The following are the introductory paragraphs to a larger ongoing analysis of THE DREAMERS (http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/) exploring its language, themes, contexts, references, etc, reveling in the little details. I’m writing this piece (entitled ‘War of Imitation’) because I feel that THE DREAMERS is a gorgeous and marvelously articulate film that utilizes the means of all its elements to a nuanced end. Unfortunately, it is so often simplistically derided or overlooked. Many people seem to think that any use of explicit or peculiar sexuality stands merely as provocation or gratuity, but these people are missing a great deal of depth and complexity in their assumption.
I’d love to hear feedback and to generate further analysis of this film. THE DREAMERS is a film in love with film, and I am a cinephile in love with IT! My goal is to give life back to THE DREAMERS, as it continues to give so much to me. * -————————————————————————————-
“War of Imitation”
Whenever I hear the sentiment “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” spouted in response to some manner of playful pretense or emulation, I’ve always reverted immediately to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “imitation is suicide.” Two seemingly polar observations, and yet neither cancels the other out, so to speak. They can exist alongside one another. Take for example Shakespeare’s Romeo, who lavishes compliment upon Juliet’s brilliant slumberous corpse in the Capulet monument, even as he takes a deadly drum of poison to his lips in an effort to imitate her “unsubstantial death,” which is itself an imitation, for Juliet is but slayed of senses, not of life. Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS is a playground for these varied sentiments, a blended but always uneasy mixture of fatalism and homage lacing every moment of tiered imitation. Emerson’s concise cautionary words are of a figurative urgency. They infer that sacrifice of principle, not flesh, is inherent in the adoption of guises, or that facilitating one’s identity through the medium of another’s constructed means, which subverts one’s own pre-existing model, is at the very expense of that model. The existential tailspin of the three principal characters in THE DREAMERS, toward its final minutes especially, is evidence enough of this truth, and further highlights that the refusal to grow, in the emotional case of the characters of Theo and Isa, is an analogous form to suicide; that of suicide by stagnation. Or put by another, “Not busy being born is busy dying” (Dylan).
Bertolucci’s triumph of unconventionally sexual cinema is a poetic and sensual exploration of the lives of three young adults; twins Theo and Isabelle, and their newly made friend Matthew, at the cusp of great personal and social upheaval in Paris. It is a film about simultaneous wars, and about refusals, both ideological and manifest, drawn with a mark of rare, and for some, a somewhat affronting intimacy. While the film speaks of social war and the unrest of the May ’68 demonstrations (a year that saw analogous uprisings the world over, such as the US’s strife against its own participation the Vietnam War), it is not a film about ’68, but rather one that takes place in that moment in history, and utilizes its intensity and its feverish embrace of the possibility of change, as an informing backdrop, if not catalyst. The film is, quite insularly, about the three main characters’ blossoming and shifting perceptions of “self” and the mechanisms of emotional identity, over the span of an exceptional month in self-imposed house arrest. Gilbert Adair, author of the novel and screenplay, explains that the actual telling of the story holds no intended or implicit irony. However, within its framework, particular and telling ironies which inform deeply on each character’s changing or unchanging personhood.
The “wars” in THE DREAMERS, as they may be termed, swell between action and inaction, between the public and the private, the political and emotional, between the teacher and the taught, between impressions and actuality, and between imitation and embodiment. Bertolucci acknowledges that each of these “combatants,” as it were, has a vested interest in its opposition in order to thrive, and from this basis he symbolically threads the film together with a palate of red and green, termed “complementary colors” but opposites just the same. Bertolucci stems from that symbolic language of opposites, into the narrative’s physical course; for instance, the stagnation that occurs within the closed-off apartment during a month of seclusion requires the punctuation of social upheaval raging in the streets to inform its own qualities. The twins, Theo and Isabelle’s increasing isolationism teaches Matthew an ironic universality of boundless love, however Matthew’s reversion of this principle towards the twins, that is to say, his efforts to instill in the twins his own learned broadness, is refused almost outright. Timid but ponderous Matthew, brimming from the first shot with boyish enthusiasm and an overly apologetic naiveté, is so complexly and confrontingly engaged by the Twins during this pocket of isolation, and yet it is they who choose to stunt their own emotional growth. It is no mistake that this attitudinal war fought behind doors unfolds as a war of ideology and principle is fought “dans la rue,” and that these two fronts should meet in the end with so much breaking of glass.
