Home » The Venice film exhibition opened with the explosive White noise – Francesco Boille

The Venice film exhibition opened with the explosive White noise – Francesco Boille

by admin
The Venice film exhibition opened with the explosive White noise – Francesco Boille

02 September 2022 13:43

White noise, the film by Noah Baumbach that opened Competition and festival, is a bomb. And it’s a bold film in many ways. For the themes, for its non-conformism, for its visual and narrative style. Adapting the novel of the same name by a celebrated writer like Don DeLillo, Baumbach returns to the Lido afterwards Story of a wedding (2019), with a free and airy cinematic work, with elegant frames, continuous and often aerial camera movements to which are added dry and disruptive alternating editing sequences.

The protagonist is Adam Driver, perfectly immersed in his character, a university professor and lecturer expert on Adolf Hitler and his disturbing aesthetic fixations.

Between the playful taste for continuous catastrophe and for the aesthetics of the accident that we have seen at work for decades in US action films and the incendiary aesthetics understood in both the figurative and literal sense of the Nazi leader, a a connection that is almost a semantic exegesis expressed visually, on which the magnificent speech and theatrical gestures of the character played by Driver are inserted, also taken up thanks to the great cinema in motion, once again emancipating the film adaptation from the original matrix literary.

Social inner tension
A serious accident upsets a small town and the director resumes the panic that follows the escape of the inhabitants with an abstract and allusive form that in some respects finds a proximity to the beautiful Nope by Jordan Peele who, as in Jacques Tourneur’s cinema (I walked with a zombie, The kiss of the panther, The leopard man), instead of showing the evidence as much horror and cinematic science fiction of today, suggests and impresses passing from the abstract to the concrete, from Close encounters of the third kind by Spielberg a Signs by M. Night Shyamalan, from horror to science fiction, without interruption, as in osmosis, as if it were a single organism, not stopping to make a catalog of cinephile references but abstracting and reworking the latter.

See also  Tall and big in the cold, minutes in the heat: this is how the climate affects the human body



But here we are not immersed in the silence of Nope: the still important oases of silence are surrounded by the growing desertification of human feeling caused by the great din, by the roar, by the continuous and unstoppable excitement, bruising, breaking or smashing everything in passing when one considers oneself legitimized by definition by having the reason on one’s side or the just reasons of a major cause that allow, according to this logic, to have no regard for anyone.

An inner social tension favored by a congenital and pervasive paranoia – a key theme in DeLillo’s novel – which finally explodes in the intimate dimension as well as in the collective one. While the obsession with diseases and medicines – even if the film underlines clearly the theme of the pandemic and the covid – instead of being a symptom of healthiness it seems a pathological syndrome that one tries to cure by generating another disease. Not to mention UFOs and religious preachers who begin to be contiguous to Republican Party politics with the Reagan presidency, the years in which DeLillo published his novel.

All this gives the satire in the metaphysical version of White noise another dimension, despite the immersion in emptiness and emptiness conveyed by the preordained and hyper-colored lines of supermarkets that seem to transfigure pop art in a conceptual key, welding everything with the din, the omnipresent noise, an endemic disease of American society. “You whites always make a lot of ado about nothing,” an indigenous guerrilla tells British Army Captain Koinsky in Dancal cheeks, a graphic novel by Hugo Pratt that dates back to 1981, so not much earlier than DeLillo’s novel. And in the void of a civilization that dissolves into inconsistency on the one hand, and into a catastrophe reduced to an aesthetic game on the other, it seems to be our end. Perpetually starting over from this nothing as if nothing had happened until the next catastrophe. Whether, or not, the ultimate apocalypse. But it is always a question of death and fear, a fundamental theme of the film as well as of the novel.



More classic – even if in the end it is a more apparent classicism than anything else – and also elegant under various aspects (direction, photography, editing) is Warehouse by the American Todd Field who has made his third feature film. Strange to the point of being pleasantly alienating, this elegant foray into the world of classical music in a modern context, is set largely in the large but cold spaces of Berlin and directed by an extraordinary Cate Blanchett here in one of the best interpretations of her career. Complex and refined in the construction of the dialogues – including the many referring to classical music or more generically to art – as well as in the construction of situations and psychologies, the film photographs an environment that excludes men without fully adapting to the gender philosophy, conveying a sort of two-sided reflection on the issue.

Blanchett, who plays here a conductor totally absorbed by her vocation, moves in a world of women: her partner, her students, her child. Men make appearances as gay collaborators or as young students obsessed with politically correct, a matter that we find parodied in The kingdom exodus (out of competition) by Lars Von Trier, a kind of splendid sequel to The kingdom which will be distributed in theaters by Movies inspired, where the director really makes fun of everything starting with himself but never losing depth.

advertising

In Warehouse instead the question is more serious. Like the black guy who infuriates Blanchett at first because she doesn’t consider Bach musically due to the numerous offspring generated by the German musician which he reads as proof of her machismo. But the film, among many things, seems to tell us that it is the role, the situation, the social or historical context, the fact of having power over others, that creates certain situations, whether they are ambiguous, criticizable or to be contextualized, not the genre.

The false breaking latest news of a handful of truths – Bardo (or false breaking latest news of a few truths) the original title by Alejandro Iñárritu aims to be an almost space-time introspective journey-confession that is combined with an examination-confession on the crazy state of the planet, creating an impressive series of paintings and visual ideas of great originality as well as some sequences of notable suggestion or impact that they deserve to be seen. It is also difficult not to say goodbye to experimental courage in a film for the general public. And nevertheless the empathy and the depth in the construction of the characters of the characters and of the situations cannot fully flourish in a film marked as always in the cinema of the Mexican director by the metaphor exhibited and the virtuosic redundancy.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy