From the Clouds to the Resistance

Da nuvem à resistência estreava há 45 anos no Festival de Veneza. Que vontade louca de ler Pavese! OK.RU ( https://ok.ru/video/4548844128966 )

Tedious and ridiculously dense, I kept wondering why this was even a movie, as it might as well have been a radio play or essay for most of it. It's an hour forty minutes but feels much longer. Very challenging to say the least, but for me not in a good way with this one.

Place, voice, word, myth, history and camera: S/H “apply space in time”, for the first time via the work of Cesare Pavese, perhaps enriching both Dialogues with Leucò and The Moon and the Bonfires by juxtaposing these two very different books, showing the doubled fate of the tragic conception in mythological and modern times, stemming from the indifference of the gods and masters – a call for a communism composed of and by those “who aren’t stupid, who don’t disgrace the name”.

S/H had an incredibly distinctive way of formally interpreting classic texts, so it's no surprise that the segments of F.C.T.R taken from classical mythology are the highlights. The second half of the film, set in post WW2 Italy, doesn't have nearly the same resonance, despite being purposively 'plainer' and more focused on socio-political issues. The 'message' is ambiguous: are S/H suggesting that myths are vital to civilization, or that they are merely illusions restricting freedom? Questions.

This is the absolute anti-humanist cinema I would like to see. Straub & Huillet prioritize the text and meaning as usual, I think the image and representation in their films become a means for the ideas and Weltgeist to realize itself, from that perspective the "character" and the actor givinig life to latter are of course futile, for they lead to an obsession with essentialism which hinders the subject from praxis. Plus, here we have an ontological try with myths and fate besides Marxsim.