The broiling but optimistic scene of social tensions of May ’68, between the powers-that-be and Parisian youths and intellectuals, is set immediately as our backdrop. At the tail end of the first shot, a descending close-up pan of the Eiffel Tower’s framework, into which the title sequence is integrated, we meet Matthew: the blonde, wide-eyed, un-spoiled American studying French in Paris. He is walking towards the Cinematheque Francaise, wearing a neutral palate of khaki, grey and white, revealing retrospective details about the time and place, and about himself, through voice-over-narration. He is our usher into this world from after the fact. Soon he is amidst one of the first organized public outcries against the deposing of Henri Langlois, the creator and curator of the Cinematheque Francais, for his reputedly slapdash handling of his resources (film, ephemera, finances). To many Langlois is the father of cinema preservation and programming, if not the encouraging rebel uncle to the elite cinephiles who would become the famed New Wavers; Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, etc. Matthew’s self-enacted immersion into the film subculture becomes a vastly more affecting avenue of education than any of his institutional schooling. “Here is where I got my real education” he says. Though not French, Matthew is a member of the universal culture of cinema and has every right to embroil in the demonstration. This organized public uprising of principle and of personal objection taking place at the Palais Chaillot, which seemingly begins as something subcultural, is merely one aspect of what will expand into a near-formal city-wide movement. This tenuous moment fatefully brings together Matthew and the twins, Theo and Isa, though it is intimated by their smiling glances to one another that the twins had been discreetly pondering him at film screenings. “He’s American, just like I told you,” Isa says to Theo while introducing Matthew. The two young men bond over the name of Nicholas Ray.
This opening scene also sets the stage for THE DREAMERS’ most prevalent and outspoken visual motif; inter-splicing archival footage and film excerpts into sequences, virtually frame by frame reenacted, or content reflective. Immediately, by virtue of this meta-motif, we are confronted with a melange of concepts that are subliminally crucial to understanding the impending identity epoch that will unfold between our three protagonists. One might define the overlapping of archival and “modern” footage as a kind of surrealism, or even a symbolic temporal confusion, because separate realities deign to be of and within the same moment. Bertolucci says “In cinema you are allowed to conjugate only one tense, the present. Because when you shoot, you are contemporary to what you shoot and to whom you are shooting. This prevalence of the present is something we cannot forget or ignore. Even if you shoot a character in ancient Rome dressed up like Julius Cesar, the people in the theater are contemporary to Julius Cesar. This is really a privilege of cinema. The three kids who are acting the part of three kids from ’68, they, in their bodies and experiences carry the present.”
THE DREAMERS is a complex but elegant exercise of this temporal aspect of cinema. Actors of the present (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green), are posing as fictional people (Matthew, Theo, Isabelle), in a fictional scenario placed within an actual past, who, to compound things further, imitate, almost as a second language, scenes from past films, which are themselves merely documented imitations of scenarios and feelings by other actors and filmmakers. Take for example the black and white newsreel images of French New Wave poster child, actor Jean-Pierre Leaude speaking out at the actual ’68 demonstration, juxtaposed with his own self-reenactment in the present, as it were, via the filming of THE DREAMERS in 2003, which is itself a restaging of ’68. Neither the archival Leaud nor the Leaud of today are in the proper time (the former pulled forward, the latter thrust back), yet they are both in the present, contemporary to each other, and to us as we view. On many occasions we are confronted with moments of the archival past and the immutable present-in-imitation of the past, compounded in singular moments. The twins constantly reenact film scenes as a game to test film knowledge and to subvert a grasping of “reality.” Their imitation games are a kind of manufactured twin-speech, a language that is both distilled in its specificity, but also diluted by several generations of removal (from their original contexts). Even if one doesn’t dissect these ideas very intently, it still carries wind of the pervasive action of imitation that propels the story, that defines and ultimately destroys the trio, and in a way, highlights the inherent sensual tactile nature of the film’s world. The Dreamers makes no shallow predication of its relationship to the lineage of cinema, doesn’t rest contentedly on the fact of simply being a film, or a film about cinephiles, but revels in its nature as a film in love with film, and creates a synthesis of itself into the family of cinema, and vice versa. Bertolucci borrows imagery from other films and weaves it into the lives of his characters (by their imitation of said imagery, and by the seeming nature that it is a phenomenon of their own conjuration), as well as into the literal fabric of the film itself, spliced into scenes regarding a material process. THE DREAMERS manifests this dynamic integration through abstraction and through a literal materiality yielding an inextricable poetic tangle.
