For FLEMMON and BOBBY DUBOIS:
Start with the title. The Double Life of Veronique/ Weronika for us is Veronica – in the vernacular “vera icon”/ true icon, from the apocryphal NT woman who is said to have wiped the face of Christ in his passion, leaving an image in his blood on the fabric of her scarf. I came across her searching for “veronica” – true icon: the saint and the pass the matador makes with the cape of the same name. Twisting his body without moving his feet, he draws the bull in close around him. The moment of truth follows.
You’re welcome petrocehalon. The Macedonian Berenice is from the Greek (phere eikon) out of which the Latin flows, but you knew that.
It is not necessary to trace the linkage of the name to Kieslowski’s title any further than mid 20th Century Spain “They (the pass) are called veronicas after St. Veronica who wiped the face of Our Lord with a cloth and are so called because the saint is always represented holding the cloth by the two corners in the position the bullfighter holds the cape for the start of the veronica” (Death in the Afternoon,67)
See also mundo-taurino.org " veronica – the fundamental two-handed cape pass named after St.Veronica "
If the screen is the cape/cloth held at apposite corners by the two veronicas, is Kieslowski the matador: the viewer the bull? The scene with the red bus in the square within which Veronique takes the photograph of Weronika is at once the point of transference of the image/photograph as well as the movement of the bull around the unmoving figure of the unseen cine-camera around which its mechanism revolves. This moment holds an echo of an older myth of a woman enclosed within a technical apparatus to stimulate the interest of a bull – Pasiphae, wrapped within the artifice of Daedalus.
This is a master drawing deeply from the well at the centre of European consciousness.
The film bears repeated viewing. It is, for me, the work of a master at one with his medium.
La Double Vie de Véronique almost 3 years ago
For FLEMMON and BOBBY DUBOIS:
Start with the title. The Double Life of Veronique/ Weronika for us is Veronica – in the vernacular “vera icon”/ true icon, from the apocryphal NT woman who is said to have wiped the face of Christ in his passion, leaving an image in his blood on the fabric of her scarf. I came across her searching for “veronica” – true icon: the saint and the pass the matador makes with the cape of the same name. Twisting his body without moving his feet, he draws the bull in close around him. The moment of truth follows.
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La Double Vie de Véronique almost 3 years ago
You’re welcome petrocehalon. The Macedonian Berenice is from the Greek (phere eikon) out of which the Latin flows, but you knew that.
It is not necessary to trace the linkage of the name to Kieslowski’s title any further than mid 20th Century Spain “They (the pass) are called veronicas after St. Veronica who wiped the face of Our Lord with a cloth and are so called because the saint is always represented holding the cloth by the two corners in the position the bullfighter holds the cape for the start of the veronica” (Death in the Afternoon,67)
See also mundo-taurino.org " veronica – the fundamental two-handed cape pass named after St.Veronica "
If the screen is the cape/cloth held at apposite corners by the two veronicas, is Kieslowski the matador: the viewer the bull? The scene with the red bus in the square within which Veronique takes the photograph of Weronika is at once the point of transference of the image/photograph as well as the movement of the bull around the unmoving figure of the unseen cine-camera around which its mechanism revolves. This moment holds an echo of an older myth of a woman enclosed within a technical apparatus to stimulate the interest of a bull – Pasiphae, wrapped within the artifice of Daedalus.
This is a master drawing deeply from the well at the centre of European consciousness.
The film bears repeated viewing. It is, for me, the work of a master at one with his medium.
Go to Comment