LETTERS FROM THE NORTH
FRANCISCO VALENTE & SABRINA MARQUES
1. From Francisco to Sabrina
Lisbon, June 11th 2013
Dear Sabrina,
This is a strange letter because it does not come from a real place nor will it reveal any particular mood as in any ordinary postcard. You see, the more I think about Le pont du nord, the less I think about the film and more about everything else.
I saw a clip on Youtube with Bulle Ogier speaking about her relationship to Rivette earlier today. What is there to say about someone you know who actually makes you feel like you’re crossing all ways of live at once? Ogier simply says: I do have my own thoughts about Rivette, but there is no way I could translate them or simply give them away in a short sentence. That would be a betrayal to the way I feel about him.
Ogier actually describes Rivette as a very private and mysterious person. Which is basically the way we could describe cinema: something private and mysterious because it lives through our own desires and illusions. Something that is actually fake - in the same way our dreams are fake -, but also true because we do aspire, incessantly, to recreate these dreams and illusions in our own life, our relationships and the decisions we make in them.
So let me speak about the way I relate to Rivette in a personal way, although some of these things may be as true as the game that the characters in Le pont du nord play against their imaginary enemies.
Watching a Rivette film is like going for a walk in your city and not knowing what will happen and who you will meet. Or rather, like those rare, beautiful days when you come home and feel that you could never have planned what you just went through. That is, a mixture of chance, improvisation, and quick but thoughtfully planned decisions exclusively based on your wildest desires and curiosity.
There’s a strong sense of pleasure in Rivette’s films: pleasure of acting, of experimenting, of shooting a film. What I love about him is that this kind of love only exists because we - the spectators - are there to witness it. Rivette doesn’t make films for himself, even though he is known as a radical and experimental filmmaker. He knows he is being watched - that couldn’t be clearer in Le pont du nord’s ending -, and he lets his actors play upon that feeling. I love the way they walk around the street and look over - as if someone’s watching over their shoulder. That is right - we are watching them (Hitchcock also felt this way, I’m sure).
So what the actors in Le pont du nord are saying is really - come take a ride with us, you won’t regret it. But even though it is a joyful ride (Rivette doesn’t take himself to seriously - humour is a big part of this film and I love him for it), it also carries a big threat in a very explicit way. And that is death.
Rivette knows that everything, eventually, has its end: every game, every illusion that lives in our mind, as well as our attempt to recreate it in real life. Which is basically what defines loneliness. I can’t think of any other characters such as those created by Rivette who long as much for love and affection, while still being aware that loneliness is as steady as the rules of the game they’re playing (except Rohmer’s, perhaps). Renoir said: “everyone has their reasons”. Rivette seems to say: let’s live them at the utmost. And that means to try and fulfill the impossible missions of finding true love (like Ogier in this film, which also takes me back to L’amour fou), to kill all invisible evil and help those in need (her real-life daughter Pascale), or to build our own imaginary life in a city that is falling apart (a corrupted and fleeting Parisian landscape).
Who’s willing to change the rules of the game we keep playing in our lives? That is basically what makes us fall in love with someone else - someone who’s making us take another step in this huge board game. On the other hand, who’s willing to stay in it once they’ve discovered our own rules in it? That is probably what makes everything else fall apart. Rivette’s cinema comes from both these feelings, I believe. That’s how it makes me feel anyway - or maybe that’s the game I’ve invented myself as a spectator of his cinema.
Meeting Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) in this film is like walking around Paris and meeting Breton’s Nadja (“amour, le grand flash du fantastique”, says Baptiste). Wouldn’t we love to do that? The nouvelle vague is commonly described as film taking a step closer to reality. That is true. But Rivette also turned it into a surreal experience, while recognizing, at the same time, that everything goes around like a play, and Paris was his own stage for shooting it through a camera. That sense of walking around your city and reacting to an invisible camera while obeying our own rules - that’s not such a strange thing, is it? I’m afraid that’s what I’ll be doing for the rest of the day.
I’ll be seeing you somewhere.
Francisco
2. From Sabrina to Francisco
Lisbon, June 12th 2013
Dear Francisco,
“North Bridge” brings me a feeling that by living in the city I constantly have – that there is a witness to every gesture. Indeed, where does the succession of watching cycles end? In cinema, one sees and one is seen, and Rivette knows it. Is it a camera or a sight of a gun hovering over Baptiste in that last shot on “Pont des Abattoirs”, a bridge that no longer exists?
Isn’t cinema the constant subject here? Rivette seems to be fighting for the new, for an invisible force, for an immaterialized potency. Destruction and reconstruction are simultaneous… This cinema is like a dagger ripping the eyes out of the previously seen. It is the praise of experimentation, a cinema of improvisation and youth. A cinema against monument-art, that by being destined to be forever admired in a pedestal, opposes the transformations of the constructive process. A free cinema shaped by a hunger for sensations in which we, spectators, voraciously gorge it until its destruction.
“Paris nous appartient” had already sowed paranoia, and the conspiracy grew within the nerve of the city. (The streets of Paris, always the labyrinthine game in Rivette’s cinema). They are a mysterious presence imposed to every corner, each event is a blow calculated by a distant puppet master and, everywhere, clues for no outcome are waiting to be recognized by the narrative of imagination.
Isn’t after all the stillness of statues and buildings the same commandment that imposes the order that keeps bodies apart? Bodies strange other bodies. Strangers throw gazes of suspicion on strangers. The other is a hell whose presence one barely stands. Unexpectedly, two women get together in a mysterious bond and gather forces in a duet of mutual support, prepared for any quest. Under the shadow of uncertainty, they cross the city against the city. We shall tear their eyes out. We shall punch them with precise fists. We shall watch over the unceasing vigil of statues. There is a secret city, an underground city. There are rules for a different society set under the society we know. A reality that is livelier, therefore, more real. A desired clandestinity is born to face all that was not chosen to exist but still imposes itself to every sight.
It dances, it runs, it fights, it hides. The movement grows indignant, it breaks the quietude, it answers to the buildings and to the statues and to the rules. It is a physical and contagious madness, it disquiets stillness, it rules in freedom. These bodies are whole, larger than the city, unstoppable bodies of energy, vibrance, mutation, embodiments of the pleasure for a lawless life. They exist in a vertigo, they fall and rise in every direction. Wouldn’t you wish to fall into this chaos?
As a continuous adventure of 360 degrees panorama, the film is itself the spiral drawn on the map of the city for a Game of the Goose, truthful to the violence of life. Between labyrinths and traps, fears and yearnings, there is a constant evocation of a perpetual movement of “theoretical fight against imaginary enemies”. As the clock, the game never stops. “North Bridge” is a statement about being alive, against this and despite of that. The bridge (countless bridges appear in the film) is an unstable state of passage where moving forward is to face the risk of the unknown - that will culminate in Marie’s destruction and Baptiste’s continuity. But the film doesn’t really end, does it?
From Rivette (is he the old chinese master we hear of?) remains a combat precept to keep: may the breath be found among the stir of the days to fight one’s own dragons. For, in the end, in life as in the Game of the Goose the best luck is to remain alive. Maybe it is like Baptiste says and "everything is written" and all is but accident or chance or fate.
How many years have passed since you played The Game of the Goose for the last time?
Sabrina
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário