To dig into the truth. Literally and metaphorically.
At the individual and at the collective level.

Bodies pregnant with legacies—tender or violent.
A gestation process, and a painful delivery.
Dealing with the aftermath. 

The opening sequence: 
Taking pictures, trying to capture life in a snapshot. To hold still what is moving. To record and remember. The lines of a face, the sparkle of a gaze, the light of a smile.

Pictures of the past and of the present. 
Pictures as tokens of History and its lieux de memoire.
Revisiting the pictures, revisiting History. 

Shots of commodities sometimes replace photographs of people. Objects too, have a life of their own and bespeak other historical processes.

The toy that was buried is unearthed and can circulate again between generations. In its proper place. In the proper hands. 

Bodies hijacked by death in the midst of their activities. The volcano of Civil War has buried them beneath its fatal ashes. 

Life holds still, like the memories that provide the only guiding thread back to them.

The archeological work of digging up oblivion and erasure. The emotional work of processing the unearthed artifacts. 

To confront and articulate historical and personal memory without ignoring what meets the eye. First and after. 

The legitimacy given by science sometimes helps.

The body does not lie. 

Genetic evidence, or bones in the earth. The veracity of facts can no longer be denied.

Some cognitive coherence and emotional alignment for Janis. If your passion is to bring to light what is, then you start with your own life. Even if it takes time. Janis’s journey inscribes itself in the national journey. 
It takes time to restore what has been broken, stolen, damaged. 
But truth makes you free.

Telling a story or inheriting one: trying to patch together lose narrative threads on the twin loom of memory and the imagination.

Love in its many faces and guises. 
Love that comes and goes.
And returns, uninvited, to haunt scripts of domesticity and normativity. 

The final shot: 
Cecilia the truth-inspirer is looking down on the historical legacy that awaits her.
A new Spain, perhaps, where the past can be laid to rest, where survivors can mourn their loved ones, and where filiations can be revisited.
it is as if, under little the little girl’s gaze, artifacts of the past retrieved their human form: a palimpsest of humanity that only love can see—defeating, if for an instant, the legacy of hatred. 

Marie LIENARD-YETERIAN

Witty and fast-paced, Wes Anderson’s film triggers in us a compulsion to move on.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

The movie invites a reflection on the conversation between literature and cinema—their respective narrative tools, their common agenda. Their mutual inspiration. Creative and ingenious kindred spirits.
The title has a programmatic ring in that regard: the formulaic opening of the fairy tale coupled with the evocation of the iconic cradle of cinema.
Hollywood: the place where literature morphed into film, perhaps.

Once upon a time tales began and ended.
Once upon a time characters were born and died.
Once upon a time plots were done and undone.
Once upon a time lines were written, and uttered or forgotten.
Once upon a time the world was a stage, the stage was a world.
Once upon a time images and words competed for power.
Once upon a time dreams and nightmares wove in and out of reality their texture of emotions and desires.

A number of literary texts appear: Tess, a biography of Walt Disney, a dime novel, Hamlet. Some of them gesture toward tragedy, others to comedy. Connecting the dots between the two, perhaps.
Hamlet is conjured up in Dick’s soliloquy in his lodge:
The loneliness and the actor’s insecurity,
1960’s countercultural ideals and icons haunting the dreaded ghost, maybe…
Enter Parody and Satire, and Elizabethan fools.

Of note: the voice over, and the precise chronology with dates and times, like a well-rounded play. A drama unfolds to reach a climax, with a witty punch-line, an open-ended finale, and a reversal: terror and horror provides the unexpected opportunity Dick has been dreaming of…

The precise evocation of 1969 Hollywood: its icons and revolutionary spins.
The music, movies, television series and shows of an era that spawned Hippy culture and the Vietnam War.

Playing with the viewer’s expectations about suspense:
Hitchcock-like moments (Sharon at the movies, we expect something bad to happen to her), the car on the road, the trip to the ranch, and the encounter with a blind man that watches his favorite show every evening.

Rehearsing the grotesque mode on screen:
Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove in the scene with the Germans?
The Coen Brothers’ Burn after Reading or Fargo?
Tarantino’s own films?
Violence laced with comedy, and the other way around.

How to become a hero on screen or on the page?
The importance of readers and viewers.
The communal act of making a movie, and watching it.
The narrative voice: who gets to tell the tale.

Once upon a time the story of film as a lieu de mémoire—a site of memory bodying forth Scheherazades for our era.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian

C’est un mystère ancien, dont nous avons fait un mythe. Quelle force pousse certains d’entre nous à désirer si fort l’inaccessible, au point d’y consacrer toutes leurs ressources, de sacrifier à leur obsession tout ce qui les relient à la communauté des humains ? Pourquoi acceptent ils d’y laisser leur vie, souvent, et de briser celles de leurs proches ? Comment, parfois, réussissent-ils à dépasser ce qui était jusque là considéré comme une limite infranchissable ? Pourquoi, derrière ces pionniers, l’humanité toute entière se rêve-t-elle plus grande ?

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Lignes de fuite

Esthétique signifiante d’un monde conçu entre la verticalité de Zalem, ville suspendue dans le ciel -qu’on imagine utopique, on ne la verra jamais-, et l’horizontalité d’Iron City, dans son ombre.

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TROUBADOURS ON SCREEN

YESTERDAY
If Jack can do this at all, it is because he has memorized something others have forgotten, or cannot remember.
If asked “what is the movie about?” , what would you say?

The Beatles? Love? Oblivion? Nostalgia? Family and belonging? Truth?…

A nice balance of humor and earnestness:
Imagining a present where Coca Cola and Harry Potter have been erased…
And the Beatles, too.
The arbitrary but relentless work of oblivion:
Pepsi has survived
And fish and chips, too.

A creative blend of realistic scenes and supernatural moments.
A self-referential nod, perhaps, to cinema and its ability to transform our habits, patterns and shapes into images and witty lines.

The yellow submarine now exists only as a plastic commodity,
Its connotative meaning only understood by the happy few who REMEMBER:
Some inside joke only picked up by a privileged trio.

The unifying power of music,
Imagined communities of a different order: the worlds created by concert going and music performing (and video sharing in this version):
A topic also beautifully explored in Ethan and Joel Coen’s O Brother (for those of you who remember the movie…)
And more recently by Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star is Born.

Stars are conjured up out of the folds of memory and dream.
Let’s imagine a world where John Lennon is still alive at 78
And can deliver wise advice to a young (er) artist about truth and life.
A world where truth prevails indeed at the expanse of phoniness and money,
A world where love and loyalty triumph over arrogance and pride.
A modern Orpheus recovering for his peers a beauty that could have disappeared forever.

The movie sketches some serious and epic pictures
Beyond the obvious melodrama and comedy about a coming of age artist:
Occasional glimpses at our contemporary upheavals
In sync with the questions that formed the backdrop to the original band’s arrival on the world stage.

The film reenacts—like Lala Land a few months ago, for those who remember—the magic and wonder of cinema:
Its ability to conjure up worlds where electricity comes and goes, where bonds are reinvented across borders, and where parents finally see the light, and love their child anew.

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE
The 3 interfilmic interludes, including Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du paradis :
A reminder of Scorsese’s love affair with silent film,
And of the origin of cinema as an interlude to theatrical acts.

Rolling thunder and its series of actors on a stage.
And its off-stage moments, with their own scripts and dramas.

Modern troubadours for a timeless performance.
Characters conjured up out of images and vintage footage and film excerpts,
And recontextualized in a series of interviews that function like so many theatrical asides—with improvised or rehearsed lines, all creating an illusion.

A world of sound and fury
With the occasional ghost or fool:
A Shakespearan comedy of errors.
Faces and voices retrieved from oblivion or nostalgia.
Its narrative trajectory playing a harmonious counterpoint to the tune played by Danny Boyle’s Yesterday which performs parallel cultural work.

We, in 2019, perhaps feel that the rolling thunder that awaits us might be all too literal to be included as a metaphor, or even as a cultural borrowing.
Bob Dylan’s statement about how truth is uttered more clearly with a mask on sounds like a conundrum, a riddle for us to decipher—unless it is some oracle.

The long final credit sequence (presented as an ‘encore’) lists the artist’s yearly hits, yet from a distance it looks like other types of lists: casualties, victims, missing people.
Some implicit and direct tribute to all that remains forgotten and erased, and must be exposed and listed anew? Danny Boyle’s creative script is conjured up again, rolling thunder and stones.

To all of us troubadours of today and tomorrow,
And other bards on tour,
Scorsese’s film inspires us to sing that in music and art and writing,
our humanity endures.

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

TWO TRIBUTES TO CINEMA: JIM JARMUSCH AND PEDRO ALMODOVAR

« The Dead Don’t Die » and « Pain and Glory »:
Strange bedfellows at first,
Odd partners.

Yet, on looking closer:
A common tribute to the power of cinema.

The ability of moving images and filmic narratives to conjure up alternative worlds and bespeak human creativity.
To rework “realistic” material—an individual sense of loss or a collective fear—into an aesthetic quest and/or statement.
To shape chaos—internal and external—into shapes, designs and patterns.

To explore the meta-fictional dimension of Art: cinema drawing attention to the fact that it deals in (not just: with) illusion and fiction—aural and visual.
Breaking the fourth wall, exposing the trick.

THE DEAD DON’T DIE
Inter-filmic dialogue with other zombie movies—in particular George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead.
Other generic forms or cinematic icons loom up, sleepwalking into the viewer’s imagination:
The Western and SF
The horror film and the thriller
Alfred Hitchcock and The Birds (and Psycho)
The War of the Worlds, reaching into the imagery of ET…

For Romero: the cultural context for the handling of the zombie character was the Vietnam War.
The Zombie of our post 9/11 imagination is cast on the stage of climate change and unbridled capitalism, in an uncanny set characterized by fake news and political lies.
The Undead no longer crave human flesh only, but material goods and the attending addiction they trigger.

The figure of the hermit/the outcast: the Poet at work? The Fool of traditional Elizabethan courts and other human theatres?

The grammar of terror and the vocabulary of horror.
The grotesque and the gothic at work and play.

A parody of iconic elements of American culture and film.
A statement about our contemporary (posthuman?) condition.
Wither cinema?

PAIN AND GLORY
Identity and belonging.
The weight of traditions and customs.
The yoke of family expectations.

Love and passion.
Some desire felt but not articulated, or even named.
The unexpected and unexplained ellipsis.
Absence and unspoken thoughts.
Silences, and then words again.

The creative eye and the personal I
Coming to terms with cannot be retrieved or recovered.
No time regained catharsis
But a final joke and reversal
For the viewer’s sake,
And his/her enjoyment.

The show must go on!

A thought-provoking handling of iconic elements of Spanish culture and history.
A statement about loss and resilience.
Pain and glory in a stalemate.
Wither cinema?

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

VICE

“Fair is foul and foul is fair” it is again.
Shakespeare’s tragic figures
Hovering over our historical moment:
Their temptations, evil deeds, and destructive legacies.

Couples bound in power and ambition
On different stages:
If the world is a stage, the stage is a world
Too.
And the actors keep strutting about,
Uttering their well-known tale
Full of sound and fury.

But this time, it signifies something.

When the three Witches are encountered,
No fear,
No remorse,
No dilemma.
The American tale “from rags to riches” twisted and warped.
A rise to power, some ascension into abysmal corruption.
The paradoxical dynamic of greatness gone unchecked, and unfettered.
The blinding logic of self-delusion:
Mediocrity to be overcome through bullying others.
And destroying/erasing them.

“We are yet but young in deed”…
How to wade back indeed?
Sleepwalking and unraveling.
Spiraling out of control.
Deeds done that cannot and will not be undone.

Exit with another theatrical line that conjures up more troubling “deeds”—
In fiction and reality:
“Legacies! Huh… And other things such as bloodstained pillow-slips”.
So says Blanche DuBois upon seeing the Mexican vendor who carries the flowers to be displayed at funerals.
Flores para los muertos. Flores. Flores.

