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Nothing is more stylized than the verismo of Man of Aran and La Terra Trema, Agnès Varda takes it apart in a thorough analysis. A photographic style, "a symphony of wood": The credits play over an ornately split log, the camera pans left and tracks down the fishing village's main street, then into one of the houses, out a window and around the backyard, done with cheat-edits à la Hitchcock. The locals deal with a teenage girl's first date, a boy's death and agents from the health department, one fellow is arrested but returns just in time for the jostling tournament—all of them are visibly uncomfortable before the lenses, sometimes frozen like snared rabbits. The contrasting line of deliberate awkwardness comes into play as a melancholy couple (Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret) wander through mannered compositions, dropping pensée after pensée. "It's the mind that rebels, or the body... I've come to make noise, yet silence has won out..." They move from the belly of a beached ship to aquatic reflections on their bedroom ("Is it canal water on the ceiling?" "Yes, because the moon's in the canal"), the townspeople adjourn to the courtyard for music and dancing, a small band fills the screen. "The strangeness of our connection," reflected in mysterious textures and sounds: Cats napping on piles of nets, the groan of a rusty wagon, documentary glances followed by Bergmanesque poses. The disparate elements overlap without intersecting anywhere except in the open, fascinated gaze of the filmmaker, on her way to becoming cinema's grand gleaner. A strikingly modern work in its use of raw materials, and, in its role in laying the groundwork for the Nouvelle Vague, a strikingly influential one. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |