Comments on Thanks for the Use of the Hall: La Notte di San Lorenzo: Film or Theater?

David. ANR – there was a good (not comprehensive) ...

2008-06-28T08:09:00.000-04:00

David. ANR – there was a good (not comprehensive) Tavianis retro at MOMA in 2001. The selection of their films available on DVD in the US isn't bad.

It doesn’t seem to me that the Tavianis present a thinned-out experience, any more than, say, theater in general does. Their personalities are dark and complicated, and their ideas come out of left field in interesting ways. This is ostensibly a film about the oppression of the Italian poor under the German occupation in World War II…and yet the brothers continuously dive into personal, even uncomfortable emotional material that is perpendicular to the story idea.

So I don’t think of them as cute – but I think I know what you mean when you say it, just as I know what people mean about Anderson. It has something to do with a broad acting style, and with wrapping up style ideas in well-labeled packages before handing them to the audience: a kind of quantum approach to style. Even though there really isn’t much comedy in San Lorenzo, the style of acting and cutting resembles that of comedies.

The battle scenes are indeed frightening: given that the Tavianis spend so much time in the subjective worlds of these people, it’s surprising that they are willing to kill them off so casually, with no impulse to mourn. Subjectivity doesn’t seem to mean emotional investment for them: there’s something abstract about all those human moments. And death is a big part of their universe, in a cheery, pantheistic way.

There’s definitely a sense of space in those battle scenes, but maybe it’s mostly a matter of configuration of elements in the frame? The images don’t often conjure up a usable space, seems to me.

I have seen this one recently and its pretty inter...

2008-06-27T14:45:00.000-04:00

I have seen this one recently and its pretty interesting and would love to watch such ones in future too...as david said

Actually, this helps explain a lot of why I mostly...

2008-06-26T01:28:00.000-04:00

Actually, this helps explain a lot of why I mostly found this film engaging, and not really interesting: a lot of cute little revelations, presented prettily, but (deliberately) not convincingly--the idea is to communicate the idea, rather than a mood. (Reminding me a bit of Wes Anderson in description). But then the battle scenes blew me away, as about the best I've seen; there's so much inherent tension to the battle, that the Tavianis' deadpan revelations of space (killers to all side) become terrifyingly disorienting. Everyone is at the mercy of their space--including the camera, which never has a good grasp of what's going on--while staying alive becomes a matter of being lucky enough to see what's going on around. The deadpan comedy becomes total fatalism: people dying casually in a field for no good reason, even while they logically obey their initiatives. I haven't seen any other of their films, but the Taviani brothers seem to be gently mocking people for following simple motivations throughout (a classic comedy approach), and being the sum of their reasons; here it becomes horrific.

Makes me really want to see more of their films.