TOWARDS A REALLY EUROPEAN FILMOGRAPHY?

Sokurov's and Lars von Trier's New Films

Новые фильмы сокурова и Ларса фон Триера  

I  nuovi film di Sokurov e Lars von Tier

Les nouvelles pellicules de Sokurov et de Lars von Trier

Die neuen Filme von Sokurov und Lars von Trier.

 

We had commented recently with great pleasure the award, to Aleksandr Sokurov, of the Golden Lion of the Festival of Venice for his film “Faust”, which, according to us, represents an important attempt to revitalize a film production devoted to Europe cultural heritage.At the Cannes Festival, another film has been presented, Melancholia, which has not received an award for the well known political polemics concerning its filmmaker, the Dane Lars von Trier. Also the latter  film represents, according to us, an important contribution to the discussion about Europe’s identity.

1. Faust

Sokurov’s work constitutes a programmatic effort to demonstrate  the evergreen validity of European classics, like Goethe’s Faust. As it is well-known, “to translate” a work of the weight of “Faust” is a difficult task, that only the filmmaker Murnau in the Republic of Weimar  had really tried up to now.The difficulties are manifold: the philosophical and literary “thickness”, the seriousness of the themes, the length of the work, to which Goethe had devoted, in practical, all of his life.

For this reason, we cannot, either approve 100% the results achieved by Sokurov, nor criticize them. The work presented at the Venice Film Festival has already been considered as excessively "hard" even for an élite audience, because of the strong literary influences, because of the awkwardness of its stile and of its themes, and, finally, also because of its duration. However, it constitutes  already the result of a thorough simplification. In practice, it is devoted only to the 1^st part of Goethe’s Faust, i.e., the sale, by Faust, of its own soul to Mephistopheles, his love with Margarethe and his descent to Hell. 

Unfortunately, , the 1^st Faust without the 2nd is not so clear as to its meaning. In fact, according to our interpretation, the second Part of Faust represents  a sort of reversal of the meaning of the Tragedy's first part.In fact, during the second part, the “damned” Faust continues to live, going  through the symbolic representation of the whole history of European culture, and, at the end, is saved thanks to Margarethe’s prayers. So, he starts a new life, in a newly conquered territory , which the Emperor  grants to him as a fief. Here, he can try his social experiment, and reclaim the land from the sea, so finding in social engagement  a reason for his life, which should allow him, perhaps,, to find that sense of life for which he, in the first part, had sold his soul to Mephistopheles.

The problem is that not even in this second part Mephistopheles is completely saved. On the contrary, one sees the Lemures which surround him , what amounts to hinting that, at the end of the day, notwithstanding Grace and Works, he will be finally pray of death and destruction.

This long, complex and problematic part of the work is completely ignored by Sokurov. On the contrary, Faust, in the middle of Hell, succeeds in "killing" Mephistopheles and in flying away over high mountains. This should mean  a form of spiritual victory against the forces of evil. This conclusion of the tragedy corresponds to the optimistic view of Sokurov, that, notwithstanding all problems,  freedom of mind and search of perfection (the "faustian spirit"), typical of Europe’s "classic" cultural eras, can still be pursued, or must be pursued, also today.

2.Melancholia.

The second film, the one of Lars von Trier, has nothing of Sokurov's optimism. It, like Goethe’s original Faust, is dominated by the sense of death and of decadence of modern civilization.

This death and decadence is shown from two different point of view. From one side, the emptiness of human life in modern Western welfare state; from the other side, the unavoidable consciousness of the limitedness of human and personal histories in front of the infinity of Universe.

Earth is bound to encroach the orbit of a huge, dead and unknown planet. Scientists and media try to persuade world’s population that a clash will be avoided, but fear and skepticism will prevail, and, at the end, the most pessimistic forecasts result to be true.

Only a young lady who, since a long time, had lived a sort of psychological desease, because she was focussed on the foreseeing of the inevitable disaster, is in a position to accept wisely the truth and to infuse a minimum of calmness and serenity into her relatives, having even the courage to build, at the last minute, a sort of pathetic, useless, small temple, inside which to recreate, at least for a micro-instant, a moment of solidarity between the dying human beings. Faust would hav exclaimed "verweile doch, du bist so schoen!"

Both films show that Europe’s cinema has still the capability and the ambition to put on the scenes the themes which are most important for mankind, even if the latter does not like to be recalled of them.