GRADIVA.

GRADIVA
de Raymonde Carasco
France, 1978, expérimental, 16 mm, coul., 25'.


Raymonde Carasco souhaitait réaliser une adaptation de la Gradiva de Jensen contre l'in terprétation de celui qui rendit ce texte inou bliable, Freud. Avec Bruno Nuytten, elle com mença par effectuer des essais sur le motif fétichisé par le protagoniste masculin de la nou velle, la pose gracieuse d'un pied de jeune fille passant sur une pierre à Pompéi. Raymonde Carasco expérimenta six vitesses différentes, de cinq cents à cinquante images par seconde. Le film se confondit avec son esquisse et devint une leçon d'adaptation de la pensée littéraire au cinéma: quel besoin de restituer l'entourage fic tionnel, alors que, dans la simple série des ralen tis différentiels qui décomposent le gracieux mouvement de la cheville, se prouve l'insuffisance de la démonstration freudienne ? On peut en effet comprendre ainsi la version carascienne de la Gradiva : s'arrêter sur un motif, le laisser revenir encore et encore, faire varier à son sujet les modalités descriptives en termes de défilement cinétique, de lumière et de son, tout cela ne relève pas d'une pathologie ; car il ne s'agit pas d'en feindre la résurrection, mais de témoi gner en faveur du caractère interminable des choses. Ici l'insistance rend hommage à la vibration profonde que produit tout phénomène vivant, aussi simple, aussi éphémère soit-il, lors qu'il est considéré avec l'attention que son pas sage dans le monde requiert. Gradiva propage la vibration de plusieurs façons : grâce à la série monumentale des ralentis ; grâce au souffle de la flûte ; grâce à l'envolée finale de la jeune fille courant dans les ruines nocturnes ; et grâce aussi, malicieusement, nous le découvrons en fin de générique, au fait que le personnage de la Gradiva est joué par deux jeunes filles au lieu d'une. Ainsi le fétichisme n'est plus ni fixation ni arrêt, il se voit réinterprété en laboratoire de la contemplation, et le tracé d'un pas devient le site d'un approfondissement à ce jour unique des vertus descriptives du cinéma. Gradiva est ce film sur la décomposition du sensible que le cinéma attendait depuis la fin des expériences inaugurales de Marey et Lucien Bull.
Jensen, qui animait les bas-reliefs, est un grand cinéaste ; Freud, qui maniait le verbe comme personne, un romancier génial; et Raymonde Carasco, théoricienne de la sensation, une ana lyste profonde

Article de Nicole Brenez, dans Une encyclopédie du court métrage français, Festival Côté court, Editions Yellow Now, Belgique, 2004.

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thanks to
MUBARAK ALI
THE SOUND OF EYE
NICOLE BRENEZ

INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE.

SAN FRANCISCO 1968

DIRECTED BY ANTHONY STERN
MUSIC BY PINK FLOYD



parte 1

( pedimos desculpa por publicar este vídeo com a pobre qualidade com que, infelizmente, se encontra disponível no youtube.
aconselha-se a que, por todas as suas qualidades particulares, procurem vê-lo com a melhor definição e som possíveis.)







+ para ver
San Francisco Redux: No. 1 (2008)
(Directed by Sadia Sadia, Anthony Stern, Stephen W. Tayler
UK:8 min)




+ para ler

For Anthony Stern, For Life
BY NICOLE BRENEZ
text in www.anthonysternglass.com. January 2009

The filmic work of Anthony Stern derives from a radical energy that reveals for us, in figural terms, the life-drive. In 1968, San Francisco, a masterpiece of psychedelic cinesthesia, explodes cinema, seeking a liberation not only of every sense but also of representation itself – which no longer seems indexed to what is recorded, but connected directly, organically, to the energy of history. How could this have happened? How can Stern’s films, following in the steps of Peter Whitehead, crystallise these precious moments of Western history, the apogee of the counter-culture and the joyous echoes of a Romantic revolution which was then still imaginable, with such justness, pertinence and ‘breath’?


To achieve such a laying-bare of the drive, such direct contact with the origin of desire and the image, obviously requires the highest level of poetic, musical and visual culture to support scopic instinct and historical intuition. This is exactly how Schelling defined intellectual intuition, the ‘mysterious and marvellous faculty of being able to withdraw into the most intimate part of ourselves, beyond all alteration that time brings’, so that ‘it is no longer we who live in time, but time – or rather, replacing time, pure absolute eternity – which is in us’. But Stern’s filmic work elaborates the exact opposite, which thus can be called material intuition: a continual, projective, almost pyrotechnical deployment of intimacy in time, which remodels our conceptions of the instant, the present, the immediate, of speed and history. San Francisco or Wheel concretise and sculpt time or rather the here-and-now, which Stern treats as it were a woman’s body whose every dancing vibration he must follow, whose least clearly outlined movement he must seize. Our life is woven from desires that are sometimes unbound, sometimes terrible, sometimes pathetic, in an unstoppable maelstrom of which Wheel – an intimate, multiple, noisy diary of 1969 – offers an amazing pill-pop, rather like a scientific ‘section’ of the complexity of our affects. Because it proceeds from deep intimacy rather than a priori certainty about things, because it knows that cinema, irremediably, cannot register every vibration (even the most negligible) of the instant, because there is too much to feel and describe in the universe, Stern’s cinema – seemingly asphyxiated by the world’s prodigiousness – adopts the discontinuous, the optical flash, permanent intermittence, the shaky, chopped and blurred, creating a vertiginous ‘cinetic’ compression which is far more faithful to the entwined stratigraphy of the sensible realm than a continuous contemplation of appearances.

Thus issued from an organic breath that is transposed by a magisterial savoir-faire on the levels of shooting and editing, an uncommon sense of rhythm dynamises Stern’s films – for example, Serendipity (1971), a serial documentary on contemporary English architecture, The Noon Gun (2004), a reworking of footage shot in Afghanistan in 1971 – and thus the record of a civilisation which has since largely disappeared – or Havana Jazz (2006).

On reseeing or discovering such radical energy – dead drunk, yet what lucid, translucent, sometimes ironic inebriation! – we ask ourselves a crucial question: where is the cinema of today going to get this kind of energy? In fact, we can keep drawing it from Stern himself. Having achieved fame, long ago now, as a master glass-blower, the maker of Baby Baby (1965) combines his know-how in the areas of poetic documentary and recycling (his 1974 Ain’t Misbehavin’ offers a precious panorama of cinema’s representations of women) with his mastery of glass, conjuring new chromatic, sensual and political marvels. With his collaborators Sadia Sadia and Stephen W. Tayler, he has taken apart that most carnal moment of San Francisco in 1968, reinterpreted it and placed it in historical perspective, thanks to a soundtrack that mixes emblematic political sound-grabs and speeches from the period with an original score. San Francisco Redux (2008) seems suddenly like a documentary on the affective sensuality of a shared memory. Anthony Stern’s festive vindications are as indispensable, as vital as those of Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice de Vlaminck, Herbert Marcuse or his mentor, Peter Whitehead. Stern has seized the bewitching phantoms of time and turned them into celluloid-children who establish, intensify, revive and set loose our collective history.