You no longer know what to expect from the cinema and what to expect from television. The border between the two territories begins to blur in such a way that it no longer matters if the story is fragmented into a chapter or a season. The only thing that matters, the only thing that really divides is the story; there is something to tell. We recently talked about ‘The Underground Railroad’ by Barry Jenkins. One chapter was enough for me to intuit that I was facing something formidable. But now, coming to the end, I can and do affirm that it is. Each episode is a movie that could well have been released in a theater. The largest and most elegant of the rooms you can imagine. A room for ten ovations in a row.
The story in ‘The Underground Railroad’ permeates everything. There is a story in the text, that is, in the action, in the dialogues, in the plot. But there is a story in the image and the sound; a story so overwhelming, so beautiful, that it deserves the best analysis. I am particularly fascinated by how certain sounds imitate that of the train: the broom, the whip, the car, the cloth that rubs the bloodstains on the ground … The music, wonderful, reads like a poem.
Like the image that, at times, are moving verses that cannot be explained in words. Images that, by the way, are not there for the mere visual pleasure. They all have a narrative intention, an intention so powerful that, if we removed the dialogues, we would understand by osmosis what is happening. There are even moments that I feel textures on my own skin: the earth and the water, the sun and the night, the blood and the tears.
It’s a series, but I haven’t seen such good cinema for a long time. Cinema, if not in the form, in the most honest bottom.
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