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The borderline cinema of Werner Herzog
<<…I’m sure my movies reach people, somewhere, who are still fervent, alive. We have to prove that they still exist!...I’m not looking for "remains of humanity",…, but simply man, independent, strong. People who had fears can always see more. Maybe I’m looking for something impossible, a space for human honour and respect, uncontaminated landscapes, nonexistent planets, dreamt landscapes>> (Film Quarterly, autumn 1977). A journey through five short films, made by an author who’s too often banally mythicized, five looks seeking a former ‘eldorado’ to discover for the first time traces of figures, uncontaminated lands, towards a primordial vision of things, in which landscapes, never descriptive, and man, can live together. To give voice to lives and paradoxically to dissolve them inside a visual experience which is never rationalized and is often only an inner one, giving birth to a hallucinatory and anthropomorphous landscape where we seem to find animal figures: Herzog.
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Werner Herzog
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Ultime parole , 1968, 13'
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Pilgrimage , 2001, 18'
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Patrick Bokanowski’s visionary cinema
To watch without telling, to perceive without understanding: the visionary universes of a great experimental director (France, 1943) dealing with an optical universe. It’s the light, the breaking down of its spectrum in variable wavelengths, and the ‘impressions’ it leaves on the bodies standing in the way of its race, all of this is what give life to Bokanowski’s research - five of his works will be presented. The short films La Plage, Au bord du lac and Flammes are the best testimony of this “watch without telling”. The image, even though it starts with a shot of something real – a beach, vegetation on the shore of a lake, … - becomes twisted, filtered by the intervention, between reality and cinema, of a frosted glass, reaching striking pictorial visions. We can find more experimentations on light’s perception in La femme qui se poudre and Dejeneur du matin (‘70s), even though those are more oriented toward the creation of a strongly claustrophobic and perturbing dimension.
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Patrick Bokanowski
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Dejeuner du matin , 1974,12'
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Au bord du lac , 1993, 6'
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Début of a director: Michelangelo Antonioni
<< When I was shooting my first documentary in 1942, Visconti was shooting Ossessione. Gente del Po was a documentary about fishing, boats, fishermen: about men then, not things or places. Unwittingly , I was on the same page as Visconti. I remember being sorry not to be able to give this film a narrative structure, to make a movie about a subject…the second reflection that brought me to a certain path was the instinctive annoyance, that I actually had started to feel a long time before, toward conventional cinematographic techniques. I began to feel this constraint since my very first documentaries, especially since N.U., that I shot in a very different way as regards the ‘standard’ one…I just wanted to deal with people >> (1961). Five documentaries, five début works containing an anthropologic universe, moved by the will to explore existence (Gente del Po, N.U.) and to catch, in order to preserve them, traces of beliefs (Superstizione), mythologies (La villa dei mostri) and ‘custom phenomenon’ (L’amorosa menzogna).
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Michelangelo Antonioni
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Gente del Po , 1943, 10'
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Superstizione , 1949, 9'
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The enthusiasm of ‘Les Jeunes Turcs’: la Nouvelle Vague
A little tribute to one of the most famous movements in the history of cinema: the ‘group of friends’ within the Cahiers du cinéma that, at the end of the ‘50s, tried to break the traditional poetics and styles of cinema. To break the mould, to try and shake and at the same time dissolve the whole cinematography, a real ‘blaze of freshness’. Eleven masterpieces, some of which actually anticipate future poetics – Resnais’ Guernica, for example - and some works really representative of the genre (Les Mistons di Truffaut), Resnai’s masterpiece Notte e Nebbia, the abomination of Nazi’s extermination camps. << I think that Nouvelle Vague has had a preamble: it started as a journalistic invention, but then it became real. Anyway, if the journalistic slogan of Cannes Festival hadn’t been coined, I think the strength of things itself would have give birth to this or that denomination... >> (Truffaut 1959)
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Francois Truffaut
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Nuit et brouillard , Alain Resnais, 1955, 32'
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Les mistons , Francois Truffaut, 1957, 18'
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