Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Pasolini on Film
(For you guys to keep an eye on Catherine Breillat, and especially Anatomy from Hell, if you are a Russ Meyer kind of guy like me.... The quote is Pasolini but I live Fellini days everyday like the Scottish bard)
"Cinema, as I said before, because of its lack of a vocabulary of concepts, is directly metaphorical. However, each metaphor intended in particular inevitably includes someting crude and conventional: witness those flights of excited or peaceful doves that are supposed to render a character's torment or joy. In sum, the nuanced metaphor, scarcely perceptible, that subtle poetic halo which separates, by a breath and a chasm, the language of Leopardi's "A Sylvia" from the classical petrarcho-archaic language—this metaphor would not be possible in the cinema. The most poetic cinematic metaphor possible is always closely bound to the other nature of cinema, the strictly communicative one of prose, which has prevailed in the short tradition of cinema history, spanning in a single linguistic convention art-films and escape films, masterpieces and adventure serials. And yet, the tendency of the most recent cinema—from Rossellini compared with Socrates, to the 'new wave' and to the production of the last few years, of the last few months (including, I suppose, the majority of the films presented at the Pesaro festival (1965) is towards a 'cinema of poetry'."
"Cinema, as I said before, because of its lack of a vocabulary of concepts, is directly metaphorical. However, each metaphor intended in particular inevitably includes someting crude and conventional: witness those flights of excited or peaceful doves that are supposed to render a character's torment or joy. In sum, the nuanced metaphor, scarcely perceptible, that subtle poetic halo which separates, by a breath and a chasm, the language of Leopardi's "A Sylvia" from the classical petrarcho-archaic language—this metaphor would not be possible in the cinema. The most poetic cinematic metaphor possible is always closely bound to the other nature of cinema, the strictly communicative one of prose, which has prevailed in the short tradition of cinema history, spanning in a single linguistic convention art-films and escape films, masterpieces and adventure serials. And yet, the tendency of the most recent cinema—from Rossellini compared with Socrates, to the 'new wave' and to the production of the last few years, of the last few months (including, I suppose, the majority of the films presented at the Pesaro festival (1965) is towards a 'cinema of poetry'."
# posted by Lamb Mouton @ 6:06 AM 