These temporally enmeshed moments are but another, if not the initial dimension of THE DREAMERS’ pervading sexuality and sensuality, for they create a bifurcated penetration of films into films, creating amorous relationships between the imitator and the imitated, reflected again through Matthew’s invitation into the twin’s very specific gravity and the chaos he stirs in the displacement as he hopes to integrate. Sexuality in the explicit sense, is therefore a response rather than a motivator to this phenomenon.
… I dont want take up too much more space here, so visit my blog… http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ …and read the rest!!! Tell me what you think! There is ever more to be discovered in this film.
A post from my blog… http://bluekeyreviews.blogspot.com/
This is especially a response to the recent Extended Cut, who’s patience and expansiveness enhances all the ideas I raise and discuss. Please respond with your own observations! -—————————————————
“I thought it was dream… what we knew in the forest. It’s the only truth.”
-Captain John Smith
Why didn’t I sense it before? Why didn’t I see what is so plainly the lifeblood and success of THE NEW WORLD… that it is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with beat of its rays, saying “I will find joy in all I see.” Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition, by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD.
THE NEW WORLD is a history (more explicitly a history of the Jamestown settlement and the initial tenuous exchanges between Settlers and Indians) as told through the mechanism of remembrance, what one might call a multifarious sense-memory; that of John Smith (Farell), Pocahontas (Kilcher), and Rohn Rolfe (Bale), in their experiences of one another and of their lives during this irrevocable epoch, imbued with apt distraction and curiosity. THE NEW WORLD is a dream that addresses the amorphousness and poetry of its own nature, both in its spontaneous construction, visual juxtapositions, the constant interjections of natural imagery and landscape, as well as through monologue and through physical action that gain life in their overlapping. John Smith reflects upon the moments shared between himself and Pocahontas after living in her tribe for two seasons, saying “If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake…There is only this, all else is unreal.”
“I don’t know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees. I was the world, the world was me. A landscape is like a face.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-luc Godard)
A subjective and existential modality laced with historicity, Malick’s film is not stringently historical. This is not to say that THE NEW WORLD is not an exceptionally researched and accurately designed film, particularly on the account of the Algonquin Indian’s representations, of Jamestown’s construction and its squalid degeneration, and the lifestyles enacted by both groups. But what Mallick aspires to, what makes this film the exception and the work of art that it is, more than a text-book accuracy, is the existential and spiritual themes that brim and flourish in the world we are exposed to, in the alternate clashing and coalescing of cultural anatomies, and in the cascade of questions, conscience, and prose that snare the wind like spores inside the mind, setting fly a felt stream-of-consciousness with the voices of John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and on occasion others. And in this binary focus of a tactile history and its subjective experience, Mallick weds the polarities of the utmost external, with that of the utmost internal. History becomes diegesis, and emotion becomes something manifest.
“All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me; I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.” (Jean-Pierre Melville)
“As the story is developed from something out of history; something that’s been told over and over again, and told incorrectly in some peoples’ eyes, the most important thing…is to bring the body language of Indian people into this. To speak a language of memory… and remembering that we tell the story our own way, through our bodies.” Such is at the very core of ones experience of THE NEW WORLD, and also something embodied by settler and Indian alike, both steeped deeply in their circumstances. (Raul Trujillo; Tomocomo, Choreographer) Pocahontas varies this notion. She speaks to herself, “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” And ‘sing’ she does, though not as the word commonly denotes. She sings on all levels; out loud but mostly inside her own heart, and through a private language of gestures, of natural evocations; pantomime that airs on the side of veneration and communion rather than mimic, of nature. She sings every time she touches her hand to a blade of wind, the roughness of a tree’s bark, or swims in cool waters. Even her analogies all sing a kinship with the natural world. “You flow through me, like a river,” she says of John Smith. “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade,” she relates of John Rolfe.
