Notes on "A Conversation with Bertolucci"

"inspired by" Borges' story
keep "the mechanism," "the structure," without the "Borgesian reflection on the cyclical nature of things"
yet - film is "elliptical... or at any rate as mysterious"

film theme: "voyage into the realm of the dead"
- town is "a kind of kingdom of the dead"

- investigation is a "voyage through atavistic memory, through the preconscious"; film "pursues the itenerary of a psychoanalytic therapy"
-- "done entirely without any anxiety... symptoms"; tragic figure, serene film; no stylistic anxiety
"Perhaps creativity allows us more easily to go beyond certain great oceans of neurosis, but analysis is something much more precise... people work, and work because they can channel into their work their libido which would otherwise not find expression."
> "I absolutely refuse to call it a psychoanalytic film because it's impossible to make a psychoanalytic film, because psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis and film is film."

"about the contradictions of demystification" (of father and mother)
- paternal figure is myth

night scenes: unusual coloration - "completely in azure"; nights when you can see everything, "like in the naive painters' work" eg. Ligabue, Magritte. "night 'eclairage'"

everything done on parallel rails: tracking shots always lateral, no violent shocks. remain at a certain distance, not too far away. everything followed laterally. "made exactly like we were on a train... which stops at every station. Yes, the style of the film is that of the rural commuter trains." (57)

editing seems to have function of coordination or association, "as if to accentuate the cyclical return of things, which is so Borgesian"
[conformist -- one five-minute scene made up of close to two hundred shots!]

"mythology of the animals, especially of the lion"
original title: The Flight of the Lion through the Poplar Trees

strange universe. like in Verdi's Aida "where the Nile is the Po River"

names: Draifa ~ "dreifach" three times - symbolic connection with numbers?
film about fathers and daughters
Tara is the unconscious & "the promised land of Gone with the Wind" (private joke)

flashbacks are present
"I wanted the conventional notions of chronology to be shattered."
"Costumes are a convention."

Pascoli's poetry/Leopoardi quotation...
- identitfication with the child

"I envy the characters of novels who, at some point, stop everything and quote a dozen lines from The Aeneid. It's wonderful to be able to recite poems from memory. Maybe you have to be a bit exhibitionist to do it, though."

"a different kind of montage"
"integrate into the last speech scenes of everything we had seen before... a bit didactic... new ending helps people understand the heart of the problem... the traitor and the hero."
orig just close-up of Athos giving speech - "disappointing because it felt too much like a minor key... [then] the final scene dies out in the grass of the train station." proportion problem... inserts break monotony of scene.
"so much the better if it's didactic, if it helps people understand!"

(as far as I can tell, mise en scene is a meaningless, amorphous term.)