FREE PALESTINE (1) - Scénarios (JLG, Coppola, Cronenberg, Jia Zhangke)

Lorenzo Esposito

 This issue of film parlato comes out because, even longer than usual, the question has been asked about the meaning and - in a world scenario filled with horror - about the very appropriateness of bringing out a film magazine today. Some essential magazines close (Cinemascope, which we will miss), others, like this one, weigh whether to stop, and each issue is, without any rhetoric, to be considered the last.

 After all, a magazine goes out - especially dealing with cinema - because the image is about human beings' infinite conversation with life and death.

 Victor Erice, whose name returns ceaselessly in this issue (signaling a centrality - from Godard Straub and Snow to Hamaguchi Wiseman Hong and Herzog - that is always too little remembered), in a dialogue with a Japanese critic some forty years ago, said that the only thing that exists is fiction because fiction is already in the way we look at things, indeed from the moment we look at a thing we mutate it, and therefore it makes no sense, except by convention, to speak of documentary. Then he added, "everything is fiction, so you cannot but have a will to document. And documentary, the way you frame and decide the distance from your subjects, is immediately fiction. The point of documentary is that it embodies the origin of cinema in that it is free from the 'literature' of the screenplay: just filming, choice of framing and editing, pure cinema. Filming reality implies the introduction of a point of view, that is, fiction. Rather, we should distinguish between documentary and TV reportage."

The simplicity with which he said such things is moving. It is as if he wanted to warn us: to all of us who may have believed that cinema is the world or replaces it, well this is an illusion and it is most dangerous, yet there is nothing closer to reality than this illusion.

 This issue, starting with the cover (Ici et ailleurs, 1976), seeks to reflect on this irremediable conflict. Memory and oblivion. Peace and violence. Jean-Luc Godard, accused at the time of anti-Semitism. Yuval Abraham (Israeli), accused today (by the Germans!) of the same thing, guilty - in the freest closing ceremony of all time and all festivals (Berlin 2024: and that is why it will remain the last truly free one) - of feeling guilty of apartheid toward a Palestinian boy with whom he co-directs the film and from whom, although they live within walking distance of each other on the same land, a wall divides him that is the worst of all man-made walls (even worse than the German one that fell not too long ago).

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