In Xalapa, I am a university film teacher and I always tell my students that more than images it is time, with it they tell a story because time is an operation of (un)reality.
In cinema, time does not exist: it is created, it is manipulated. Not in real life. It is the opposite of Dorian Grey: Bogart no longer ages, nor Chaplin, nor Brando, nor Armendáriz, nor the two Hepburns (Katherine and Audrey), because cinema is the human way of eternity.
We live in “long shot sequence”. No cuts, no editing. That, perhaps, is material for remembrance, memory that is a kind of metaphysical montage.
What does time taste like? We try it daily and ignore its taste. Time is the flesh of years, ulcers of plans, abstraction that becomes wrinkles.
Looking at things as they happen, without removing even a comma, is the way in which time writes life. The waves of the sea are echoes of a world that contemplates us, It tells us that nothing is eternal. Only the sea…
The Cuban poet Eliseo Diego wrote: “having no more / between heaven and earth than / my memory, than this time; / I decide to make my will. / It is this: / I leave you / time, all the time.”
Time is a testament to losses and gains. Irremediable heirs, we (badly) spend time living. Is living the enormous parenthesis of death?
Opening our eyes is the greatest tribute of life that someone gives us. We return to the image, to the idea of existence. The eye, aleph, magician of light, dictates life, mathematician of forms. The eye opens and closes universes, prevents and multiplies beauty. Although Buñuel, in ’29, took a knife not to cut but to tear the gaze in an interior look because Buñuel is the cut eye, the cinema in the body, the skin screen, the other look of time.
Buñuel is cursed beauty, devilish modesty, vital detritus. Buñuelian images irritate, vivify, make the grapes of chaste wines tremble.
To see Buñuel’s cinema it is not enough to look: you have to suffer. The camera moves and here, the viewer, suffers from humanism. Buñuel is a man and an artist; even more: he understands man because he is an artist.
Buñuel is fear and pleasure, encounter and disagreement.
Buñuel’s cinema of so many shadows is saturated with light. Deceptive light: silence and hubbub, space and dream. The greatest mystery of Buñuel’s cinema is the unfolding, the cloning of the interior of the being.
A Buñuelian film is the answer to the pain of knowing ourselves to be finite, inconsequential after all.
Buñuel confirms Eros in his prison of metallic air. Buñuel’s cinema is passion, a dagger in the jugular of morality, acid in the skin of hypocrisy.
A Buñuel film is uncomfortable because there is, without a doubt, art in it. And to say art in an artist like Buñuel is to say transgression, rage, nonconformity of spirit.
Buñuel extended (and prologued) Cervantes and Galdós in “Nazarín” / 1958 and “Simon of the Desert” / 1964, he gave the psychological melodrama the coming of age in Him / 1952, he told us that hell is not the others: it is one same.
The Buñuelian women break schemes (Pedro/ “Los Olvidados”: “Mom, why didn’t you give me meat the other night?”), are absorbed by the moral schemes of society (Susana, Viridiana) and unfold according to the diatribe. of man (Conchita/ Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina in “That dark object of desire” / 1977).
Buñuel put Freud in the dock (of the accused?) and asked accurate questions about the subconscious, morality and sexuality.
Buñuel, a surrealist, a realist, an artist, gave Mexican cinema an intelligence that it has never had again because he manipulated film time with the hands of irrationality, which is to say untamed intuition, perhaps inserted in the vagaries of chaos, and chaos in the Art often means the permitted order.
There may be a universe without space, but not without time (Borge dixit). In cinema, space/spatiality occurs in what Bergson called “closed sets”, outside of time (the internalization of a character, narrative ellipsis); and for the effect we go to what Deleuze explained: “The glass of water is effectively a closed set that contains parts, the water, the sugar, perhaps the spoon: but the whole is not there. The whole is created, and does not cease to be created in one dimension or another without parts, as that which takes the whole from a qualitative state to a different one, as the pure becoming without interruption that passes through these states. The whole (narratology, montage) is “created”, where? In the time.
Time in the film is constituted by a “set of movement-images; collection of lines or figures of light; series of space-time blocks” (Deleuze dixit). Although to do this we must review the notions of shot and montage, because although the shot is the “image-movement” that it is, time derives from the montage that links one image-movement to another.” Considering that the framing forges a picture and determines an off-screen, thus creating a space, later the shot will add a temporal perspective.
For example, in the opening sequence of “The Godfather” / 1972, by Francis Ford Coppola, Vito (with his back to the shot) converses with Bonasera (facing the shot) in motion-image; When he changes the frame, now Vito – facing the shot – and Bonasera – with his back to the shot – a temporal perspective is added. That is, the montage operates on the movement-images to detach from them the whole, the idea, that is, the “image of time.” And it is that “the image is not originally something that is seen, perceived or thought, but rather something that moves, that is in perpetual movement independently of a consciousness” (Álvarez Asiáin dixit). Because in every film, like the universe itself, everything is made, built, changing and lasting through staging, shots and editing, respectively…
2023-12-24 21:23:30
#dogs #birthday #Cinema #time