In its sensuously ponderous method, Malick’s film expresses thus: that the “new world” is in fact bifurcated, that beyond the discovery of a new land to settle by the English and the subsequent shock of alarm sent through Indian life, it is the mutual rediscovery of “home.” The frontier is also the process of ‘loss’ and ‘reclamation,’ within and without the body. It is the settlement of Jamestown, the fleeting integration of John Smith into Indian society, and the integration of Pocahontas into settler society, and then her journey to England itself. The “new world” is all these things, and it is also not. What it is, most profoundly, more than a mere adjustment of attitude, is Pocahontas’s rediscovery of her own sense of life, and a sense of how to once again “find joy in all she sees,” purely and fully. To be able to say, roaming a vast garden of unnatural design, chasing her sun and feeling the dew in the air, “mother [earth], now I know where you live.”
For some, for those who see not borders, who build not walls, this “frontier” is a constant condition, a state that exists at the intersection of soul and earth, of man and men, of tactility and ethereality. For them, such as the Algonquin people, there is no separation… that is to say, until one is explained what a ‘wall’ is, until someone stands behind one and touches it and knows their distinction from what is on the other side… and then once changed, they understand all things in terms of walls, and places them into the abstract so that they can proliferate the symbolical damage that is the worser side of their intentionality. John Smith says of the Algonquin, “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” These will be taught to them, as we know.
“We often try to analyze the meaning of words but are too easily led astray. One must admit that there’s nothing simpler than taking things for granted.” (2 or 3 Things I know About Her: Godard)
More than anything else, we take for granted that we will be understood, or that our words, once spoken, gain some importance despite their innocuity, or the arbitrary basis of their make. “The phenomenon of ‘automatic pilot’ is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings (“how are you” … “I’m fine, and you?”), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.” (Mike Cifone)
But some conditions breath life back into our discourses. In college I had a Japanese friend. She was an exchange student, and native of Japan. What was so exciting about our exchanges with one another, more than the exhilaration of a tactile cultural crossroads, is how her “handicap” with the English language inversely challenged my own aptitude towards it. With her own linguistic sidestepping, she offered me a reactivation of the spoken word. In our conversations, I began to reduce my expressions, sometimes to a kind of relational poetry, in order to communicate ideas, feelings, and concepts of art and culture and emotionality. And even in what might have been the most banal topics, there was a vitality, a newness, a spark in the manner of how aware I was of each word, and of its placement, and of the breadth of its potentiality. This is a reality addressed not only in the intimate communion between John Smith and Pocahontas in the wild, but also between settlers and coping with their shattered expectations of “The New World,” in John Rolfe’s acquiescence to Pocahontas’s quietude and trepidation, and between Pocahontas and the friction of life behind walls; the wall of a dress, of shoes that make walking difficult, the wall of an imposed faith, of all the things that impede her experience of nature, her mother. All of these confrontations present individuals and groups alike with a challenge against their prescribed modalities, make them question themselves as much as they question what newly surrounds them, and forces them, by degrees, into adaptation.
“What is language?” “The house that man lives in.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)
“If all we have created up till now are mere words…” (Eros + Massacre: Yoshida Kiju)
I think its a great cover. It contains an element of quiet, or mystery, of anonymity, and expansiveness that I feel from watching his films. Its lack of design is appropriate in engendering those kinds of feelings. It also feels quite intimate somehow, through the use of a muted palate. In the end its really all just a matter of preference. I think that the cover should be reflective of, but not competing with the content of the film. Allow the cover to be subtle, to be an obscured taste , and allow the film to be the force and the context behind it (even though his films themselves are also quite subtle).
