"If I think about the future of cinema as art, I shiver" (Y. Ozu, 1959)

WAR GAMES 2 - 13 Hours (Michael Bay)

Monday, 11 July 2016 09:45

Giona A. Nazzaro

Published in 05

USA 3 - Ash vs Evil Dead (Sam Raimi)

Monday, 22 February 2016 11:40

Giona A. Nazzaro

Published in 04

Tela brilhadora - O Garoto (Julio Bressane)

Tuesday, 27 October 2015 13:46

A filmmaker at the end of time and space

Giona A. Nazzaro

Boy meets girl at the end of the world. Once again, Julio Bressane stages the beginning of life itself as a stylized and dysfunctional yet mysteriously minnellian dance. O Garoto, element of the collective project Telha brilhadora, that comprises also O prefeito by Bruno Safadi, O espelho by Rodrigo Lima and Origem do mundo by Moa Batsow, is a film that has at its core a mischievous insurgent sexual energy that bristles and sparks relentlessly poetic hybris. Those who are not familiar with Bressane’s work may be puzzled by the minimalistic approach and its reiterative patterns, but it is obvious that O Garoto (The Kid) is just a different kind of educaçao sentimental. The boy and the girl inhabit a world whose only other sign of life is a rhythm pattern that seems to be almost detached from them, even though they watch and listen amused to the silent musician who keeps drumming away. The other element is the camera itself. The sensual geometries of the film try to make this triangle work. The camera wants to make love with the bodies in front of it. But the gaze of the girl and the boy point out toward the wilderness, a barren yet intoxicatingly magnificent landscape. This impossible triangle tries to claim hold of the land. Make it again a land of the living. Or, at least, they try to survive in and on it again. Let’s rewrite the social contract for the very last time. As it happens with Bressane’s recent work, O Garoto also recalls elements and patterns from his previous films. These fragments of memories and echoes from a different time are the tools with which Bressane shapes his vision. His newfound Adam and Eve are the sign of a never ending quest. To regain the world, that is the problem. As in O gigante da America, the film is also an arcane and bewildering reflection on the results of colonialism. O Garoto is definitely Bressane’s song of exile. His Paradise Lost, if you want. Minus the angels and the devils. Minus god. There is no regenerative utopia here. The two are destined to be apart. And even though the girl tries to break the diaphragm that separates her from the boy and the camera and the audience (the most sublime moment of the film), she is on her own as is the boy. Bressane films the end of the world as a reenactment of the origins of cinema: a boy and a girl. One plus one. Where the plus sign is obviously the camera itself. A precise yet restless camera, that roams a never before seen landscape as if it were the ultimate set of the world. A world that still hopes to be filmed, seen, and experienced as such. Bressane thus offers the image of a filmmaker at the end of time and space. Looking for signs of life, Bressane comes up with a sensual dance that manages to rethink the Lumière brothers filmmaking in an utterly innovative way.

Giona A. Nazzaro

Published in 03

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

Sunday, 19 July 2015 10:13

Dead-ends

Giona A. Nazzaro

Amidst the totally over-the-top full-blown non-stop action galore, there lies hidden at the core of Fury Road an almost theoretical film about the complexities of the transformations that cinema has gone through in the past few decades. If much is to be applauded in Miller's choice about going analogic in the realm of post post-modern digital action cinema, then maybe his critical discourse and proposition can even more be appreciated. Strip everything away from Fury Road and you are left with an almost abstract film. What once would have been labelled as an "avantgarde" film. First of all, the main character. The film title plays with the notion that it is the very same Mad Max of the first three films. But then, again, and without diving in the fandom conspiracy theories, there's really nothing in the film to substantiate this claim. So: Max is not Max after all. Who is he then? The guy called Max, aptly identified as a "bloodbag" (even though he protests a different identity), is literally the narrative blood that keeps the film flowing. The audience keeps their eyes on him and the film moves. So "that" guy carries the fuel blueprint of the film as precisely as Monica Vitti carried the hyperdynamic stillness of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura on her body and in her gaze. And if the characters in Antonioni's films about alienation and anonimity in modern  European architectural lanscapes didn't have anywhere to go, so does Max. With some differences, though. The urban lanscape has been substituted with a desertic nowhere land which, of course, over the years has become a commonplace and popular symbol of the failure of capitalistic society. But Miller expands on the basic idea with a wonderful ironic footnote. Given that there is no need for another hero, and that after Joyce and Eliot heroes have become something completely different altogether, Miller gives his Max with no name at least two different options: you can go either forward or backward. History has not only repeated itself enough already, it has definitely exhausted itself. So what is left of adventure and action?  Not much. You can go either forward or backward. That is what's left of the great spectacle that once was cinema. Space has become a two-lane road on which you can re-stage the great spectacle of repetition; replay all the former stories that have already been re-told over and over again in different industrial manners. While Antonioni staged the end of the western world as the end of the possibilities given to culture to shape or reshape ways of communicating, Miller, in a very ironical way, creates the "überstage" for the definitive image of what western culture has become as seen through the lenses of that very cinema which imagined itself, in Griffith's work, as an extension of the Dickensian ethos. Fury Road, really, is the swan song, maybe the sublime, while also earnest, parody of all the dead-ends that contemporary cinema has taken.

 

As Eliot has it in his Nocturne

Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground -

The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique 



Pain and Gain (Michael Bay)

Thursday, 16 April 2015 14:53

Il futuro alle spalle

Giona A. Nazzaro

Collocato fra il terzo e il quarto capitolo dei Transformers, Pain and Gain (Dolore e guadagno), è il suicidio commerciale di Michael Bay. Film costato relativamente poco rispetto alle macchine cui il regista ci ha abituato, è una sorta di catalogo delle brutture e delle mostruosità. A vederlo senza badare ai credit, si penserebbe a un film di George Armitage periodo Miami Blues. Stesso tocco ultrasgradevole, medesima spietatezza nei confronti dell’idiozia. Ma è un film di Michael Bay, probabilmente il cineasta di maggior successo economico degli ultimi decenni. Ed è un fallimento, voluto, cercato. Praticato come se il cinema non avesse futuro. E non è un caso che all’inizio del quarto capitolo della saga dei Transformers, il robot-camion si trovi dimenticato in un cinema in disuso. Bay, in termini strettamente industriali, si concede il lusso di produrre il film a medio budget che a Hollywood nessun grande produttore ha più intenzione di fare. Si inizia a parlare di produzione a partire da 100 milioni in su. Bay un passo indietro. Il futuro può stare alle spalle, non necessariamente sempre davanti agli occhi. Si proietta all’indietro in un’ipotetica zona temporale settantesca, recupera un’arrogante anarchia formale che sa molto di Corman gonfiato agli estrogeni e, così facendo, fornisce anche un preciso indizio su cosa è cambiato nel cinema americano dagli anni Ottanta in avanti. La follia di Pain and Gain, il suo violento e sgradevole nichilismo, sono il segno della consapevolezza di chi, in assenza di un discorso critico, si permette di autoprodursi il discorso sullo stato delle cose dell’industria cinematografica. Fallire, economicamente, realizzando il film più teorico prodotto a Hollywood da un regista che non si chiama né Fincher e né Anderson. E soprattutto, significa mettere in luce quale è il pensiero cinematografico che non avrà più cittadinanza né tanto meno futuro a Hollywood a meno che non si accetti il rischio di un inerente vizio di forma. Ed è solo così che si spiega poi il luddismo merceologico dei Transformers.

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