"Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. 

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.* 

* With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror. 

As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin. 

Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.* 

* I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet. 

I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl. 

But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim! 

Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror. 

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. 

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men - has no substantive deformity - and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so? 

Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place! 

Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog. Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. 

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.

But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it? To analyze it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness- though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to import to it aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified; can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now. 

Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? 

Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors- the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves- why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? 

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of and skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;- it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. 

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples. 

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness - as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?" 

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitude. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. 

But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael. 

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey- why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness - why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon? 

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. 

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! 

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. 

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. 

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues - every stately or lovely emblazoning - the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge. Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

in Moby Dick, capítulo 42, de Herman Melville

Double bill (XVIII)

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« Ça s’appelle la mise en scène, ça… c’est pas compliqué ! »*

I'VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU (1946)

por João Bénard da Costa

Filme extremo, filme extreme - o mais extremo e o mais extreme dos filmes do estremecente Borzage - I've Always Loved You só pode suscitar reacções igualmente extremas e extremes. Não me custa nada perceber as reacções da crítica da época, cobrindo esta obra de sarcasmos e ridicularizando tudo, desde a desvairada implausibilidade do argumento às grotescas interpretações dos protagonistas. Não me custa nada perceber que metade da sala ainda reaja hoje da mesma maneira. Mas quem ficar enfeitiçado - logo na primeira sequência, a do salão de Filadélfia - só pode ir de surpresa em surpresa, de êxtase em êxtase, até ao delirante final (porventura, o mais delirante final de filme de qualquer obra jamais produzida em Hollywood) e amar este filme de excessos, portentoso vaso comunicante de uma teia infinita de cumplicidades, a mais paroxística e demencial das afirmações da arte de Borzage.

Se esta sempre visou um irrealismo transcendental, que não tem equivalência em qualquer outro dos mestres americanos (e quem viu Seventh Heaven, Lucky Star, The Shining Hour, Strange Cargo ou Little Man, What Now? - para apenas citar alguns exemplos cimeiros - não me pode desmentir) foi, provavelmente, ainda jugulada - nos twenties e nos thirties - pelas exigências dos grandes estúdios para que Borzage trabalhou. A partir do fim da guerra, quando a sua cotação baixou, após os relativos insucessos dos seus últimos filmes para a Metro, para a Paramount ou para a Universal, Borzage - ao serviço dos estúdios muito mais pequenos, como é o caso da Republic, típico estúdio da série B - pôde finalmente encontrar a liberdade para ir até ao fim das suas ousadias e cumprir o programa que anunciara mais de vinte anos antes, quando, em 1922, numa das raras entrevistas que dele se conservam, pôde dizer: "in every face I see I find a story. It doesn't seem hard. The story is right there lying on top, easily visible. You can take it and make something real, vital out of it... By face I don't mean face literally... I mean the characters in my story." E "lying on the top" pegou nos personagens da história de Borden Chase (que, pouco depois, escreveu Red River para Hawks) e deu ao tema do Concerto uma acepção não apenas musical, mas essencial. Porque neste filme todos os instrumentos (personagens, décor, iluminação, côr, montagem, découpage, guarda-roupa) se concertam uns com os outros - tanto quanto o plano e a orquestra na partitura de Rachmaninoff - para, em oposições ou consonâncias, construírem a harmonia supra-natural alcançada nos últimos planos. Finalmente tudo se comunica. Myra pode realizar que amou sempre o marido ("sempre o soube" responde-lhe este estranhamente) e o "Maestro" pode realizar que "there is a woman in music". Concretiza-se, assim, na suprema irrealidade do fantomático gesto com que Myra se levanta do piano, antes do fim do concerto, para se juntar ao marido e à filha nos bastidores, o que Maria Ouspenskaya tinha ido legar a George, na sublime sequência da sua visita à quinta: espaço e tempo não interessam quando "I play as you play the things you play".

O estranho destino deste filme oculto - tão raramente citado, tão raramente visto, mesmo pelos mais borzagianos - parece ainda cumprir o seu oculto apelo. À época, quem não se riu dele ficou-se apenas pela antologia de música clássica, pelo aproveitamento do concerto de Rachmaninoff, ou pelas interpretações de Rubinstein, pomposamente chamado no genérico "the world's greatest pianist". Nos anos 60, Luc Moullet redescobriu-o em Locarno. Mas se foi o primeiro - que eu saiba - a sustentar que era a obra-prima de Borzage e a afirmar que "l'excés de mievrerie et de sensiblerie dépasse toutes les limites permises et anihile le pouvoir de la critique et de la reflexion pour déboucher sur la pure beautê", ainda falava de "oeuvre demodée" e de "personagens insuportáveis" para explicar por que é que os "homens da nossa época" não podiam aceder a um universo de outro tempo e que parecia não ter evoluído depois dos Secrets de 1923.

Ora se o filme revela do inexplicável (o que ninguém negará) é a sua análise a única que pode fazer aceder ao cinema of excess de Borzage, para retomar uma expressão de John Belton, que justamente dedicou ao filme o mais belo comentário que dele conheço no seu livro Cinema Stylists, cuja leitura vivamente recomendo.

A perturbação - ou a magia, como disse atrás - insinuam-se em nós logo na sequência de Filadélfia, quando julgamos que o filme se vai centrar sobre um carácter fáustico (Goronoff, the master) na linhagem de várias outras obras contemporâneas desta (curiosamente também centradas na música) como The Seventh Veil de Compton Bennett ou Red Shoes de Powell e Pressburger. Philip Dorn parece aproximar-se de James Mason ou de Anton Walbrook, protagonistas desses filmes, na mesma arrogância magestática de cabotino genial. Mas a errância da câmara ("floating aimslessly looking for something to latch onto", nas palavras de Belton) prova que essa pista é falsa e que ainda se anda à procura do centro. E só quando Catherine McLeod é arrancada à profundidade de campo para vir tocar a Apassionata (recusando-se à Fuga, que lhe pedia o protagonista) câmara e personagens se concentram e concertam (após o magnífico plano do sapato azul) para desfazer o ambiente glacial e disperso até aí existente e pela primeira vez estabelecer uma cumplicidade secreta sobre as várias rivalidades e frivolidades até aí esboçadas. E quando, depois de deixar de tocar, Catherine Mcleod lentamente como que desperta, a imagem funde em negro para se abrir depois, tecnicoloradíssima, sobre a paisagem idílica da quinta dos Hassman: campo, vacas, lagos, e finalmente a casa à beira dele, donde vem o som do piano. Dois mundos são, pela primeira vez, opostos e conjugados. Não apenas pelo décor ou pela côr, mas sobretudo pela movimentação da câmara, rodopiante na primeira "cena", "extática" na segunda.

É pela janela que Goronoff irrompe nesse décor, que, apesar do seu aparente à-vontade, domina com muito mais dificuldade do que o décor de Filadélfia. E os primeiros acordes do concerto de Rachmaninoff (tocado a dois pianos, pelo maestro e pela aluna, com Goronoff a reservar para si a parte da orquestra) são interrompidos pelo som do tractor, introduzindo George na história. A nudez do rapaz, o erotismo do apontamento da camisa que Myra lhe vai lavar, introduzem uma segunda falsa pista: a de que o conflito se vai travar entre a atracção carnal de Myra pelo rapaz do campo e a sua atracção espiritual por Goronoff. Se é preciso recordar essa sequência para nos lembrarmos depois por que e que George sempre se refere a qualquer coisa mais do que amizade existente entre eles, aparentemente Myra o esquecerá - tanto como nós - até ao final do filme. George, será tudo menos um personagem físico, remetido durante grande parte do filme ao estatuto do boy next door ou de husband next door. Mas essa camisa - como depois o anel que lhe dará no wishing room do jardim (prodigiosa sequência) - é o primeiro sinal de uma comunicação indissolúvel entre eles, tão indissolúvel como a comunicação que no mesmo wishing room (e em sequência não menos bela) se estabeleceu entre Myra e Goronoff.

Se o erotismo exacerbado vai ser o cerne da comunicação musical entre os últimos, o erotismo oculto (apetecia dizer em surdina) da relação Myra-George não é menos forte. Isso é o que compreenderá Maria Ouspenkaya quando, pela primeira vez, encontra George e depois dos seus expressos pressentimentos. Por isso, o incita ("nice boy", "gentle boy") a lutar por Myra, sabendo que essa luta é a única que pode travar a força destrutiva da relação Goronoff-Myra.

Na sequência seguinte à dessa visita, como que misteriosamente investido pela mãe do rival, George manifesta surpreendentemente - e pela primeira vez - essa força, quando interrompe o Prelúdio de Chopin e corta a misteriosíssima comunicação à distância entre Myra e Goronoff. Suspendendo essa fusão telepática, George reduz Goronoff à impotência. Quando Myra pára de tocar, Goronoff suspende-se igualmente no concerto público que estava a dar, no primeiro dos grandes momentos absolutamente onirizantes de um filme que até aí parecera excluí-lo do centro, para sorver unicamente a paixão de Myra pelo master. Myra regressa a casa, à quinta, a George, finda a febre musical que tivera o clímax no primeiro dos concertos do Carnegie Hall.

Não me estou a esquecer de nada e muito menos da fulgurante sequência do Rio de Janeiro com o xaile e Myra, na profundidade de campo, a anular com o liebestod a aventura ocasional de Goronoff. Mas a sequência do primeiro concerto, culminando uma das vertentes do filme, é um dos momentos de cinema mais misteriosos que já me lembro de ter visto. Por alguma razão, a Abertura da Flauta Mágica é tocada à cabeça do programa, como aviso do terreno que vamos pisar. Esse terreno é o profundo desencontro entre a feminilidade absoluta de Myra e a masculinidade do Maestro. Na prodigiosa découpage dessa enorme sequência, o que se afirma é uma guerra de sexos que Goronoff não consegue dirigir. Cada novo plano de Myra - a começar pelo plano genial em que tira do dedo o anel que George lhe dera e ousa no piano - só desenha, cada vez mais nitidamente, símbolos femininos. Cada novo plano do maestro só acentua simbologias fálicas. Mas jamais essas representações se reúnem. Cada enquadramento só desfaz o concerto, transformando a harmonia em combate e em combate vitorioso para Myra. E, subindo à geral (onde está George) ao camarote de Ouspenskaya com o crítico, ou saindo da sala para ir buscar aos bastidores electricistas e ajudantes de palco, a câmara estabelece entre todos esses espaços e todas essas gentes uma impalpável rede de cumplicidades, como se todos confirmassem a feminilidade da música e todos desejassem a destruição do elemento masculino dela. Destruição tanto maior quanto mais Myra é oblativa (recurso à voz off) acentuando até ao extremo limite a impotência do homem que julgava poder abarcar toda a música sob o seu exclusivo sexo.

Metaforicamente, essa sequência do concerto é uma sequência de amor físico, uma das mais prodigiosas sequências de amor físico da história do cinema. Um só personagem - Goronoff - é excluído do orgasmo colectivo e é excluído porque deliberadamente se auto-excluiu dele. É a sua infernal persistência masturbatória que o exclui e dita o terrível off do final, quando Myra sai do palco e do teatro a correr, como se lhe fosse impossível voltar a enfrentar aqueles com quem tinha feito amor contra o homem que amava. A ruptura seguinte (a ceia) é só uma coda a essa disjunção.

Há um filme de Cukor - Rich and Famous - em que uma das personagens masculinas - um rapaz novo - diz a Candice Bergen que não suporta fazer amor com raparigas da idade dele, porque só pensam no orgasmo delas. Irónica, Candice Bergen pergunta-lhe se ele queria que só pensassem no orgasmo dele. E ele responde-lhe que a única possibilidade e quando tudo se concentra no orgasmo dos dois.

De certo modo, I've Always Loved You até esse concerto - ou até à ruptura entre Myra e Goronoff - permanece nas duas primeiras alternativas. Vai ser necessário o crescimento mútuo, ou o envelhecimento mútuo (e este é um filme do envelhecimento de Borzage, ou, pelo menos, da sua grande maturidade) para que seja possível (segundo concerto) o clímax total, que transborda da relação entre os dois para tudo e todos que os rodeiam. Em termos de Borzage - cujo erotismo ou cuja sexualidade são sempre marcadamente espirituais - é necessário que a comunicação se transmude em comunicação invisível (separação) para que ao nível das almas aconteça o que ao nível dos corpos não pôde acontecer.

Por isso, George, que interrompera a montagem mística dos dois Chopin, ordena a Myra, na inadjectivável sequência da noite de tempestade - quando já muitos anos passaram e quando tem já seis anos essa estranha criança que parece saber de tudo - que recomece a tocar e reabra o piano que ele próprio selou. E de Mozart às canções de embalar, o caminho fica aberto para o mesmo Prelúdio de Chopin, na precisa nota em que ficara interrompido seis anos antes. No mesmo momento, em Nova Iorque, Goronoff levanta-se e retoma a música, como se ele também fosse comandado por George para reatar a relação. Mas a relação em que ainda pensa é já impossível, como lhe diz a mãe. Se para a música há um espaço, esse espaço é eternidade e, por isso, ela também suspensa dessa nota, morre Maria Ouspenskaya nessa noite. E morre com um único receio: que Myra volte a procurar Goronoff. Não é dele que tem medo, é dela.

E é o único ponto em que vai ser excedida pelo nice boy que instigou. Porque o plano de George passa por esse regresso e é a esse regresso que obriga Myra, desenvolvendo, para que ele se dê, as rimas mais ocultas: a carreira de pianista da filha (de certo modo, repetindo a mãe), a relação com Severin (duplo de Goronoff) e o segundo concerto do Carnegie Hall. Só a figura de repetição pode esconjurar tanto a figura da presença com a figura da ausência. E todas as personagens se onirizam, se esbatem (numa espécie de recuo mágico) até que Goronoff e Myra voltem a tocar juntos.

Só que agora - no segundo concerto - George já não está no topo do teatro, mas na plateia, com a filha ao lado. E é num só plano que o segundo concerto se realiza, com a câmara abarcando uma tonalidade e jamais a fragmentando. No único momento em que se sai da sala, é para Borzage ir buscar, através do reatrato de Maria Ouspensaya, a velha sombra e reunir também os mortos aos vivos. É essa prodigiosa ressureição, que justifica a "ressureição" de Myra (tão incrível como a de Charles Farrell em Seventh Heaven) abandonando piano e maestro, para se juntar à família, finalmente reconhecida.

Ultrapassei os meus (vastos) limites e dou-me conta de que ainda não falei de tanta coisa sublime de que queria falar: do baton das outras mulheres nas mãos de Myra; da paramentação do xaile e do primeiro "desacerto" em torno da música; das lágrimas de Ouspenskaya no final do primeiro concerto; do "I've Always Loved You" de George, junto à árvore, na noite do pedido de casamento; da fabulosa personagem da mãe de George, com a incrível sequência dos novelos, em que ela também parece detentora de todos os segredos e todas as cumplicidades. E ainda não falei das rimas internas - a cada plano - com as cores, os décors, os fatos.

Não vou falar. Como todos os espaços mágicos, este é um filme repleto de recantos e segredos, de sótãos e alçapões, em que cada um descobrirá os seus próprios tesouros. No mais acidental, oculta-se o mais essencial.

