Another comment here gives some precious background around the film which frees us here to examine the cinematic, the work of moving illusion.
We cut at the heart of cinema when we say that memory is one of the central facets of what gives rise to reality, that faculty we have with the capacity to recall and project illusion, a cinematic subject. We have three characters stranded on a boat here, each reminiscing in turn about currents of life that brought them there.
The whole is what they were fond of calling a "cinematic poem" in those days, which means this. Memory as a way of shuffling narrative, creating currents of image so that it's not anchored on a stage, nor pivots around clearly revealed drama, but wanders off and about, free to gather up disparate views from the whole mundane horizon.
People walking places, empty windows, a flower by the side of the road, an affair, a Chaplin movie, tall grasses, these and others are all picked up to be scattered about again by the camera. It's already where Jonas Mekas would arrive a long time later.
Those were wonderful times but so different - horizons that were open then are now closed and vice versa. So when a scene of inner turmoil is transmuted as the camera wildly swinging around at the hands of the operator, you get the painterly sense desired, how the known geography in front of the eye can be made to spill like a painter mixes colors. It's French inspired in this sense, the works of Epstein and others.
We have come up with more eloquent ways since, which comes down to a single thing. The silent makers worth knowing all dismantled perception, freeing eye from world. That was enough at that stage. The question then was how to regroup these fragments in a more penetrative sense that looks behind appearances to find soul, actually do it. All the subsequent cinematic schools of note would busy themselves with ways to thread this cornucopia of images, Italians first.
This might well be what this filmmaker was doing in his way, looking for soul, and it was enough to impress Welles when he was going to be down there in Brazil a decade later. But it is also randomly scattershot for long stretches, giving simply a fragmental sense.
As a last thing to note, the wonderful experiments of the silent era would soon draw to an end, this comes on the tail end. Sound rolled in, solidifying reality back to a fixed state, removing the sense of reverie ingrained in silence. You'll see near the end here a wonderful sequence of symphonic water - film could still be thought of as music, whereas not after.
We cut at the heart of cinema when we say that memory is one of the central facets of what gives rise to reality, that faculty we have with the capacity to recall and project illusion, a cinematic subject. We have three characters stranded on a boat here, each reminiscing in turn about currents of life that brought them there.
The whole is what they were fond of calling a "cinematic poem" in those days, which means this. Memory as a way of shuffling narrative, creating currents of image so that it's not anchored on a stage, nor pivots around clearly revealed drama, but wanders off and about, free to gather up disparate views from the whole mundane horizon.
People walking places, empty windows, a flower by the side of the road, an affair, a Chaplin movie, tall grasses, these and others are all picked up to be scattered about again by the camera. It's already where Jonas Mekas would arrive a long time later.
Those were wonderful times but so different - horizons that were open then are now closed and vice versa. So when a scene of inner turmoil is transmuted as the camera wildly swinging around at the hands of the operator, you get the painterly sense desired, how the known geography in front of the eye can be made to spill like a painter mixes colors. It's French inspired in this sense, the works of Epstein and others.
We have come up with more eloquent ways since, which comes down to a single thing. The silent makers worth knowing all dismantled perception, freeing eye from world. That was enough at that stage. The question then was how to regroup these fragments in a more penetrative sense that looks behind appearances to find soul, actually do it. All the subsequent cinematic schools of note would busy themselves with ways to thread this cornucopia of images, Italians first.
This might well be what this filmmaker was doing in his way, looking for soul, and it was enough to impress Welles when he was going to be down there in Brazil a decade later. But it is also randomly scattershot for long stretches, giving simply a fragmental sense.
As a last thing to note, the wonderful experiments of the silent era would soon draw to an end, this comes on the tail end. Sound rolled in, solidifying reality back to a fixed state, removing the sense of reverie ingrained in silence. You'll see near the end here a wonderful sequence of symphonic water - film could still be thought of as music, whereas not after.