THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

“Truth, like Art, is in the eye of the beholder”
(Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil)

A fairy tale for our modern times
The fantastic, with a political and artistic twist
Scripts, old and new.

A thought-provoking work about virtual reality, a sort of companion piece to Ready Player One. In its own way. Playing in a virtual world, to escape reality.
Creating an avatar for yourself,
Falling prey to it… for better and for worse.
But in the process, you inspire others.
And journey on. On a horse, on a mule,
Or on foot.

A statement about what creation is: the search, the recycling of previous ideas, the intertextual processes, the dialogic dynamic between different generic traditions and conventions.
The literary text and its screen adaptation through the creative reworking of the individual film director
The trappings of the mise en abyme device
The maze of numerous narrative lines
The rewriting of the old to shape the tale(s) anew.
Fiction and its attending spaces: creativity, imagination, illusion.

Intruders in the fictional party: politics and ecology.
New forms of power and feudalism.
The old castle and the new dwellers, lords and feuds of a different era.
The grotesque excesses of wealth, the instrumentalization of the other: her body (the notion of a « whore », « what is the going rate? »)/his face: “you have a good face”.

The Russian oligarch and his fantasy world
The regressive and infantile behavior
The new courtesans: to curry his favor to « obtain the contract ».
Sex and desire
Sublimated love (Dulcinea: the ideal/idealized woman)
How to uphold chivalric values in the crass world of money and advertising?
The new poor: gypsies, migrants, and other outcasts
The destructive ecology of a mindset generated by fear and prejudice
Assuming that the other is … dangerous, hostile, murderous, treacherous… and constructing a narrative around it. And acting on it. Violence–physical and other.
Reality undoes it, yet you persist in the script of your own making.

A landscape of rugged and uneven surfaces
The desert of some environmental disaster
And its attending heaps of garbage, material and moral.

On the narrative level: the black and white sequences: akin to italics and other typographic devices to show the different narrative layers in written texts.
Coming in and out of the cinematic world, coming in and out of the space of memory:
Remembering: staging/restaging an alternative reality.
Memory and its treasure chest of images—conjured out of the space of a former experienced reality, or created out of the space of longing and nostalgia.

The beauty of the creative illusion
And the ugliness of the illusions generated by fear and prejudice

The power of the imagination to map out alternative realities
And the power of the imagination to whip up anxiety and distrust

The delusion—and yet the awareness of that illusion
To uphold the illusion of grandeur, not just for yourself but for others.

The old film, the new in the making.
The return of the old film in his life: nemesis of his having sold his talent to the industry of advertising.

To inscribe yourself in a line of fictional heroes, to appropriate them for yourself at different times in your life.

Last but not least: a tribute to cinema
The enticing lure of the moving image to capture our inner dynamism, the momentum of our individual and unique imaginative power.

The Force was with Adam Driver… Could Toby outperform Kylo Ren??

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

EVERYBODY KNOWS

The opening sequence: like the first paragraph in a short story, it provides clues and hints, it conjures coming themes, introduces the main protagonists, and establishes leading metaphors and tropes.

The church bell tower where some truth is told, some oracle is given:
“Everybody knows”
About Paco and Laura…

The clock mechanism proceeds relentlessly, setting other processes in motion: moving hands, ringing bell, flapping bird wings, fluttering thoughts and emotions.
A heavy and ominous atmosphere sets in
A foreboding of something to come: broken glass around the dial
The uttering and whispering of an unwelcome prophecy:
If you get too close to time, you can hurt yourself.

The scribbling on the wall, the scar of a lost passion.
What is intuited through the single initial,
What the marking indicates, points to, yet also silences.
What it stands for, what it fails to express
What it recalls, and still conceals.

The wedding ceremony in the room below: the marriage that could not take place years before: the fated and star-crossed lovers went their separate ways.

The re-apparition of the past and its unfinished business
The no-exit world of village life
And its attending array of passions and grievances, past and new.

The obsessive filming of every detail, in a quasi journalistic fashion.
The corridors and stairways, the doors—locked and unlocked
The upstairs rooms and the shared bedrooms: physical spaces mapping out psychological and emotional ones.
The building of a particular mood through the editing and the camera work
“A feat of compression” as Elia Kazan said about theatre: every detail matters, and leads to an outcome.
The comings and goings of family members
The unsaid and unsayable
The secrets and the taboos
The suspicions and the guilt
The resentment and jealousy

Irene, whose name means Peace, yet she brings recklessness and trouble
Whose daughter is she? Who is her father?
The biological/ the adoptive father who prevented the abortion.
Fatherhood: regained, and lost again.
The ending: a disquieting lack of closure
The stuff real life is made of
As everybody knows, indeed.