E seria precisa outra análise - já não filmográfica mas musical - para percebermos muitos outros concertos, numa obra que toma como cerne aquele que é não só o mais romântico dos concertos para piano e orquestra, como aquele que começa com uma longa entrada do piano solo, a que a orquestra tardiamente se vem juntar. Tão presente nesse início, será por acaso que Myra Hassman abandona o 3º andamento e deixa a orquestra concluir sozinha? Alguém me disse - e estou pronto a dar-lhe razão - que I've Always Loved You é também o filme de um imenso off: o do terceiro concerto, que todos sabem, no final, terá lugar algures e dará sentido pleno à crispação do primeiro e ao onirismo do segundo. Nesse, o maestro reunir-se-ia, ele também, a Myra, a George e a Porky, tão ressuscitados e rejuvenescidos como a everlasting music que já não precisaria de intermediários. Então eles, como ela, seriam finalmente kindly to the years.

I knew him through his editor, who was also his girlfriend and in her twenties. She was a very lively girl, and I remember her saying: ‘Watch what I’m going to do when Barnet comes.’ She went up to him and ordered: ‘About turn!’ This immense figure turned round smartly and she jumped on to his back, calling ‘Gee up!’ That’s how I met him. 

He asked me: ‘Who are you?’ I said: ‘A director’ (this was when I was making April [Aprel’, 1962]). ‘Soviet,’ he corrected, ‘you must always say “Soviet director”. It is a very special profession.’ ‘In what way?’ I asked. ‘Because if you ever manage to become honest, which would surprise me, you can remove the word “Soviet”. Now I am a “Soviet director”, although I only became one recently.’ 

Then we had a drink and he told me: ‘Above all, don’t watch my films twice.’ ‘Why?’ I enquired. ‘Because they are made for one viewing and afterwards, when you go for a walk and remember them, they become better. I am not’, he told me, ‘a chemist like Eisenstein, who poisons slowly.’ 

I fell in love with him the first time I saw By the Bluest of Seas. It was in the editing class given by Felonov, an excellent teacher, who told us: ‘There is no logic to this film, none at all, and no measurement, but it is very well filmed.’ (He was used to measuring everything and thought that all films were calculated.) ‘It is very well made. I am not teaching you the craft in order to follow this example. I noticed how much you liked it’ (I had badgered him to let me see it again on the editing table) ‘so here it is, but don’t take it as an example. Even though it is better made than, say, Ivan the Terrible.’ 

He was a poet at a time when cinema had thrown out all its simple, unmannered poets, in order to implant mannerism. Dovzhenko’s poetry is really mannerism, with those apples around the old man dying…. Barnet’s films like The Girl with a Hatbox and Trubnaya were very much influenced by their epoch. They were light-hearted and very funny. They were ironic and even carried their propaganda well: ‘Things are bad,’ they said, ‘but they will improve and this will only be temporary.’

Ideologically, he belonged to that company of film-makers, but morally he didn’t take part in their games. Why do I say that? Because a director who had gone through it all and been broken by the demands of the time, who had started to make films about the kolkhozes, said of him that he was an enemy. Just like that. Indeed he was distrusted by all his colleagues, for what he had done? What did By the Bluest of Seas amount to? In our epoch of construction, with all its serious and weighty problems, what’s all this about a wave which sweeps a woman into the cabin of a boat? This really has nothing to do with reality! 

I have the impression that professionals, the same ordinary technicians who still work at Mosfilm who had contact with him, adored him as a person. This was in contrast to those directors who exemplified what a film-maker should be. Happy, straightforward, generous, a drinker and a child, all at once. He had no anxiety about being humiliated; he could say, ‘I don’t know how that’s done.’ 

This is a craft which should be plied happily if at all possible. But you never get good results if, as in France, you try to please the producer. Barnet made a charming, silly film, Lyana. He was dead-drunk and surrounded by gypsies singing and dancing through the shoot. He had a wonderful time. Rather than conform, if one has to film something stupid, better not to take part in the shooting. Just opt out.

Otar Iosseliani sobre Boris Barnet

via KG