MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: THE WIDE BLUE ROAD (1956)

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Sunday, June 8, 2008

THE WIDE BLUE ROAD (1956)

Helmer Gillo (BATTLE OF ALGIERS) Pontecorvo’s debut is a Marxist/Soviet agitprop meller about a Sicilian fisherman (Yves Montand) who uses dynamite for bait, thumbing his nose at the authorities and turning his back on the emerging local Co-Op. Trying to better himself, he dreams the capitalist dream and gets a big engine & the big debt that goes with the investment. When things go awry, he takes chances, disses his fellows by dynamite fishing near the coast, and the inevitable tragedy occurs. Shot with a weirdly effective mix of leftover Neo-Realist tenets, movie stars (Alida Valli is Montand’s wife), cute kids, WideScreen color & a supercharged music score, it’s all so steeped in political predetermination that you may get the giggles on reflection. But it works like crazy while you are watching, and Pontecorvo would both purify and move beyond Stalinist doctrines after witnessing the USSR playing with dynamite in Hungary just weeks after WIDE BLUE was released.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Sunday, June 8, 2008

THE WIDE BLUE ROAD (1956)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE