In Japan, we can see the current situation in which people who advocate war and conscription never assume that they will be the first to die in battle, and the TV-style manipulation of "exclusion" for viewers who lack imagination outside the frame is still prevalent. Even just recently, none of the authors of Gendai Shiso/Contemporary Thought, the October 2007 extra issue of Documentary, mension "documentary and fiction," but made no mention of fiction films, thus revealing a negative attitude toward the power of fiction and its closed nature. This is as ludicrous as the words of those who talk as if Hollywood or Japanese films were the only ones in the world. The work outside the frame left by Robert Bresson, who never ceased to engage the audience's imagination in order to resist such manipulations, becomes increasingly important, and Roberto Rossellini's Giovanna d'arco dal rogo, India and L'eta del Ferro which were and still are ignored because they are impossible to categorize, became also increasingly important.
Carmelo Bene's Macbeth Horror Suite was dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, co-author of "superpositions" who had committed suicide the year before, and to Antonin Artaud on the centenary of his birth. In an interview shortly before his death Bene had mentioned with Bresson's Lancelot du Lac. Like Amleto da Shakespare a Laforgue (shot in black and white the year after Amleto di meno, the last film shot in color Cinemascope and released theatrically) and Otello (shot in 1979 and completed in 2001, shortly before his death), Macbeth Horror Suite was filmed for television and, with its simpler set pieces and motionless fixed screen and editing, appears at first glance to be a stage broadcast recording, but in fact it is not so simple.
At the beginning of the film, when Bene himself, a middle-aged, overweight, white painted man in armor sitting on a bed with huge doors standing on either side, slowly unwinds the blood-stained bandages on his head and hands, there are no wounds anywhere, and he starts barking in response to goats, dogs, and other noises coming from off-screen. It is very comical from the very first scene, more Jerry Lewis-like than Camilo Mastrocinque's Toto, Peppino e the fuorilegge, and also recalls the animal voices echoing in the opening titles of Joao Cesar Monteiro's Le Bassin de J.W. ( Bene said he liked Monteiro's A Comedia de Deus). And it’s no longer a marionette manipulated by a witch's voice, but rather an observation of a series of actions by a sick man who thinks he is Macbeth. Macbeth moves his distorted mouth to the playback of his own voice altered by the synthesizer, throws off his armor as he tries it on, flutters his handkerchief like a child, peels off his thick white makeup, and finally continues to tumble and fall as if in love. The other character in the play, Lady Macbeth, is also a sleepwalker who puts on her husband's armor and laments her failure to have sex with him, reciting her lines like a rapid-fire gun and howling into the mirror, "Basta! (Too much!) "
Amleto da Shakespeare a Laforgue, shot on a flat black-and-white set that lacks any depth, reminds the viewer of FEKS and Eisenstein from its opening iris-out and set. And finally, in the black coffin of the Carl Th Dreyer-like white set, the characters fall down like vampires, and when the king climbs the throne, he removes his armor and becomes "invisible" like an invisible man with a white mask. After Amleto di meno, Carmelo Bene's works for television moved away from the frenetic high-speed montages of the earlier film works and finally simplified to the coaxial connection of full view and close-up of the set of Macbeth. Witnessing such a process, we can see that, although he denied it entirely in his testimony before his death, in fact, as a theater director who made films on film, no one reflects history of cinema more bountifully than Carmelo Bene (and the lack thereof is the reason why Japanese theater directors fail without exception when they make films). But that does not mean, of course, that he is cinephilic. For, as Deleuze has already said, Bene's voice and body are a "process" of gesture and voice that ends before arriving at a particular name or work.
Otello, completed posthumously with Lorenzaccio, "subtracts" much from Orson Welles' Othello, to follow Deleuze. The lamentations and monologues of a character lying in bed and dying, the mixed black and white pigments, the fade-out black and white alternations, the handkerchief and veil to which Bene consistently clings are props not seen since Italian silent cinema, which dances in darkness and covers its figures. The black pigment and white makeup peel off and mix in the scene where Othello embraces Desdemona, and Bene's low voice mingles with Michela Martini's high voice as the wonderful Desdemona against Verdi. It is reminiscent of Bene's monologue in the final scene of Salome, which is arguably one of the greatest Italian films of all time, rather than Bene's best work, and should be called "the bombing of an image," in which Donyale Luna and Bene himself intertwine like magical beasts in the blinding light. The monologue of Otello is different from that of Salome. In Salome the king Herode’s monologue is hallucinatory, which I remember from a one time screening at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo more than 20 years ago, with the horrific scene of a woman in the front row dashing toward the exit in high heels in terror and kicking down the door. The monologue of Otello is in lyricism. All the characters are covered in a mass of clothes, lying down, murmuring, smiling, and disappearing....