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

THE RIDER

“He galloped up … his heels in the horses’ s ribs and it dancing and swirling like the shape of its mane and tail…” (William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

The articulation of passion and identity and self—and the loss of it all. At first.

The nightmarish return of haunting images of success. And failure.
Some turning point: the accident or event through which change brutally and relentlessly storms in, damages and destroys—taking off masks, ripping confidence and arrogance open, wounding and hurting.
The daily routine now altered by the unavoidable scar. The visible one, and the invisible one.

Yet, Brady gets to live, unlike the horse he had befriended. Another casualty of life and its rugged surface.

The love and gentleness of the simple-minded sister Lilly who puts paper stars on her sibling’s body when he is sleeping.

The friendship with other cowboys: their aspirations, endurance and fear. The terror and horror of the rodeo experience. And its addictive thrill and thrust.

The beloved horse Gus sold off, and the crazy horse Apollo who gets tamed—momentarily.

The admired friend Lance abandoned by luck, stranded in a place of no return, remapping the boundaries of heroism, probing into the unchartered territory of the power of the soul.

Life compelling you to re-design your priorities, and accept a new perimeter for your wanderings. The scope of a new wisdom, perhaps. And the shape of some eternity.

The final choice: self-less love for the loved ones, instead of the self-centered pursuit of a deadly illusion.
Letting go of the “before” to allow for the delivery of some “after”—however uncertain and unknown.

Finding happiness in the knowledge that you still have life, and in the awareness that your ability to dream lives on—undamaged.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian

DON’T WORRY, HE WON’T GET FAR ON FOOT

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe” (Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing).

A form of contemplation, the quality of a gaze that strives to explore without damaging, to know without assessing. To see without becoming blind.

Gus Van Sant covering the territory of forgiveness and acceptance, tracking down despair, anatomizing courage.

The birth of a calling
The discovery of a hidden talent
The beauty of lasting beginnings

Empathy—and, more radically, compassion.
A form of mercy, too. For oneself, for others. For humanity in its irreducible scripts and achievements.

The American story of from ‘rags to riches’ revisited from the point of view of the body and the soul. The existential rise from despair, the understated heroism of fortitude and hope.

A variation of the American Dream, a declaration of will and purpose, and a requiem for posthumanism.

A form of prophetic insurgency, perhaps.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian

READY PLAYER ONE

Teenage coming-of-age story the Twenty-First Century way…

Indulging in the magic that Spielberg’s works provide.

Like Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret, Ready Player One proposes some tribute to cinema

And the cultural work it provides.

An invitation NOT to play alone.

For the viewer who was a teenager in the 80’s, the enhanced visual pleasure of recognition: familiar references de-territorialized and re-contextualized in a virtual world—the only world when they can be found anyway, as they now belong to the world of memory only.

The legacy of enduring screen figures that have become new heroes and icons, King Kong leading the way for contemporary Aliens and Machines.

The thrill of the guessing game of a roman a clef :

How many references can you track down/identify/retrieve/appropriate?

Literalizing the trope of Back to the Future

The urban landscape as the SF version of Blade Runner?

The wonder of ET and AI combined with a topical and political agenda.

How do you live in a disenchanted world?

Withdrawing into an “oasis”

Conjuring an Illusion of power and agency into perfect shape and guise

Deploying your potential in which your ‘real’ life is now reduced to heaps of garbage or life in a cubicle (with a panopticon effect, a nod to Foucault maybe)

Fidelity centers and their new forms of enslavement.

The immature behavior of the CEO speaks to the current lack of world leadership, and an increasing regressive will for power : “Who has the biggest bomb?…”

Some kinship with the recent release Ghost in the Shell:

A fighting spirit and a rebellion

Resistance to the encroachment of big corporations

Reintroducing the collective dimension beyond the pervasive self-centeredness

Following the way set by the Atari Game Adventure where winning is not what matters, but playing is.

Attention to detail(s): the quarter that was going to be discarded is the access to a Second Life.

Look again: the curator is actually someone else

Review your hypothesis and assumptions

Revising eventually leads to the truth (and success in the contest)

The moral component of the fairy tale: “only the real world is real”

Shutting down the game two days a week: a plea to reinvest the places of humanity and explore its space anew—with or without the avatar(s)?

Reality: Augmented, repurposed.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian