Named after a common Italian children's song, and shot by Mario Bava, this second (surviving) film in Rossellini's series of documentary-essays on the lives of creatures employs the same kind of revelatory, Cocteau-esque narration that the director used in Undersea Fantasy [Fantasia sottomarina, 1938] to invite, here as there, a fairy-tale scenario to enter the images. The opening titles of Lively Teresa [La vispa Teresa, 1940] even seem to foreshadow Cocteau's later cinema...
La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:
Le Testament d'Orphée, ou Ne me demandez pas pourquoi [The Testament of Orpheus, or: Don't Ask Me Why] by Jean Cocteau, 1959:
Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963:
Prière pour refuzniks (1) [Prayer for Refuzniks (1)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 2006:
A utopia: bugs and gastropods live in the vicinity of one another, and abundantly. A little girl, a human, has invaded their field and snatched a butterfly out of the air; she has it between her thumb and forefinger, pinched at the wings. And so: "Beetles, scarabs, weevils spread the word and all together cry help. [...] From every hidden forest corner reinforcements rush, and each urges the other to follow. [...] Ranks thicken. Warcamps form boldly." As Rossellini goes down to the level of the microcosmos, speed seems also to decrease, in illustration of the elastic and proportional relationship between space and time; as though this slowing-down, this act of pausing to magnify, could alone accelerate a harmony for all beings.
La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:
Throughout my life, I've known a practical parade of T(h)eresas; in first- or middle-name position, the appellation is recurrent enough to assume a mercurial, maybe mythical / maybe mystical, significance chez Keller. Funny that the "lively" one of Rossellini's film is presented as an almost exclusively static entity — but in apportioning this stasis across each shot that features Teresa, Rossellini reconceives his human as something from Planet Olympus, whose monumental grandeur alone (at the level of the insects' eyes and that of our own as spectators), never mind external action, emanates a challenge for the microcosmos.
La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:
Teresa can be said to be "lively," in fact, in only one shot: a long-shot of her entrance onto the scene of the dispute. But even then Teresa is fixed compositionally at the same spot within the frame, like some axiom, or axis. The camera pans in perfect synchronicity with her gambol / act-of-war.
La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:
Casus belli. The entire bug-kingdom bombards her white-bright shoes, which nonetheless remain immobile. No girl's feet actually fill them, of course; the result is as beautiful and surreal a sequence of images as Rossellini (oh, eminent "realist"!) has ever filmed. Over this segment flows Rossellini's narration: "No-one dares venture onto the girl's legs. The warm white skin disgusts everyone."
La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:
Tune in to Roberto Rossellini's India, matri bhumi [1959] for the exciting conclusion!!!
Roberto Rossellini's first film is a work of deceptive transparency. In its initial moments the film appears to be a documentary about underwater, even deep-sea, species. But soon after, the narration, in the manner of Cocteau, unleashes a powerful "dual reality" onto the images, imbuing them not only with a narrative logic, but a kind of magic. (Let's be clear, for Rossellini there are basically no precedents; or about those that can at least "be said to" exist this filmmaker would always be willing in turn to rejoinder, and pointedly, that the material influences for any film of merit hail from life itself and the powers of the observer; correspondences between films might exist — but why shouldn't they, since audiences and filmmakers are all, ostensibly, alive.) Magic always resides within reality; maybe it's better to say Rossellini "imbues" less than he unlocks. So I ask, at no-one in particular: Is the difference in method (imbue vs. unlock) why Rossellini (or Vigo, or Renoir) have, insanely, been perpetually categorized as (excruciatingly loaded, extraordinarily wish-fulfilling and villainous phrase) "master realists," as though they were closer in form and temperament to the aggressions of a Chernyshevsky than to the "specific details" of a Nabokov? As though Picasso's famous assertion — "I do not seek — I find" — were, after all, too "oracular" (read as: foolish, mad, cavalier, unsuitable for We 2.0) and, therefore, too domineering in service of the cause of the Individual (too self-involved!), rather than that of the marxist-christianic Social Fabric (just communist/grown-up enough!)? It is my belief that whenever imagination and freedom stand as the core precepts of one's aesthetic, no intrusions (invited or repressed) of "political" or "social" "realities," either as plot-element, backdrop, or general milieu, can grant Possession and Control of that work to the envious workaday critics, hack bloggers, or majordomo Ideologians. All great artists know, and from head to toe, that the big picture is the Individual and his interior perceptions of the outside world — and that artistic generation is simply the mimetic representation, mise en abyme, of this graceful essence and its occasionally ancillary residue (i.e., external action). For Rossellini, social realities exist in counterpoint to knowledge and fantasy, and Rossellini's Undersea Fantasy [Fantasia sottomarina, 1938] is an essay upon man's only material reality: his origin, and the circumstances of his end.
Tag Gallagher: "[The film] was shot in an aquarium on the porch of [Rossellini's] cottage in Ladispoli, twenty kilometers up the coast from Rome, in the summer of 1938. The director filled dead fish with lead and manipulated them with long hair from his wife's head."
Needles(s) to say: all instances of the "LUCE" logo at the top-right of the frames below are not native to the film's negative, but were imposed on the master for the film's Italian DVD release, which is the source for my personal copy of the film.
Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:
So the setting for Undersea Fantasy's action is neither actual undersea environs or ocean floor, nor that kind of aquarium staging wherein the camera floats in some yellow cage amid zigzag schools of glittering fish. From Rossellini-Film-1: "neorealism." The 'fourth wall' is re-established, is not retractable; we're only made aware it's there at all at the astonishing moment when the predatory octopus's tentacles lash forward at the camera — and its suction-cups splatter in attachment to what we now realize is a glass wall positioned between the plateaus on the inside and the camera on the outer side — not quite 'our, the spectators', side'. For there exists an envelope of non-aquatic space between the onscreen set and the camera, which, in the battle sequence centered around the octopus's sudden and shocking circumscription, reinforces the Rossellinian concern of an ideal freedom being hemmed in by an absolute, initially invisible boundary of control.
Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:
In the narration's 'anthropomorphisization' of the sea-animals and its reconstitution of many of our own movements within the events of this small marine kingdom (the twitch of a lobster's antennae are said here to emit radio signals for aid in the fight against the predator; a carefully constructed montage bolsters the soundtrack's relation of the betrayals and loneliness afflicting a lovelorn fish), Rossellini leads us, implicitly, undidactically, to consider nothing less than man's aquatic origins, our collective crawl out of the primordial filth, and in so doing he proclaims our daily struggles as embodying stuff already-imbued with the primacy of Truth. And in filming along the way the combat that ensues between the terrorizing octopus and the ingenious and resistant fish, Rossellini crafts as elegant a depiction as any of the notion that "man," to use the words of Orson Welles in that Dick Cavett interview, "is a crazy animal." Love, jealousy, hate, determination, obsession, ambivalence, compulsion, contradiction, redemption, transcendence: We'd do well to recall that The Beatles' album Help! was initially intended to be released with the title Eight Arms to Hold You...
Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:
Resistance against the confines of control finds its correlative in another undersea filmmaker: Jean Painlevé, who six years after Rossellini's Undersea Fantasy would direct with Jean Grémillon the first film on the 'overgrounding' of the French Resistance, when Paris was seized back at the end of the war from the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. Organized from footage shot with handheld camera in the heat of the conflict by an ad hoc crew, and created as documentary revelation for an international audience, the film, Le Journal de la Résistance [1944] (narration in English, and French title retained for its screenings in the UK, US, Canada, etc.), was recently released on Criterion's DVD edition of Melville's Army of Shadows [L'Armée des ombres, 1969] — with little indication on the disc's packaging of its presence, and even littler fanfare from critics over such. As these frames attest, Painlevé's and Grémillon's picture is a remarkable document that deserves at least as large a portion of the public as greeted the celebrated re-emergence of Melville's (equally excellent) film.
Le Journal de la Résistance by Jean Painlevé and Jean Grémillon, 1944:
Rossellini, proving himself a thinker of maximally poetic and imaginative breadth, even uses his film to contemplate the seldom-considered reality of animals in the wild suffering accidental deaths.
Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:
Abel Ferrara talks about John Cassavetes at the September 2007 press-conference for the New York Film Festival screening of Ferrara's Go Go Tales [2007], with cast-members Willem Dafoe and Sylvia Miles, and Richard Peña —
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John Cassavetes, with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, on The Dick Cavett Show in September 1970 (parts 3 and 4 out of four), promoting Cassavetes' soon-to-be-released Husbands [1970] —
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Orson Welles, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in July 1970 —
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Jerry Lewis, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in January 1973; and on Later with Bob Costas in June 1993 —
João César Monteiro's very first film, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969), is the moving salutation from one genius to another that lasts a little longer than 17 minutes.
Who was de Mello Breyner? One of the great poets of the last century, a Portuguese stateswoman, an example for living. A volume of her selected poems was published in England in the '90s under the title Log Book, translated by Richard Zenith with collaboration from SdMB(A). Zenith is the great renderer of, among other poets, Fernando Pessoa into English. De Mello Breyner died in 2004 at the age of 85.
Who was Monteiro? An easy candidate for one of the six or seven greatest filmmakers, and a great poet in his own right — critic too. His satanic presence left the planet in 2003 at 64 — cancer — and he knew he was dying when he made his final film. Two years ago I wrote the following two paragraphs for the French magazine Panic, as the finale of a longer piece that also includes two preceding sections called "Birth" and "Death" —
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RESURRECTION: In Monteiro's Vai-e-vem [Go-and-Come / Come-and-Go, 2003] (the English phrase precludes a return), João Vuvu too has been fucked to death. The offending strap-on phallus (also imagined?) rests on a small shrine-like table near the hospital bed of João dying (in life, as in the film). The table has been draped over with the American flag, and on the wall above the phallus' glans hangs a framed color photo of George W. Bush in mid-proclamation, wherein the flag appears again as backdrop. Here, in one of João César's final acts, a dying man uses the onset of the eternal to combat the ephemeral, and so redeems the power of the Political Statement; that any such Statement may be "merely current" makes it no less imperative, after all, and cinema holds the power to ensure nothing can diminish a Statement's near-magical resonance, influence.
Vai-e-vem [Go-and-Come / Come-and-Go] by João César Monteiro, 2003:
As such, Monteiro's shot elevates the singular Statement to the power of the universal. — My emotion at this moment becomes validated by the final image of the film (and as JCM knew at the time, of his entire oeuvre), which I dare not describe — a sacred image, all-encompassing, one wherein Monteiro pays tribute to himself, and to his spectator. A final bow, and to quote Ishaghpour, citing Godard citing Malraux on Manet: "A gaze that joins the interior to the cosmos."
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"I think my film represents above all the proof, to those who want to understand and accept it, that poetry can't be filmed, that it is useless to try." —João César Monteiro
Maybe poetry-in-and-of-itself can't be filmed, adapted, but in filming, in an attempt to film it, we possibly can capture something of the residue of originary material, and then, as spectator (either as the artist him-/herself, or as 'a member of the public'), in the interior apprehension create a parallel poem. The inside vs. the outside remains the greatest divide; the permeability or lack thereof not only between the cogito and the outside, one dilemma-of-all-dilemmas'-worth in and of itself, but also between the self and the Other. In other words, How to reconcile the commands, wishes and will of the interior with the stasis, the chaos and transgressiveness of the outside, of the majesty with the horror, promise with indifference, etc.? Is art, reduced to its singularity point, only yearning? And if so, — how pathetic and mockable, — nothing but the yawp of a sidewalk-baby-bird!
