My first film by Eugenio Martin, and I am deeply moved. Nagisa Oshima once wrote that all filmmakers want to film sex and death the most. I always understood the first part, never the second. I think, now I do. The moment when Tomas Milian's character lies on the ground, dying, his face covered with dirt, and we see only half of it, as the camera shows us an extreme close-up, with a lonely tear rolling down his cheeks as he exhales his last breaths that stir the dust of the soil to lift itself up from the ground a few more times.
The relentlessness of the view. The relentlessness of the camera watching. That's been something which I've been pondering a lot ever since I started falling in love with cinema. Looking, not wanting to let go, and at last having to, at some point in time – because everything has to end. That is death. Everything is death. We die a thousand times each day.
Those looks, those insisting eyes Martin keeps us showing and showing, paired with the melancholy tunes of master composer Stelvio Cipriani are the heart and soul of the whole movie. Which is a melodrama at its core, a subdued, forlorn melodrama. A film of the past, looking upon it. Once upon a time in the West.
The editing is also top-notch always putting people side by side, giving everyone at least a little attention and thus creating an ensemble piece of people, connected like beads on a string. Everyone is important in this film. Because everyone is human.
The dying – in the end we all have to die. I would like to think that at the end of the movie, the protagonist, a Bounty Killer, doesn't collect the bounty for Milian's character but lets the townspeople bury one of their own, one who used to belong. He is still a part of them.
Anyways, the film is a statement, a demonstration, an elegy, wonderfully executed up until the end-titles which must have been some of the first in film history created in this now dominant way. 1966: After the credits have rolled, the image turns black and we remain to hear a wailing trumpet and finally the last strings of a soothing guitar. Maybe it's not what you see before you die, but what you hear. The last sounds of this world.
The relentlessness of the view. The relentlessness of the camera watching. That's been something which I've been pondering a lot ever since I started falling in love with cinema. Looking, not wanting to let go, and at last having to, at some point in time – because everything has to end. That is death. Everything is death. We die a thousand times each day.
Those looks, those insisting eyes Martin keeps us showing and showing, paired with the melancholy tunes of master composer Stelvio Cipriani are the heart and soul of the whole movie. Which is a melodrama at its core, a subdued, forlorn melodrama. A film of the past, looking upon it. Once upon a time in the West.
The editing is also top-notch always putting people side by side, giving everyone at least a little attention and thus creating an ensemble piece of people, connected like beads on a string. Everyone is important in this film. Because everyone is human.
The dying – in the end we all have to die. I would like to think that at the end of the movie, the protagonist, a Bounty Killer, doesn't collect the bounty for Milian's character but lets the townspeople bury one of their own, one who used to belong. He is still a part of them.
Anyways, the film is a statement, a demonstration, an elegy, wonderfully executed up until the end-titles which must have been some of the first in film history created in this now dominant way. 1966: After the credits have rolled, the image turns black and we remain to hear a wailing trumpet and finally the last strings of a soothing guitar. Maybe it's not what you see before you die, but what you hear. The last sounds of this world.