Every Inch of It: Exploring A 'Film In Love With Film' over 2 years ago
The following are the introductory paragraphs to a larger ongoing analysis of THE DREAMERS (http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/) exploring its language, themes, contexts, references, etc, reveling in the little details. I’m writing this piece (entitled ‘War of Imitation’) because I feel that THE DREAMERS is a gorgeous and marvelously articulate film that utilizes the means of all its elements to a nuanced end. Unfortunately, it is so often simplistically derided or overlooked. Many people seem to think that any use of explicit or peculiar sexuality stands merely as provocation or gratuity, but these people are missing a great deal of depth and complexity in their assumption.
I’d love to hear feedback and to generate further analysis of this film. THE DREAMERS is a film in love with film, and I am a cinephile in love with IT! My goal is to give life back to THE DREAMERS, as it continues to give so much to me. *
-————————————————————————————-“War of Imitation”
Whenever I hear the sentiment “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” spouted in response to some manner of playful pretense or emulation, I’ve always reverted immediately to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “imitation is suicide.” Two seemingly polar observations, and yet neither cancels the other out, so to speak. They can exist alongside one another. Take for example Shakespeare’s Romeo, who lavishes compliment upon Juliet’s brilliant slumberous corpse in the Capulet monument, even as he takes a deadly drum of poison to his lips in an effort to imitate her “unsubstantial death,” which is itself an imitation, for Juliet is but slayed of senses, not of life. Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS is a playground for these varied sentiments, a blended but always uneasy mixture of fatalism and homage lacing every moment of tiered imitation. Emerson’s concise cautionary words are of a figurative urgency. They infer that sacrifice of principle, not flesh, is inherent in the adoption of guises, or that facilitating one’s identity through the medium of another’s constructed means, which subverts one’s own pre-existing model, is at the very expense of that model. The existential tailspin of the three principal characters in THE DREAMERS, toward its final minutes especially, is evidence enough of this truth, and further highlights that the refusal to grow, in the emotional case of the characters of Theo and Isa, is an analogous form to suicide; that of suicide by stagnation. Or put by another, “Not busy being born is busy dying” (Dylan).
Bertolucci’s triumph of unconventionally sexual cinema is a poetic and sensual exploration of the lives of three young adults; twins Theo and Isabelle, and their newly made friend Matthew, at the cusp of great personal and social upheaval in Paris. It is a film about simultaneous wars, and about refusals, both ideological and manifest, drawn with a mark of rare, and for some, a somewhat affronting intimacy. While the film speaks of social war and the unrest of the May ’68 demonstrations (a year that saw analogous uprisings the world over, such as the US’s strife against its own participation the Vietnam War), it is not a film about ’68, but rather one that takes place in that moment in history, and utilizes its intensity and its feverish embrace of the possibility of change, as an informing backdrop, if not catalyst. The film is, quite insularly, about the three main characters’ blossoming and shifting perceptions of “self” and the mechanisms of emotional identity, over the span of an exceptional month in self-imposed house arrest. Gilbert Adair, author of the novel and screenplay, explains that the actual telling of the story holds no intended or implicit irony. However, within its framework, particular and telling ironies which inform deeply on each character’s changing or unchanging personhood.
The “wars” in THE DREAMERS, as they may be termed, swell between action and inaction, between the public and the private, the political and emotional, between the teacher and the taught, between impressions and actuality, and between imitation and embodiment. Bertolucci acknowledges that each of these “combatants,” as it were, has a vested interest in its opposition in order to thrive, and from this basis he symbolically threads the film together with a palate of red and green, termed “complementary colors” but opposites just the same. Bertolucci stems from that symbolic language of opposites, into the narrative’s physical course; for instance, the stagnation that occurs within the closed-off apartment during a month of seclusion requires the punctuation of social upheaval raging in the streets to inform its own qualities. The twins, Theo and Isabelle’s increasing isolationism teaches Matthew an ironic universality of boundless love, however Matthew’s reversion of this principle towards the twins, that is to say, his efforts to instill in the twins his own learned broadness, is refused almost outright. Timid but ponderous Matthew, brimming from the first shot with boyish enthusiasm and an overly apologetic naiveté, is so complexly and confrontingly engaged by the Twins during this pocket of isolation, and yet it is they who choose to stunt their own emotional growth. It is no mistake that this attitudinal war fought behind doors unfolds as a war of ideology and principle is fought “dans la rue,” and that these two fronts should meet in the end with so much breaking of glass.
The broiling but optimistic scene of social tensions of May ’68, between the powers-that-be and Parisian youths and intellectuals, is set immediately as our backdrop. At the tail end of the first shot, a descending close-up pan of the Eiffel Tower’s framework, into which the title sequence is integrated, we meet Matthew: the blonde, wide-eyed, un-spoiled American studying French in Paris. He is walking towards the Cinematheque Francaise, wearing a neutral palate of khaki, grey and white, revealing retrospective details about the time and place, and about himself, through voice-over-narration. He is our usher into this world from after the fact. Soon he is amidst one of the first organized public outcries against the deposing of Henri Langlois, the creator and curator of the Cinematheque Francais, for his reputedly slapdash handling of his resources (film, ephemera, finances). To many Langlois is the father of cinema preservation and programming, if not the encouraging rebel uncle to the elite cinephiles who would become the famed New Wavers; Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, etc. Matthew’s self-enacted immersion into the film subculture becomes a vastly more affecting avenue of education than any of his institutional schooling. “Here is where I got my real education” he says. Though not French, Matthew is a member of the universal culture of cinema and has every right to embroil in the demonstration. This organized public uprising of principle and of personal objection taking place at the Palais Chaillot, which seemingly begins as something subcultural, is merely one aspect of what will expand into a near-formal city-wide movement. This tenuous moment fatefully brings together Matthew and the twins, Theo and Isa, though it is intimated by their smiling glances to one another that the twins had been discreetly pondering him at film screenings. “He’s American, just like I told you,” Isa says to Theo while introducing Matthew. The two young men bond over the name of Nicholas Ray.
This opening scene also sets the stage for THE DREAMERS’ most prevalent and outspoken visual motif; inter-splicing archival footage and film excerpts into sequences, virtually frame by frame reenacted, or content reflective. Immediately, by virtue of this meta-motif, we are confronted with a melange of concepts that are subliminally crucial to understanding the impending identity epoch that will unfold between our three protagonists. One might define the overlapping of archival and “modern” footage as a kind of surrealism, or even a symbolic temporal confusion, because separate realities deign to be of and within the same moment. Bertolucci says “In cinema you are allowed to conjugate only one tense, the present. Because when you shoot, you are contemporary to what you shoot and to whom you are shooting. This prevalence of the present is something we cannot forget or ignore. Even if you shoot a character in ancient Rome dressed up like Julius Cesar, the people in the theater are contemporary to Julius Cesar. This is really a privilege of cinema. The three kids who are acting the part of three kids from ’68, they, in their bodies and experiences carry the present.”
THE DREAMERS is a complex but elegant exercise of this temporal aspect of cinema. Actors of the present (Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green), are posing as fictional people (Matthew, Theo, Isabelle), in a fictional scenario placed within an actual past, who, to compound things further, imitate, almost as a second language, scenes from past films, which are themselves merely documented imitations of scenarios and feelings by other actors and filmmakers. Take for example the black and white newsreel images of French New Wave poster child, actor Jean-Pierre Leaude speaking out at the actual ’68 demonstration, juxtaposed with his own self-reenactment in the present, as it were, via the filming of THE DREAMERS in 2003, which is itself a restaging of ’68. Neither the archival Leaud nor the Leaud of today are in the proper time (the former pulled forward, the latter thrust back), yet they are both in the present, contemporary to each other, and to us as we view. On many occasions we are confronted with moments of the archival past and the immutable present-in-imitation of the past, compounded in singular moments. The twins constantly reenact film scenes as a game to test film knowledge and to subvert a grasping of “reality.” Their imitation games are a kind of manufactured twin-speech, a language that is both distilled in its specificity, but also diluted by several generations of removal (from their original contexts). Even if one doesn’t dissect these ideas very intently, it still carries wind of the pervasive action of imitation that propels the story, that defines and ultimately destroys the trio, and in a way, highlights the inherent sensual tactile nature of the film’s world. The Dreamers makes no shallow predication of its relationship to the lineage of cinema, doesn’t rest contentedly on the fact of simply being a film, or a film about cinephiles, but revels in its nature as a film in love with film, and creates a synthesis of itself into the family of cinema, and vice versa. Bertolucci borrows imagery from other films and weaves it into the lives of his characters (by their imitation of said imagery, and by the seeming nature that it is a phenomenon of their own conjuration), as well as into the literal fabric of the film itself, spliced into scenes regarding a material process. THE DREAMERS manifests this dynamic integration through abstraction and through a literal materiality yielding an inextricable poetic tangle.
