The art of making a movie…

Is the art of creating more than an atmosphere; it’s creating a whole frame of mind. When you get the chance to watch something responding to this description you realize you’ve been pretty lucky. You suddenly start thinking that watching a good movie has some sort of healing and calming power.

Watching a very good movie heals your soul.

 

This is what I thought two nights ago, after watching a famous movie I didn’t happen to see in theaters, I’m talking about “Brokeback Mountain”, by Ang Lee. It really is a cinema masterpiece, but not for the story. Even if this movie was highly helped in gaining its fame by the theme it treated, it really deserved all those awards. I personally believe, making a movie isn’t simply telling a story. If it was only this, every piece of video would be called “movie”, instead it’s not this way the world works. Ang Lee is a master of storytelling, a dreammaker. Everything in the movie, soundtrack, landscapes, actors’ small gestures, words and more importantly silences contribute in equal part to a film that breaches in your heart. There is no need for explosions, big stars (even if Ledger and Gyllenhaal are), huge sets to make a rocking film.

Great 2 h 25′ of my audience life. Thanks Ang Lee and everyone who made this reality.

Marathon

The second and, unfortunately, the last movie I got to see at this festival was “Marathon” by Iranian director, Amir Naderi. Shot in black and white, it tells the story of Gretchen who desperately goes after her record of 77 Crossword Puzzles solved in a day. She finds inspiration in Manhattan’s noise. The Subway and the words are the story’s real protagonists.

 

Sara Paul in Marathon, by Amir Naderi

Being part of a Festiwal (“Il Vento del Cinema“) the theme of which was “The Unfinished Cinema”, Marathon perfectly fits the event. As the very same director stated during a jam session he doesn’t plan too much on a movie, he just makes it as he feels, this movie doesn’t demonstrate to have a focused aim. Sometimes nebulous, sometimes fascinating, isn’t capable of transmitting a message different from what in my opinion seemed a metaphor of chaos. Or better still, a metaphor of struggle against chaos; tidy crosswords contrast what is a city bursting with noises and chaos. This is what Gretchen needs for her concentration, though this doesn’t allow her to go over her previous record. She desperately tries to find a way…, not changing almost anything about her way of working. An unfinished story…

 

77 & 1/2

That’s how far she goes.

Combat d’amour en songe

This is the title of a film I have seen this morning. Yep, this week-end will be full of cinema, art and whatever other nice things you can associate with it ( as music, literature, discussion, so on and so forth). Being back on my tiny little island in Southern Italy, though sometimes it appears quite limitating, other times offers unvaluable chances to spend good time. One of these chances is represented by a small festival, called “Il Vento del Cinema”, namely “The Wind of Cinema”, which is held on my tiny little island.

Poster

http://www.ilventodelcinema.it/

Projections of rare cinema pieces and related jam sessions fill the day. The film I have seen was a dreamy piece of cinema, where the viewer slowly understands what is a truth hard to achieve. Happenings, characters, actors all are confused, mixed, so you find yourself wandering around the path of a dream. A dream that, as you may imagine, doesn’t follow the pre-packaged linearity books and other movies do follow.

It goes, wherever the mind and heart tell it to go. Complete nonsense, complete sense. At the same time.