The Blind Owl
90 min - Drama | Fantasy
Director: Raoul Ruiz
Writers: Sadegh Hedayat (novel), Benoît Peeters, Tirso de Molina (Play), Raoul Ruiz
Stars: Jean-François Lapalus, Jessica Forde, Jean-Bernard Guillard
Country: Switzerland | France
Language: French
A movie is wonderfully made using the threads of shadows interposing between dream and reality (actually "between" is wrong since there is no difference between them). La Chouette aveugle (1987) is clearly a cinematic experience, freely adapted from "The Blind Owl" by Sadegh Hedayat and "Damned by Despair" by Tirso de Molina.
A projectionist working in a mysterious theater is intoxicated by gaze of character in a movie he is showing. He constructed movie by connecting some stories with the base plot and used dark, shadowy, exhausting atmosphere. There are so many limitations for a director to visualize "The Blind Owl". Raoul Ruiz freely adapted the theme of book and its techniques.
La Chouette aveugle is not a rigorous one like the novella, it vacillate between the events in the movie showing and that of watcher; projectionist. The demarcation "between" reality (projectionist) and illusion (cinema) is disappearing here.("We are sated and hungry")
Like a labyrinth we are twisted inside, directed from one story to another, throwing out from it- a different kind of feeling. In the move projectionist watching, a holy man is searching his crazed uncle( not sure he is searcher's father or not) found a man in the woods telling story about two twin brothers who loved a Jewish girl. The man is telling the story of searcher's father/uncle; a similar situation like projectionist and his co-worker Kasim, his lover Fatima; like something repeating by cancelling time, space and being. The projectionist himself is an uncle for his unknown nephew.Mixing the story of Christian niece with this nephew.
May be the protagonist's life is somewhat like that of the film's story when we consider the term "repetition". But its not sure.Ruiz made the film in different levels make the viewer to think this happening in different lives, different times also merging all these to a single plane. In cinema it seems to happen in another life, a previous one or another world, and it is repeating in some other plane.
Ruiz gave some space for the woman's mental agitations (can compare with "bitch" in novella). She asks about damnation and pardon to the butcher. She, her husband, butcher (he kills sinners) all are damned. Even death is not an ultimate rescue. It will repeat, souls will be saved for perdition. We will have to play the same part of same drama; may be without knowing. But that spark is haunting, disturbing.Only the shore changes, it will be in the same earth and with the same river(Abandon all hope, ye who enter here)
No comments:
Post a Comment