to television broadcasting, idleness’ symbol, and she can’t understand her husband with his need of escaping from that prison built in order to make humans pawns (their will is not just subdued by external events but they force themselves to serve and to live as slaves) because she likes this type of life, because in her opinion the lack of thoughts is the only possibility to be happy, that is, to avoid every type of self-emotion.

The reading act, that is the authentical profound message of the text, is the explosion of free will, breaking the chain of servitude, when can shine the fear and the shyness, the privacy, of self conscious people, who the fear and the shyness of who, in secret, reads without having the courage to rebel against this state of things, standing aside; and who is waiting for the right moment to return from a forced exile to teach again how to live a real life with thoughts because a totalitarian state cannot hold out forever.

"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.