CALDERON (LE)

of MUSIAL Jean-Marc

FRANCE, 2002, 00:34:00

Production : ATTILA, DRAC Nord Pas-de-Calais, LE PHENIX, SCENE NATIONALE de VALENCIENNES, STUDIO NATIONAL DES ARTS CONTEMPORAINS LE FRESNOY
Genre : Fiction
Keyword : Homage, Relation, Theatre

Summary :
Adapted from Pier Paolo PASOLINI's theatre plays.
Seeing that film projected on the living site of Calderon (3 hours of theatre creation, with 16 episodes, 11 actors and 4 cameramen) or seeing that cinematic object for itself, is not the same emotion. The first form has to be the desire of a total partition, whereas the other is a pictorial quintessence. For that film, because it needed to be organic, I had to create a semiology that was diverted from the reality of Pasolini's text. The action is contained within the frame and the words. What is off-screen has a twofold destination, it is both cinematic and dramatic. The film tends to become another structure than the film. The signs of the film make it look anti-modern, but it is ferociously precise in its constant designation of the intimate relationship with power. Yet you can't say that the film is political, because it is in-actu, although it is confronted with the impossibility to represent the world of concentration camps, where the Rosauras won't have other places to wake up any more. Basilio's parallel soliloque - he is a powerful and extremely elegant man, wearing the masai headhunter necklace around his neck - is an open awareness : from now on, his power is recreated by generating the protest against itself, by absorbing the body and soul of the other, through a daily fascism, in order to be served even better. That's why we see Basilio turn into an infanta, pouring water into a basin and showing an ancient alchemical and psychological recipe (the anima). There is the outer dream and the inner reality. You go from one to the other thanks to the angels of the master (Melainos the obscure/Leucos the luminous). The perversion of power is that it surreptitiously offers a model for rebellion, a model that remains dialectic, but appears as an obscure and mysterious force. Basilio : "I have taught them the language of rebellion and revolution. It was very dangerous for me, yet now I'm hijacking them. Because no protest against me can be sincere". Jean-Marc MUSIAL - 2002)

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