Cinema, a meeting
... What 's is played there, like a "big bang" not covered by any distinction of taste or culture, but attending the meeting in its uniqueness, unpredictable and astonishing.
She holds in the instant certainty that this film, waiting for me, knows something of my report to the enigmatic world, I do not know myself but it contains in him as a secret to decrypt (...) confirmation of this truth that the important meetings, movies, movies are often those who have a head start on our awareness of ourselves and our relationship to life.
During the meeting, it simply collects the riddle with astonishment and acknowledge the blow, the power to shock.
time elucidation will come later and will last for twenty, thirty years or a lifetime.
The film works on mute, its shock wave is spreading slowly. Philippe Arnaud wrote: "Any image light, symbolic of the famine in childhood: not only itself but by the anticipation of instant proceeding that is foreign, it lays the foreshadowing of a possible ourselves by which we are chosen: it is a stand of images required to designate and we make up a kind of destiny that awaits us, know confusing since it is ahead of us, marked each time a punch where irremediable we know this about us without understanding why. " ... Alain
Bergala (The assumption cinema ed Cahiers du Cinema 2002)
The Spirit of the Beehive
Victor Erice
Spain, 1973, 1:38 with Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria Copy Newfoundland Restored 2008
"Everything flows from this primordial scene: that of meeting a girl with a monster, contemplated in turn by an eye that observes the world for the first time . »Erice
Spain, 1940, shortly after the end of the civil war. A mobile cinema plans Frankenstein in a small village lost in the Castilian plateau. Children are fascinated by the monster, and among them, the little Ana, 8, raises a thousand questions on this frightening character. Her older sister, Isabel, has tried to explain that this is a "trick" of cinema, she claims not to have met the spirit of Frankenstein prowling near the village.
incredibly rich, The Spirit of the Beehive opens like a fairy tale ("Once upon a time ...") and place in a magical realism. It is also well a film for children, and sensitive exploration of the magical world, a hidden symbol of devastation left by the war. Its multiple reading levels make it an inexhaustible source of fantasy and mystery, a haunting masterpiece carried by the play of his actresses and beauty images.
In both dark and bright, The Spirit of the Beehive is a timeless and unforgettable experience, a film that can not grow old and still exerts a fascination indelible.
The Spirit of the Beehive upset because every spectator not only relives his "First" film, but also his own childhood ...
Especially suitable for younger audiences, the film addresses the awareness of danger and death, through imagination and rich inner world of a child. The little Ana - Ana Torrent proved by this film three years before Cria Cuervos Carlos Saura.
The spirit of the hive is also a great film about Spain. According to Alain
Bergala "Eric is not only a filmmaker, he is also aware of his country's cinema and film in general." Indeed, if for Victor Erice reflection on the past policy Spain's expressed through the personal journey of the little Ana, the presence of the repressive ideology that undermines Franco's Spain is no less strong.
The confrontation between the universe of childhood and adulthood, "the constant interference between the real and imaginary, allow the viewer to form his interpretation, see other monsters of Other causes to defend the all-powerful weapon of the imagination. " (Marcorelles Louis, Le Monde, 17-05-1974).
When, in the guise of Boris Karloff, Frankenstein's monster meets a little girl and killed, the filmmaker manages to capture an incredible expression on the face of the little Ana Torrent (which, we recall, the unforgettable heroine of Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos) that we would define as an imperfect mixture of awe and amazement.
One time "documentary" fiction in a beautifully composed, this plan of incredible beauty made the rare density of the sequence, not just because Eric has managed to "steal" an emotion the little girl but because it is the keystone of the whole work, a wonderful proof of this belief unwavering in the "fiction" that the viewer can read in large black eyes of the child.
first feature film a rare filmmaker (Erice has only three feature films under his belt since his debut in the '60s), the spirit of the hive is a magnificent novel learning Taking its source in the memories of the author (at least, we presume) and recounts, in a metaphorical form, suffocation of an entire society bursting under the yoke of Franco's dictatorship. Filmed during the last years of the reign of Caudillo, the film continues to outwit censorship punctilious and develops a language full of imagery, preferring the unspoken poetry and metaphor in direct confrontation with the regime.
Hence the admirable work of Victor Erice plastic: the frame is a breathtaking beauty (a constant frontal who favors symmetrical composition elements, lines of flight that "open" framework to another place far away ...), photography is beautiful (the filmmaker does not begrudge some pictorial and some plans refer directly to the Flemish and English painting) and a highly developed sense of the ellipse and off the field (particularly with very particular attention to the sound) it avoids heaviness demonstrative, any explanation highlighted in bold.
Ana and Isabel, two toddlers in the film, have a beekeeper father. The image of the hive can offer a first metaphor (there are also the geometric shape of the cells on glass honey color of the house), that of a society living under a leaden and obedient, without apparent reason, a power omniscient but invisible (this "spirit" mentioned in the title). The adult world is reduced to a mute father (Erice discusses his "internal exile") and a mother also prostrate, crushed by the oppressive nature of the universe in which they live.
First, the world appears to be huge and full of dangers: these are footprints in the earth to awaken the mind the image of the ogre, it is these trains which pass close to girls or these poisonous mushrooms against whom their father warns.
While her big sister makes him believe in the existence of mind and confronts the monster (fictitiously) to death (the sequence where terribly strong Isabel pretends to have been killed), the belief Ana a world "shadow" will allow him to escape the yoke of daily life.
This path will be marked by two steps that the director will set the scene with a breathtaking intensity. The first is an encounter with a soldier escaped from a train.
keeping with its strategy blueprint (the film contains little dialogue), Erice underline nothing, explains nothing but the viewer can easily imagine that this is a resistance to the regime and the terrible images of an end support this idea.