"You're important to yourself, because you're what you feel, / You're everything to yourself, because for you you're the universe, / The real universe and other people / Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity. / You matter to yourself, because you're all that matters to you. / And if this is true for you, O myth, then won't it be true for others?" —Fernando Pessoa as Álvaro de Campos, translated by Richard Zenith.
"He who sees a phenomenon wishes to see the whole phenomenon. It is simply a matter of attention, sequence, and rigor. And that's why poetry is a moral act. And that is why the poet is driven to search for justice through the very nature of poetry. Like Antigone, the poet of our time, says: I'm the one who did not learn to yield to disasters." —Sophia de Mello Breyner, in Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
In watching a film one cannot leave traces of the viewing in the way one can with written matter — poetry, novels, songs transcribed — no underlining of favorite passages, no notes on the margins. The experience is very naked — in other words, ready to slip away as easy as dream, tease or betrayal.
With Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, we watch a film about a writer, we watch Monteiro's coming-into-being, his first film; Monteiro, who in making a first film, chooses, as what cannot but be (by virtue of being "first-film") a first step or act powerfully autobiographical (necessarily and undeniably so, as though inscribed universally at the level of the ontology of the act), to biographize a fellow artist — as though to say, "This she will be me," spurred by the drive felt by any young artist at the moment of assumption, of self-declamation, affirmation, abandoning juvenilia with that great "Now — " — but then again —
— What does it mean to build these affirmative works out of quotations? A routine strategy, to a degree, in a biographical essay such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen... something else, and not only an enacting of pupilship underneath messieurs Godard and Straub in the case of the second through the fourth films — He Who Waits for Dead Men's Shoes Dies Barefoot: A Cinematographic Proverb [Quem espera por sapatos de defunto morre descalço, um provérbio cinematigráfico, 1970], Fragments of an Alms-Film [Fragmentos de um filme-esmola, 1974/1977], and What Shall I Do with This Sword? [Que ferai eu com esta espada?, 1975]. No, the phase of JCM's films #2-4 is like the day-of remarination, Lusitanian cuisine, — or (now different ingredients) a regathering of energy, a time for action to be activated and terminado, all over, at once, for reflection to be made dormant and begun over again anew; it's that beautiful act of first artistic migration, revealing itself mid-flight, proclaiming nothing-to-hide. But, in calling focus upon the gorgeous and particular moment of the first film (poised before metamorphosis, yet unable to conceal inevitable nature), we'll just remark for emphasis, again, and plainly, upon that initially perceivable distance between author (Monteiro) and Film #1. Is it a self-subversion (in the sense of a subterfuge) in the context of first film as an identity's-coming-out? Cold feet, indecision? "César wants to make a film, but he's lost for a subject..."? Well, some might call Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen barely even a film "in form"... one scene (living room) following another (children poking fun at Sophia the matron) after another (cigarette, verse composition) as they do... But let's thank for a moment The Film Desk, who reminded us on the occasion of the recent, 17-year-delayed U.S. theatrical release of Garrel's J'entends plus la guitare [I Don't Hear the Guitar No More, 1991], of Godard's words about Garrel, and use them to elevate everything laudable about the scenes in Monteiro's film, connected with such suppleness by the music of Bach — that is, let's say the construction of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen seems "as natural as breathing." In other words, the film's the domesticity of a poet, and if the subject weren't de Mello Breyner, it might have been Godard himself, Kubrick, or Paul Muldoon.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
I've always thought of literature as the secret cinema, the one projecting inward on the mechanism. Here inscription exists as the very order of the process, and circumvents the time-flow of cinema's and real-life's inescapable presents. The underlining of favorite passages, the notes in the margins...
"...the biography of my life..." — de Mello Breyner reflects upon her history while the kids fiddle with the stereo on the left side of the frame — and as the music at last erupts from the speakers, and Sophia begs for calm, we see one origin of a similar scene in Fragments of an Alms-Film — still something about families and living rooms, but now the gap in space that signified a generational and temperamental difference acquires another nuance: the extra-familial, the charged opposition brought to bear by one's in-laws — the discrepancy between the default ease of parlor-welcome and the sado-masochism of the already hateful intruder coming to call. I had a friend at school who said she couldn't bear to decorate her dorm-room in the slightest degree lest any visitors begin to assess her, not on the basis of any tastes to which she might be alluding or which she might be endorsing or announcing as identifiable stand-ins for herself — but because to have any appointments at all would be 'to have made a display', and this was not bearable.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
Fragmentos de um filme-esmola [Fragments of an Alms-Film] (Second of Three Versions, and Only Extant Complete Version) by João César Monteiro, 1974/1977:
Here, look at the sun splashing off the ripples. The pleasure of the body and life in the outside. The breeze of the Portuguese sea. How can we live, in the United States? A country too vast and, as a result, paradoxically up until the point of progressing beyond the paradox, too homogeneous. Taken as a whole, America is a few cities of a relative sort of freedom, and they're tied together by what's basically a ranging network of scorn-for-many-things. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is a film that shames me, undidactically, about not knowing how to cut out the guts of any fish larger than trout.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
"...that we are rather, by natural light, heirs to the freedom and dignity of being." —SdMBA, in Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
"I waited as one who waits in vain, / So clear and precise was the void." —Sophia de Mello Breyner, translated by Richard Zenith.
This expression I used to know —
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
("The angels' faces were becoming visible, / As if the earth had entered agony." —Sophia de Mello Breyner)
— at the time when women still had beautiful handwriting.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
"I fall from images / As a dead bird falls from the bushes / And splatters on the cold ground." —Sophia de Mello Breyner, translated by Richard Zenith.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen by João César Monteiro, 1969:
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João César Monteiro directed twenty-one films from 1969 until his death in 2003. Most of them are masterpieces, even of the supreme sort. I'd like more people to know him, and to pursue seeing and showing his work, so over the next few years I'm going to write on Cinemasparagus about all of his movies. What follows is a completely random selection of frames from a selection of Monteiro's films I randomly pulled off my shelf.
Veredas [Pathways] by João César Monteiro, 1977:
O amor das três romãs [The Love of the Three Pomegranates] by João César Monteiro, 1978:
Silvestre by João César Monteiro, 1981:
Recordações da casa amarela, uma comédia lusitana [Remembrances of the Yellow House: A Lusitanian Comedy] by João César Monteiro, 1989:
O último mergulho, esboço de filme [The Final Plunge: A Film Draft] by João César Monteiro, 1992:
A comédia de Deus [Deus's Comedy / God's Comedy] by João César Monteiro, 1995:
Branca de Neve by João César Monteiro, 2000:
Vai-e-vem [Go-and-Come / Come-and-Go] by João César Monteiro, 2003:
"Destroyed among poems and staring in awe" —Sophia de Mello Breyner, translated by Richard Zenith.
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Here's an incredible music-video (and by director unknown!!!) attached to one of my favorite groups, Deux. It's for the track "Felicita", which was c/w "Game and Performance" in 1983 — now findable on the must-have compilation BIPPP: French Synth Wave 1979-85, out on the Born Bad label in Europe and Everloving in the U.S.
Little Lexicon of Anglophone Cliché: A Work in Progress c. 2007
"2 or 3 things"
"A Novel"
"At once _________ and _________, ..."
"For [so-and-so, in dedication]" (exception: the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which invented the practice in cinemaville)
"I found myself unprepared for the emotional wallop"
"Love it or hate it, ... "
"Unfortunately, compared with Rohmer's earlier work, in particular the series known as 'Six Moral Tales,' The Romance of Astrea and Celadon has little to say about eros that's still relevant. It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie."