These temporally enmeshed moments are but another, if not the initial dimension of THE DREAMERS’ pervading sexuality and sensuality, for they create a bifurcated penetration of films into films, creating amorous relationships between the imitator and the imitated, reflected again through Matthew’s invitation into the twin’s very specific gravity and the chaos he stirs in the displacement as he hopes to integrate. Sexuality in the explicit sense, is therefore a response rather than a motivator to this phenomenon.
… I dont want take up too much more space here, so visit my blog… http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ …and read the rest!!! Tell me what you think! There is ever more to be discovered in this film.
Go to Comment
The Impossibility of History over 2 years ago
A post from my blog… http://bluekeyreviews.blogspot.com/
This is especially a response to the recent Extended Cut, who’s patience and expansiveness enhances all the ideas I raise and discuss. Please respond with your own observations!
-—————————————————“I thought it was dream… what we knew in the forest. It’s the only truth.”
-Captain John Smith
Why didn’t I sense it before? Why didn’t I see what is so plainly the lifeblood and success of THE NEW WORLD… that it is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with beat of its rays, saying “I will find joy in all I see.” Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition, by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD.
THE NEW WORLD is a history (more explicitly a history of the Jamestown settlement and the initial tenuous exchanges between Settlers and Indians) as told through the mechanism of remembrance, what one might call a multifarious sense-memory; that of John Smith (Farell), Pocahontas (Kilcher), and Rohn Rolfe (Bale), in their experiences of one another and of their lives during this irrevocable epoch, imbued with apt distraction and curiosity. THE NEW WORLD is a dream that addresses the amorphousness and poetry of its own nature, both in its spontaneous construction, visual juxtapositions, the constant interjections of natural imagery and landscape, as well as through monologue and through physical action that gain life in their overlapping. John Smith reflects upon the moments shared between himself and Pocahontas after living in her tribe for two seasons, saying “If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake…There is only this, all else is unreal.”
“I don’t know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees. I was the world, the world was me. A landscape is like a face.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-luc Godard)
A subjective and existential modality laced with historicity, Malick’s film is not stringently historical. This is not to say that THE NEW WORLD is not an exceptionally researched and accurately designed film, particularly on the account of the Algonquin Indian’s representations, of Jamestown’s construction and its squalid degeneration, and the lifestyles enacted by both groups. But what Mallick aspires to, what makes this film the exception and the work of art that it is, more than a text-book accuracy, is the existential and spiritual themes that brim and flourish in the world we are exposed to, in the alternate clashing and coalescing of cultural anatomies, and in the cascade of questions, conscience, and prose that snare the wind like spores inside the mind, setting fly a felt stream-of-consciousness with the voices of John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and on occasion others. And in this binary focus of a tactile history and its subjective experience, Mallick weds the polarities of the utmost external, with that of the utmost internal. History becomes diegesis, and emotion becomes something manifest.
“All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me; I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.” (Jean-Pierre Melville)
“As the story is developed from something out of history; something that’s been told over and over again, and told incorrectly in some peoples’ eyes, the most important thing…is to bring the body language of Indian people into this. To speak a language of memory… and remembering that we tell the story our own way, through our bodies.” Such is at the very core of ones experience of THE NEW WORLD, and also something embodied by settler and Indian alike, both steeped deeply in their circumstances. (Raul Trujillo; Tomocomo, Choreographer) Pocahontas varies this notion. She speaks to herself, “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” And ‘sing’ she does, though not as the word commonly denotes. She sings on all levels; out loud but mostly inside her own heart, and through a private language of gestures, of natural evocations; pantomime that airs on the side of veneration and communion rather than mimic, of nature. She sings every time she touches her hand to a blade of wind, the roughness of a tree’s bark, or swims in cool waters. Even her analogies all sing a kinship with the natural world. “You flow through me, like a river,” she says of John Smith. “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade,” she relates of John Rolfe.