How about taking up Manoel de Oliveira’s Le Soulier de Satin, which was said to be impossible to release in Japan, in a different sense from Bene’s Salome? It should have been shown together with another masterpiece, O Pintor e A Cidade, which deals with the town of Porto, the birthplace of this master, rather than Le Belle toujours, which I mentioned in my previous text, but at any rate, Porto Minha infancia has just finally been released in Japan.The lack of last several minutes of DVD of this 6 hours and 50 minutes monstrosity from Track Media in Spain is proof to the contrary that a cinema is definitely the place to concentrate for such a long time in order for the audience to watch the film from beginning to end. That is why the cancellation of the 2005 screening in Japan to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Claudel's death was such a disappointment. The film begins with the shot-sequence from the entrance scene of the audience as extras into the theater to the oral presentation. The second scene on the second day, from the clownish introduction in which the "irrepressible man" gives an oral statement while instructing the choreographed "backstage" and the long close-up of Dona Pluiez (Patricia Balczyk), or From St. James appearing in a Paradjanovian diptych until the Méliès-like moon monologue (Marie-Christine Barrault), the core of "theater=cinema," which is made up of a series of scenes that continue without a break for nearly ten minutes of raging recitations. Oliveira, as a documentary filmmaker, had begun to work on a film that is akin to Jean Rouch, and has been convinced of the distance of dismantling the dramatic film into "theatrical representation + time-space created by the frame" since O Acto da primavera, in which he accidentally discovered the Passion Play in a rural village, just as Jean Rouch discovered the ritual in Les Maîtres fou.
It is no coincidence that I mention here a completely different film, but one of the most wonderful films of 2007, Teiichi Hori's Moso Shojo Otaku Kei/Otaku Type Delusion Girl. The long scene in the art room where two girls who are manipulated by images and can only come in contact with the world by acting out the images, talk to each other and play the characters, for example, should be seen separately from the superficial story of the "adventures of the four girls" captured in the world of boys love comic books. This is because it is a certainty of distance and duration that captures their bodies. Therefore, this is a film that criticizes images. Perhaps this, together with the use of off-screen imagery (the family only appears in voice-over), is what makes the curtains that always appear in this director's films so fascinating, as well as the whiteness of the splashes in the pool at the end.
The director Oliveira's procedure for "putting" Claudel's performance on film is also a use of the power of the frame. Near the end, on the ninth scene of the fourth day, the King of Spain, whose glory has been diminished by the sinking of the Invincible Armada, gives Don Rodrigue (Luis Miguel Sintra), the former hero of the New World, the title of King of England in order to deal with him. The scene is constructed with more cuts than ever before, but Oliveira's choice to avoid the slapstick use of ship rocking that author Claudel apparently intended at the time of writing, may be coming from that "(Bresson's Jeanne film )taught me the power of the fixed shot," he later said in an interview with Godard. In fact, the stage, layout, direction are reminiscent of the trial scene in Bresson's Proces de Jeanne d'Arc; the rigid frame jostles with the rocking of the ship's set that threatens to destroy it (and therein lies the risk of filming); and off-screen sound piles on top of each other. When Don Rodrigue, after being falsely proposed British rule by the King, offers his terms to open the New World to the world, the camera pans to the cross on the roof of the King's stage, and out of frame, the voices of the ministers hurling accusations at Rodrigue, the rocking of the ship, and the eerie thumping of drums come in like waves. Oliveira intersperses the vast amount of dialogue with close-ups of the faces of Rodriguez and the king, who are silent, but this is what harshly conveys the intentions of both of them, who are, in effect, the losers.
It is a film that encompasses the baroque(1), theater, and what is thought to be the antagonism between Bresson and Rossellini, who made another Jeanne d'Arc film based on Claudel's oratorio, and moreover, as "theater=cinema", it is also a film that is connected to Rossellini. Documentary? Fiction? Is it necessary to set a boundary... What a greedy thing cinema is, if it pays attention to hidden dynamics!
(1) For more on Carmelo Bene and "baroque," see Yoshishige Yoshida's "Between Cinema and Structuralism: Carmelo Bene's Caprici" on the October 1970 issue of Eiga Hyoron (cinema review). And Yoshida commented Bene, Bertolucci, Visconti and his own film Kaigenrei/Coup d'État on the October 1973 issue of Eiga Geijutsu (cinema art).
(2007.12.20)
Note that Le Soulier de Satin finally had its Japanese premiere in Tokyo on November 22, 26, 27, and 28, 2020, 5 years after the director Manoel de Oliveira died in 2015.
(2020.11.28)
The notes and commentary on the translation of Le Soulier de Satin(Iwanami Bunko, translated by Moriaki Watanabe), which calls Claudel's original work a "baroque world theater," are also worth mentioning, in terms of pushing for the exposure of the backstage and devices before Brecht, Jacques Becker's unrealized project "The Book of Christopher Columbus" (which, oddly enough, is connected here to Oliveira's film Cristóvão Colombo-O Enigma), and Claudel's own references to his directorial intentions with the film, yet it makes no mention of Oliveira's and Rossellini's film adaptations.
©Akasaka Daisuke