Where is the Streetcar named desire?
Huh…Desires without the “magic”…
Just tricks and con games,
And vice turned Vice.
The other way around, too.
Foul is… fair is…

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

CINEMATIC BITES

FIRST MAN
The human epic more and the national narrative.
The man and the scientist.
How he overcomes grief and loss:
The long haul to the finish line,
The physical and psychological toll.

A STAR IS BORN
The person and the artist:
Not losing your soul,
Finding your own voice,
You have something to tell people musically.
The nurturing, and the return of the demons of the past,
Acceptance, tolerance, unconditional love.
Healing through art?

THE FRONT RUNNER
The biopic, and the issue of the journalistic task.
The moral and professional objectives:
To believe or not to believe in the alignment of words and actions,
The quest for truth,
Asking the question that calls for a clear answer.
Does the means justify the end?
What is the cultural work performed by the movie in our context of “fake news” and/or “alternative reality”?

THE MULE
The South/North route as frontier.
A vertical trajectory that evokes other human displacements and events associated with the legacy of a violent History (the Antebellum South/the Great Migration/contemporary forms of exodus).
The well-known narrative of the drug trade through the portrait of a Korean War veteran working for one of the Mexican cartels.
The barren and desolate landscape of new and native forms of warfare, with equally numerous casualties and losses.
The female body as a desirable, but disposable and exchangeable commodity.
The fragile and beloved flowers grown by Earl’s horticultural skills constitute a tragic reminder of a beauty that cannot survive in the scorching sun of Texas land—some expenditure of love that might die with the gardener.

COLETTE
To revisit the story of a canonical writer, and highlight the journey to the self—artistic and personal:
To shed the illusion of romantic love.
To let go of unhealthy attachments.
Writing and the performing arts:
Two modalities of existence and expression.
The obstacles,
The nurturing presence of a groundbreaking mother,
The choices and their attending losses and gains.
Keeping track.
Staying focused.
Letting go of the burdens.
Breaking free…

GREEN BOOK
The uncanniness of one’s origins.
An unlikely friendship
Beyond the obvious racial line divide
The feeling of estrangement that comes from seceding from a given community because one wants to pursue one’s path as an individual.
The power of the person to take a step from within the prison cell of institutional racism and biases:
Individual agency and freedom.
Societal borders made porous by mutual trust,
The common predicament and loneliness,
Looking beyond the obvious differences.
Our attachments and sense of belonging.
Our elected communities and chosen affinities:
The families we leave, the families we create
What change can you enact, trigger and achieve?
Sudden revelations and encounters with the truth of who you are…
Freedom might take the form of the moment of happiness you create for others.

ROMA
The slow pace of the film, a tutoring in patience and care.
The growing bond between two characters separated by class, age and education.
The common predicament of women.
The political backdrop as metaphor for the personal collapse
And vice versa.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
The material of tragedy.
Fate and destiny.
Curse and catharsis.
Fear and terror.
The collective burden,
The individual predicament.
The sense of waste.
The anger
No deus ex machina but the resolution brought by unconditional love.
And the closure of Hope.

MARIE LIENARD-YETERIAN

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY : A SONG
To the tune of “I Want to Break Free”…
With a chorus line from A Streetcar Named Desire

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

Renaming oneself
Shaping one’s life into a design of one’s own making.
Gender and identity.
A sense of belonging within elected families:
A band, and a public.
The transformative power of the stage experience,
And of the experience on stage.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

The carefully crafted artistic persona,
The mesmerizing performer-singer
Reinventing himself for each performance,
And each public.
The stage as place, and space for the magic to intrude on the prosaic,
A creative crucible of tamed hauntings,
A site for possibility to deliver Life.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

Each show a declaration of love and independence,
A renewed call to reach out and be accepted.
The interactive energy, dynamic, and dialectic.
The shared pleasure of bald and uncanny music.
Yet, the unavoidable leave-taking.
The reconciliation with the estranged father,
And the self, damaged or healed.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

“I have always relied on the kindness of strangers”, says Blanche:
Streetcars and desires,
Loss and incongruity.
And, sometimes, so quickly, Desire beyond Death.
Coming to terms with one’s fate and mortality,
And rocking into the future of eternity
With the perfect song, and love.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

Marie Lienard-Yeterian