In its sensuously ponderous method, Malick’s film expresses thus: that the “new world” is in fact bifurcated, that beyond the discovery of a new land to settle by the English and the subsequent shock of alarm sent through Indian life, it is the mutual rediscovery of “home.” The frontier is also the process of ‘loss’ and ‘reclamation,’ within and without the body. It is the settlement of Jamestown, the fleeting integration of John Smith into Indian society, and the integration of Pocahontas into settler society, and then her journey to England itself. The “new world” is all these things, and it is also not. What it is, most profoundly, more than a mere adjustment of attitude, is Pocahontas’s rediscovery of her own sense of life, and a sense of how to once again “find joy in all she sees,” purely and fully. To be able to say, roaming a vast garden of unnatural design, chasing her sun and feeling the dew in the air, “mother [earth], now I know where you live.”
For some, for those who see not borders, who build not walls, this “frontier” is a constant condition, a state that exists at the intersection of soul and earth, of man and men, of tactility and ethereality. For them, such as the Algonquin people, there is no separation… that is to say, until one is explained what a ‘wall’ is, until someone stands behind one and touches it and knows their distinction from what is on the other side… and then once changed, they understand all things in terms of walls, and places them into the abstract so that they can proliferate the symbolical damage that is the worser side of their intentionality. John Smith says of the Algonquin, “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” These will be taught to them, as we know.
“We often try to analyze the meaning of words but are too easily led astray. One must admit that there’s nothing simpler than taking things for granted.” (2 or 3 Things I know About Her: Godard)
More than anything else, we take for granted that we will be understood, or that our words, once spoken, gain some importance despite their innocuity, or the arbitrary basis of their make. “The phenomenon of ‘automatic pilot’ is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings (“how are you” … “I’m fine, and you?”), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.” (Mike Cifone)
But some conditions breath life back into our discourses. In college I had a Japanese friend. She was an exchange student, and native of Japan. What was so exciting about our exchanges with one another, more than the exhilaration of a tactile cultural crossroads, is how her “handicap” with the English language inversely challenged my own aptitude towards it. With her own linguistic sidestepping, she offered me a reactivation of the spoken word. In our conversations, I began to reduce my expressions, sometimes to a kind of relational poetry, in order to communicate ideas, feelings, and concepts of art and culture and emotionality. And even in what might have been the most banal topics, there was a vitality, a newness, a spark in the manner of how aware I was of each word, and of its placement, and of the breadth of its potentiality. This is a reality addressed not only in the intimate communion between John Smith and Pocahontas in the wild, but also between settlers and coping with their shattered expectations of “The New World,” in John Rolfe’s acquiescence to Pocahontas’s quietude and trepidation, and between Pocahontas and the friction of life behind walls; the wall of a dress, of shoes that make walking difficult, the wall of an imposed faith, of all the things that impede her experience of nature, her mother. All of these confrontations present individuals and groups alike with a challenge against their prescribed modalities, make them question themselves as much as they question what newly surrounds them, and forces them, by degrees, into adaptation.
“What is language?” “The house that man lives in.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)
“If all we have created up till now are mere words…” (Eros + Massacre: Yoshida Kiju)
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Cover about 2 years ago
I think its a great cover. It contains an element of quiet, or mystery, of anonymity, and expansiveness that I feel from watching his films. Its lack of design is appropriate in engendering those kinds of feelings. It also feels quite intimate somehow, through the use of a muted palate. In the end its really all just a matter of preference. I think that the cover should be reflective of, but not competing with the content of the film. Allow the cover to be subtle, to be an obscured taste , and allow the film to be the force and the context behind it (even though his films themselves are also quite subtle).
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