T to as announced earlier this summer, in autumn, while the usual course of the blog, we would spend a collective tribute to The wind in this space would be open until 10 November (date on which the movie turns 80 years since its release) to cooperate in any more or less extensive, written or drawn, either in a tone of formal paper or a small tribute to witness given viewer. I emphasize the latter, in case anyone discourage the tone of discourse with which to start this tribute, an article by Roberto loved, which may also be read in its kinodelirio.com .
Many thanks to Robert, and encouragement to those who want to participate, however modest it as their contribution.
"WIND." Letty and Kantian synthesis
Author: Roberto loved
Published: Kinodelirio and Silent Passion
Salamanca, October 2008.
technology often tries curb the imagination and finds that talent strives to achieve. This claim seems ridiculous today, indeed it is, and accept only if we turn, technology helps achieve. Both propositions are not at all reliable, much less a century ago, back in the silent cinema.
Everything was so embryonic as daring. Some technologies with its limitations and advantages, were employed by the filmmakers (directors, photographers, art directors, etc.) Before normalization years later from the production business fronts. The results were in their heads and largely pulled the brake technology.
No doubt they were more daring than the possibilities offered by technologies available, and did not hesitate to play with depth of field, with the release of the camera, on location, modulation of the screen using the cache and the iris, etc. Often it seemed that the innovations were in tow as a consequence of a false process of organic evolution: the development of emulsions, sets, set construction, play with the objectives of shorter focal length, etc.
field was the pioneer, it was all to explore and the burden of the convention was being phased out boldly and with open bar for creativity. Borders do not exist, and if it were established temporarily, be extended, retracted, came a more stubborn and visionary settler, opened new routes. The device itself as a technological object, and offered a variety of tools too powerful to stand on trifles. In short, we can not miss the success of the genre "pioneers" during the period, the silent film, then as a meta-exploration. Learning.
versa And largely, the film that the Swede Victor Sjöström directed in 1928. The Wind and its protagonist named Letty, played by Lillian Gish, will lead the funeral of another of those "restrictions" means the absence of sound, as one of the participants in human communication, helplessly pushing a performance model based on excessive gesticulation. But we must point out that such reasoning can not be detached from the sophistry, for several reasons, among which we highlight a few:
1. The influence of sound in language (spoken) is not ultimately to achieve successful communication.
2. This model was neither universal nor uniform, but ended up identifying some kind of dramatic performance, often female, with the whole. Forgetting the refinement achieved by the art of mime during those years. Let us
film. Its structure does not present a sharp separation can be seen in some European films of its director. Here, the storyline and character development are more progressive, although there continues to be a clear division into three acts. And now we do not refer explicitly to the segmentation performed by intertitles, which is used in its Swedish production line very Central European film and substrate narrative, fictional or dramatic, they used to use. The four acts announced for their cards carefully, scheduled the film.
We say that no difference in the structure itself and the intensity put into your joint, that is, some of the most famous examples of Swedish stage in accordance with the following pattern:
- Happiness and Stability: the family as a symbolic vehicle to display appropriate
- radical sudden loss of that condition: great suffering
- redemption and / or atonement: now using the individual and their values.
The formula works seamlessly and quickly moves to empathy with the characters, which tend to be faithful representatives of a humble middle class, which is why their hardships over the entire second block, we are even more painful. Just remember the poor Ingeborg Holm (1913, pictured below), resounding example, after an entrepreneur whose start-up (going to start a business) will see how it all falls apart with the death of her husband, the loss of children and his own insanity, to, finally, find some comfort and redress to the suffering.
Terje Vigen (There once was a man, 1917) will follow this scheme, and Berg-Ejvind hustru och hans ( Outlaws, 1918), Klostret i Sendomir ( Sendomir Monastery, 1920) and, with nuances, He Who gets slapped ( He Who Gets Slapped , 1924), and in his American period.
Now in Wind, Letty will live a time of apparent calm and happiness during the first third of the film, but his pain will be just a result of this learning step of their new environment, touching the face and the peak end, coinciding with the madness announced years earlier Ingeborg Holm , and will be quickly overcome in the end.
