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lundi 27 février 2006

The fridge

mullanA short film from Peter Mullan (Trainspotting actor and autor of The Magdalene Sisters - 2002), rather conventional but nevertheless thrilling by the hopelessness of its characters.
Usually I am not a fan of this realistic and rude form of filmmaking but this little boy locked up in an old fridge is a rather stunning metaphore.

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vendredi 17 février 2006

Trollflöten

bergmann
"The overture is played while the camera shows the utterly rapt faces of the audience especially the beatific one of a little girl and I find this particularly tedious after a while. In real life, audiences, particularly children, tend to talk or fidget through an overture, I think. The dragon (originally a snake.) which pursues Tamino at the beginning is really more funny than terrifying and makes Tamino seem like a crybaby."
says a certain fan of Mozart, regarding Bergman's cinematografic adaptation of Mozart's famous opera.
As a matter of fact this beginning looks like an assembly of UNESCO, but Bergman seems to like to show the potential audience of this mysterious opera that unlike all other Mozart operas has provoked an avalanche of contradictionary interpretations.
Perhaps the recent essai of egyptologist Jan Assmann is one of the more interesting, at any rate my favorite.

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dimanche 5 février 2006

Let's celebrate!

mozart
"I cobble together a verse comedy about the customs of the harem, assuming that, as a Spanish writer, I can say what I like about Mohammed without drawing hostile fire. Next thing, some envoy from God knows where turns up and complains that in my play I have offended the Ottoman empire, Persia, a large slice of the Indian peninsula, the whole of Egypt, and the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Tunisi, Algeria, and Morocco. And so my play sinks without trace, all to placate a bunch of Muslim princes, not one of whom, as far as I know, can read but who beat the living daylights out of us and say we are 'Christian dogs.' Since they can’t stop a man thinking, they take it out on his hide instead."
said Figaro in: Beaumarchais, Le mariage de Figaro, 1784.

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