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The Disney affinity has been noted (The Band Concert is especially close), Anger and Brakhage are spirited students of its rhythmic layouts. Crashing waves, as befits an offering from the land of Aivazovsky, a churning elemental screen, turbulent waters stilled to reveal upside-down trees. Silhouetted by a vast window, dwarfed by a ticking clock, the doleful mondaine (Mara Griy) contemplates Nature from inside a somber parlor. "An old Russian song" mourns and exalts, starbursts out of the fireplace propel the piano into the clouds. Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov in Paris, finding in an alto singer's vibrations the extra dimension for their emotive montage. An ineffable melancholia, evanescent and eternal, the perfect field for the music of cinema and the cinema of music. Patterns of movement, shapes of emotion. Flapping swans, shots that infuriated the fellow agitator shooting L'Age d'Or on the neighboring set. (From Buñuel's memoirs: "I used to comb the cafés in Montparnasse looking for the man just so I could slap him.") Rodin statues in flight, cf. Riefenstahl's Olympia, lachrymose downpours and veiny branches. "Autumn... sadness... dead love," of such themes emanates "un étude cinématographique." Sunup, the spring of a maiden's smile, a screen in bloom. Nabokov has it, "music that would nimbly ripple or suddenly hack the world into great, gleaming blocks." Russell in The Planets updates the alchemy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |