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QUEI LORO INCONTRI
Italy, 2006, 68 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Jean- Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet.
Quei LorI Incontri is like many of the films made by the two directors over a number of decades. They are really theatrical pieces, pieces of drama, poetry, rhetoric declaimed by actors standing in sets.
The cinematic aspect of this film is the woodland locations were five pairs of orators speak. Most of the film is single-take fixed camera – with a few tracking shots about the beauty of the trees, the shrubs and the water. However, this makes for very static cinema. The musical accompaniment adds some enrichment to the visual impact.
However, the Straub- Huillet films are mainly verbal. Spoken in Italian, from pieces written by Cesare Pavesi, they are declaimed rather than given nuanced enunciation and modulation. The style means that the rhetorical nature of the poetry and its content is merely strengthened and made less acceptable for audiences by the declamation.
The audience would need to have great expertise about Greek mythology, about the Greek gods, about the philosophy behind creation, the gods, the role of nature, the position of human beings. There are also references to very obscure and little-known myths. The orators themselves take the voice of some of these mythical characters.
Generally the tone and content is about the human condition, about God, the transcendent, nature. It is also about the possibility of gods becoming human, or at least mixing amongst humans and sharing their experience. The emphasis is also on suffering.
This kind of rhetoric is particular to Continental Europe, a relishing of abstract and cerebral considerations rather than an imaginative, narrative, or even emotional presentation of the ideas – and eliciting this kind of response from an audience.
For most audiences, this is not a cinematic experience – and very hard going.