Through this meeting, Ana made the experience of death and finally leaves the world of children by running away into the forest. Then she saw the pictures of James Whale, until his encounter with the Frankenstein monster.
she living then really what you see? Is it a mere fantasy ? From that moment, the film plunges into a kind of reverie that combines the unconscious and childhood fears. The beauty of the plans of Erice is such that we think of some passages in The Night of the Hunter Laughton: it is the level where is the spirit of the hive!
Through the eyes of this child, the filmmaker offers a vision of the strongest and most distinctive of the English company subject to the Franco dictatorship. By supporting the belief to the end of this girl, we offer a movie extravaganza sailing between fantasy and pure poetry ... Vincent Roussel
******************** ****************
Nearly 80 years have passed since the release of Frankenstein, 80 years during which the impious creature and shaped by the tragic mad scientist has profoundly marked all the fantastic imagery of the collective imagination. But if the makeup forever recognizable Jack Pierce had crossed a century of cinema without a wrinkle, rediscover Frankenstein today can realize to what extent, by the use he made of his references - and that of his predecessor in the Chair director Robert Florey - Director James Whale was deeply codified the world of fantasy to come.
James Whale's Frankenstein will be screened at the Renoir in February the same author this month: The Invisible Man.
Erice
Victor Erice was born June 30, 1940 at Karrantza Spain. Fascinated by the film he discovered child, it becomes both a major critical and a great director.
With only three feature films, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), SOUTH (1983) and THE DREAM OF LIGHT (1991) and more than thirty years, he is without doubt one of the rarest English filmmakers of his generation. One of the secrets too, but who knew exactly how the secret of a country held in the shadow of the Franco years, the secret of a work where the mysteries of childhood, as far as the discretion of art, appear the incandescent core to which it has given shape.
Since the late 1990s, Victor Erice has shot three short films, including the beautiful children (2002). While it is unfortunately very rare, Victor Erice although one of the greatest filmmakers working. His three feature films, both fiction and documentary, are milestones in the history of modern cinema. They have influenced and continue to nurture the work of many filmmakers.
Victor Erice has written extensively on film, including an essay on the films of Nicholas Ray (Nicholas Ray y su tiempo, by Victor Erice and Jos Oliver, Madrid, 1986). Some of his texts were published in French magazine "Traffic".
Knowing his taste, his sensitivity and intelligence of other movies, the importance and influence of this cinephile always on his own films, the Centre Pompidou gave him carte blanche to present to the public twenty films that have singularly counted for him. FILMOGRAPHY
LOS DIAS perdidos, Spain, 1963, 41 ', nb
LOS DESAFIOS, Spain, 1969, 35' (for the episode), col.
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El Espiritu de la Colmena), Spain, 1973, 98 ', col .. New print in February 2008 by Carlotta Films.
SOUTHERN (El Sur), Spain 1983, 93 ', col.
THE DREAM OF LIGHT (El Sol del Membrillo), Spain, 1992, 135 ', col.
PREGUNTAS AL Atardecer, episode of omnibus film "Celebrate Cinema 101, Japan, Spain, 1996, 12 ', col.
CHILDREN (Alumbramiento), an episode of collective film "Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet ', Germany, 2002, 10', nb
APPROACHES. NOTES ON THE WORK OF ARTIST ANTONIO LOPEZ AT MADRID DURING THE SUMMER OF 1990
(Apuntes. Sobre el trabajo del pintor Antonio López en Madrid en el verano 1990), 1990-2003, video, 29 ', col.
THE DEAD RED (Soliloquio), Spain, 2006, 33 ', col.
MATCHING, 6 letters Video Abbas Kiarostami, 2005-2007, shorts, col.
TEN MINUTES OLDER: ALUMBRAMIENTO, 2002 Víctor Erice
Duration: 00: 10: 00
Víctor Erice as Abbas Kiarostami are filmmakers childhood.
Alain Bergala proposed Jordi Ballo, director of the contemporary center of Barcelona, to achieve a first exhibition of cinema in the form of a correspondence between Abbas Kiarostami and Víctor Erice. He knows that last big movie buff, know the films of Kiarostami. The project took shape when asked Bergala Erice and Kiarostami on the latter declares his admiration for the dream of light, one of the greatest films on the relationship between painting and cinema.
The correspondence between the two filmmakers, while both born in June 1940, one week apart, one in Iran of the former regime, the other in Franco's Spain, has three Topics: childhood, the political situation and its impact on the difficulty of creating the possibility for other arts practice to regenerate their cinematographer.
Erice as Abbas Kiarostami are Filmmakers childhood. The spirit of the hive (1973), South (1983) of English filmmaker, The Passenger (1974), Homework (1989), among many other titles of the Iranian filmmaker, became absolute references in cinema childhood. For Victor Erice
, childhood is the focus of the sensations. But, as revealed by the Red Death (2006), the primal scene is deeply marked by Franco which probably generates in him a challenge to make films in contemporary Spain.
For Kiarostami, childhood is perhaps, despite the masterpieces he produced a theme circumstance. He became a filmmaker working at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and young adults (the "Kanun"). Where is the Friend's Home? and Homework (1989) provide an opportunity to speak anyway, while Iran's censorship banned in almost all dialogue and contact between adults. His main subject is, according to Alain Bergala, how the law is passed in a society. Thus there is very little difference between the films before and after the revolution. The passenger, probably marking the presence of the larger society as in Where is the Friend's Home? style more poeticized.
ERICE / KIAROSTAMI
Matches
File:
Matches
File:
0 comments:
Post a Comment