If the Heart Had Eyes: Tears, Silence, and Snow in Seeking the Maternal Performance (the Quiet Room, Ponette)
1997; Issue: 44 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
Resumocould feel at the time There was no way of knowin' Fallen leaves in the night Who can say where they're blowin' As free as the wind Hopefully learnin' Why the sea on the tide Has no way of turnin' More than this, you know there's nothing More than this, tell me one thing More than this, you know there's nothing It was fun for awhile There was no way of knowin' Like dream in the night Who can say where we're goin' No care in the world Maybe I'm learnin' Why the sea on the tide Has no way of turnin' More than this, you know there's nothing More than this, tell me one thing More than this, there's nothing Bryan Ferry, from Love Among the Ruins by 10,000 Maniacs Dad asks me what think of death when still used to talk. Nothing, said. I think nothing of death. He's always asking me questions don't have words for. Sad? Sad because can't say why sad. The Girl, in The Quiet Room by Rolf de Heer ...The plot? The action? haven't any, everything seems dust and ashes to me compared to these three or four months in my town surrounded by about fifty children to whom could say in dialect: ver la boca da peu (open your mouth wider). ...The wonder must be in us, expressing itself without wonder: the best dreams are those outside the mist, which can be seen like the veins of leaves. Cesare Zavattini, in Zavattini: Sequences from Cinematic Life WHAT TRIGGERS MY WRITING HERE IS TEARS. Each time see Ponette cry, and always at the same moments, it seems--those when she cries. Am feeling for her, or for myself? Does it matter that she is girl, and has lost her mother? Why do feel fulfilled by the experience of her loss? (1) Regarding his mother's death and how he mourned her, Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida recalls his desire to sustain the strength of his grief, finding himself more alive with his pain than without it. (2) retain vivid image of him looking at her photo and explaining, Affect was what didn't want to reduce; being irreducible, it was therefore what wanted, what ought to reduce the Photograph to. (3) While have always been interested in how the cinema becomes catalyst for feeling, the fact that the photo Barthes chose to discuss was of his mother before the age of five must have occurred to me as first watched four-year-old Ponette pursue reunion with her deceased mother in Jacques Doillon's film. (4) Barthes had never seen or known his mother that way, much as had never met Ponette. have since wondered what feelings can be articulated by four-year-old, or, put another way, what emotions we invest in her--invest in the sense that, as Emily Dickinson observed, a charm invests face/Imperfectly beheld. On this thought Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe captivates me with his claim that the primitive in text is its communication of inexplicable clarity beyond what it can articulate. (5) Every bit as much as Barthes' analysis of his photograph and his way of looking at it, Gilbert-Rolfe's theories of painting have led me to question the nature of cinema, particularly various codes of realism--neorealism, poetic realism, magical realism. What is it that brings me to experience the emotion of grief as both directly familiar and strangely enigmatic at once? Could performance be the key, and age peculiar factor? (6) Two films have helped me to approach these questions, along with Ponette itself, from variety of angles. The Quiet Room by Rolf De Heer also employs girl actresses--sisters, in fact, playing the same girl at ages seven and three--who mourn the loss of mother not in her physical death, but as she was in the past. (7) use The Quiet Room for comparison here because of its slightly alternative film language although, like Ponette, it seeks to present the girl's point of view through realism. …
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