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The unyielding artist, his beliefs and enemies. Athens is the toga-wrapped brain and Sparta the sword-and-shield brawn, the wall comes down and from the demolished gate the Acropolis is glimpsed as a storybook illustration. Socrates at 70 (Jean Sylvère) is a reflective fellow, he ambles through with disciples in tow and defuses a potential confrontation via the humility of lucidity: "I know that I don't know anything." Roberto Rossellini has painted temples at his disposal yet pauses to register sandal prints on the ground, the dirt under Athenian marble—it takes a great questioner to study another ("The only joy is the search for the truth"), a clear model for Straub-Huillet. Regime changes and extended debates and procedural views of the cradle of democracy as votes are cast inside an urn and fished out by a blindfolded boy. "La conoscenza! La conoscenza!" cries the weary Xanthippe (Anne Caprile) at home, as her husband is accused of corrupting the young. The filming is marked by dignity and discretion (plus a whiff of Corman's airiness in Atlas), a modernist score overtakes the harps and flutes for the occasional foreboding note. The open-air trial hinges on a filibustering close-up that reveals this as the trenchant political work it is, with dashes from Apologia and Crito passing before the camera with zoom and dissolve. Sentenced to death, sentenced to truth, "which is the better destiny?" Socrates' cave is Louis XIV's royal chamber and Blaise Pascal's darkened bedroom, he gulps down poison and takes solace in knowledge. "How are you so calm with death so near?" "I reason." Osborne's Luther is a close variant, Snyder's 300 the antithesis. With Ricardo Palacios, Giuseppe Mannajuolo, Antonio Medina, Julio Morales, and Emilio Miguel Hernández.
--- Fernando F. Croce |