N+2: Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia G-moll - Jan Svankmajer (1965)

10 marzo 2012

Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasia G-moll - Jan Svankmajer (1965)


J.S. Bach: Fantasía en sol menor / J.S. Bach: Fantasy in g-minor
Sin diálogos/No dialogue

Un hombre toca una pieza de Bach al piano (la que da nombre al cortometraje) mientras el escenario reacciona a la melodía.


Bach es considerado el mejor compositor de todos los tiempos, el Maestro, y para muchos sin duda, y sin que ello sea exagerar, Dios. Es una figura de tal importancia, hablando ya de la música (y no siendo el único arte en el que será una referencia tan sustancial), que ha sido absolutamente trascendental para todos los periodos posteriores. Es aquél que con su música, absolutamente PERFECTA en todos los niveles en los que sea posible exigir algo, ha llegado allí donde ninguna otra cosa ha sido capaz.


Svankmajer no hace más que, por medio del surrealismo, exaltar la imagen todopoderosa de Johann Sebastian Bach: los agujeros, las grietas, símbolos de la penetración hacia donde se supone que no se puede lograr entrar (únicamente sucede mientras el pianista toca). Y al final de todo, qué queda pues, sino luz (deificación).

Añadir, para sostener aún más mi argumentación, que la luz en las ventanas del momento final (este momento que comento de divinización) sucede con el último acorde de la pieza, y es un acorde final que en música se llama "Cadencia Picarda", muy utilizada para acabar dando un fuerte carácter de glorificación a las piezas -como se puede entender al escucharla-.
Adriana (FilmAffinity)


Cortometraje ganador del Premio del Jurado al Mejor Cortometraje y nominado a la Palma de Oro en el Festival de Cannes 1965.


You might expect such a subversive artistic talent to display a chaos of form and content in his work, but time and time again, you’ll see that, even if the imagery is oblique and inscrutable, it is tightly structured, often with clearly defined beginning and ending – Švankmajer doesn’t confuse complexity or opacity of meaning with a lawlessness of form. This film begins with a beautifully lit sequence following an organist (although his identity is not initially apparent) to his seat before he begins playing. 

This prelude is followed by a montage of shots of locks, barred windows, and holes appearing or receding in stone and brickwork (achieved through by stop-motion animation). It is a rapid compilation of pictures which don’t accrete a coherent sense of space so much as a visual formula for confinement and stasis; Svankmajer often likes his films to provide inventories or collections of themed and arranged ojbects (I’m sure I’ll get round to writing about his Historia Naturae, Suita (1965) and The Ossuary (1970) at some point in the near future – both of them archive a compendium of anatomies inside tight formal structures), and this one is no exception. 

In the review of the BFI’s DVD boxset written for Film Quarterly, Adrian Martin suggested that Švankmajer’s films may be so densely packed, so traumatically loaded with visual information that they might be met with a new kind of engagement fostered by the DVD format, slowing them down to pore over the microscopic detail they offer. This is fascinating enough, and hopefully the frame grabs I’ve incorporated here are testament to the careful of arrangement of objects that rushes past the eye in one of his films, but there is also great power in the pile-up of pictures that barely allow time for consideration: your only chance is to spot the accumulation of connections and graphic matches rather than attempting to analyse the composition of each individual fragment. 

It might seem customary for this kind of film to “interpret” the music visually, to take the perceived themes of the piece and select correlative images that help to reinforce those themes. Instead, it seems that Svankmajer has empowered the music in the same way that his animation gives agency and a defamiliarised significance to everyday objects. As the organist’s hands first attack the keyboard, the next cut is to two holes bored into stone, as if the channelling of the air through the organ pipes, the marshalling of bass notes, is enough to blast through walls and crumble the fabric of even the most static of objects. 

The compendium of locks and other barriers to movement is shaken loose by the music – whip pans dynamise the otherwise still pictures, and eventually the film ends with a montage of doors and windows swinging open, and an ecstatic tracking shot through the space. An earlier, sublime lateral tracking shot (see the first and last images of this post) traces scratches across masonry that seem to undulate like soundwaves along the walls. It is the most definite connection in the film between image and soundtrack, a premonition of how the film will suggest that music can affect the feeling of a place, the sense of an environment. It may be a perverse juxtaposition of Baroque music and decaying architectural squalor, but it reinscribes the humble location with the sounds of grace and order.

DVDRip por HawkmenBlues


LINK

https://rapidshare.com/files/2287452495/Johann.Sebastian.Bach.Fantasia.G-moll.1965.www.nplus2.org.mkv

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