To which we, the learning process Letty is the actual cause of trauma, first as a disappointment and second, mental degradation. The naive girl from Virginia will choose the wrong method that becomes frustrating and your condition will respond more to this cause hostility and windy desert habitat. His particular initiation, a clear subtext of the film and will give everything to unpleasant sensory capacity. Letty, embrace empiricism as a means of understanding the world and thus, stacking as many mental and sensory deficits as grains his ramshackle arena door.
empiricism ends up far from reality, a victim of this dangerous mechanism that equates tautological representation concept and mental image perception, where the latter two would only be distinguished according to degree of intensity. The differences between the sensitive and the mental and, therefore, between the perceptual and cognitive, are not taken into account as an integral process of a processing chain that does not respond to automatic (intersection of brain processes), the passivity ( predisposition of the subject), or essences (the great weight of experience, but no empirical historical subject.) Letty
never sees his new life is just the sensing, trying to catch with some ways that are revealed as insufficient to accomplish the task. The consequence of this is readily apparent: the protagonist ends up hating and fearing everything from the impact of expressions (Nature and human) it receives. Hear the wind hit the trees, and until it materializes through those windows constants we perceive as effective reverse shot from their point of view to increase the dramatic tension and a symbol of madness to be installed and making their mark in your mind. Look through those windows but just see, and his empiricism, and not the sand, who barrier. Letty
smell that res flayed by the jealous wife of his cousin, the stench as a new aggressive element. Foster brother of smell, taste, also arrives to upset with that stale coffee that serves Lars and especially with the kiss picture you rejected it in the mouth. Letty touches her delicate hands are scorched by the iron shortly after he had made a gesture as delicate as inappropriate for the place to scratch with your fingertip sand accumulated on the slices of bread. The touch also prove to be false, as well as unsatisfactory, the wedding ring.
A bombing empirical stimuli that are unable to process, can not afford that, you can not ask. The approach of character to the world is thus primary. The empiricist approach in principle could provide power to influence reality as capital source, and even as an emanation of ideas, what it does is accentuate the gap between it and Letty, with subsequent isolation as their activities are not projective requested or at least come on circumstantial (dance sequence). The "idea" of things becomes "ideal" to be introduced in a framework where they disappear or minimize the possible actions of interpretation and processing. So
well, that empiricism eventually run into the root Epicureanism. A Epicureanism already announced the concept of "simulacra" (1): mental fixation of the ways that they originated from outside where copies radiated material objects and then reach the human brain. Is the line of Hume, who saw in the "ideas and cognitions, mental images, which were created in the previous perception through the senses", which would end after the interventions and contributions of Locke and Descartes, a new theory (Representative Theory of Perception) whose livelihood would come to be summed up as: "What causes representations received internal have a similarity with the perceived objects without, however, necessarily have the character of real images. " (2)
The" we are what we see, "he would say McLuhan. Fortunately, the true initiation, if it exists, is always achieved outside of empiricism and Letty access the knowledge of things once it recognizes the a priori concepts, in this case, three:
1 and 2 . Evil and death (Roddy), shown in the masterful and terrifying storm sequence as rape and its aftermath raw morning where a floating traveling on the shoulder of a muffled in Letty a shawl, reveals the phallus unsheathed on the table.
3. Lars Love.
It appears then that the necessary synthesis between the empirical and the rational, that is, when Lillian Gish Kant discovers and verifies that the action can prevail and human reactions to a world and a draconian ways. To be critical, ultimately, not only sensory processes but experienced the cognition and language. This implies that the reverse mechanism is empiricist, which runs from the outside in, while it follows an opposite course, where concepts are direct consequences of external reality or sensory experimentation, but exist as separate elements, constituents of reality.
That model to which we referred, based on the excessive gestures, also die and be relaxed Letty factions, now understood. Empiricism, then, is demonstrated as one of the leading causes in this way for the interpretation which has remained as silent film icon:
"silent film characters seem to belong to a humanity missing, for whom emotion was more important that language. A humanity that was incapable of love without gestures and mourn and tightened his hands, gesturing with furious eyes and died with grand gestures, as if trying closing the door of hell. " (3)
Finally, let us dare to recommend a parallel viewing Wind one of the great works of European cinema of the 40's: Le tempestaire , directed by Jean Epstein in 1947 . I mentioned in this article would be full of nuances and interesting discussions. NOTES
(1) This idea will resume after the simulation, in its way, as a postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard to discourse on the problems of reality in its historical moment.
(2) Graciano, Roque, Nöth, Winfried and Santaella, Lucia Image: Communication, semiotics and media. Reichenberger, Kassel, 2003, pp. 17-8.
(3) Macé, Gérard: Cinéma muet . Saint-Clement, Fata Morgana, 1995, pg. 16. Cited in: Leutrat, Jean-Louis and Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne: I think cinema . Cátedra, Madrid, 2003, pg. 25.
