Director – Lantern of Hope

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3. The Pedagogical Films

Man has always sung about love, because to humans, it remains an inaccessible and eternal thing. Love is a perpetual quest. But the great Italian film director, Luchino Visconti, points out to an inherent strange aspect of love. He tells us that Love is a self-destructive phenomenon.

As in The Damned (Italian film of Luchino Visconti-1977), the problem with love is that it is also an enslavement! Enslavement folded in pleasure, which makes it a paradox.

When watching Visconti’s films, we come up with this feeling:

The unreality of love, this terrible passion. The sentiments that follow love are usually indifference, detachment, and in the end, nothing really lasts, neither love nor friendship nor human relationship. In The Damned, it is a process of self–destruction in search for a perfection that can never be reached (which can be considered as a pretty good definition of love).

The Damned is a film whose story rests on the fondness of an old musician for a young and beautiful adolescent .Great love and adoration are intrinsic peculiarities of the human nature. The problem is not in this sentiment of love and extreme submission, but in the choice of the object to be adored.

To adore something, is to accept being its slave. Then the problem that occurs is the following: to be the slave of whom, of what? The least we can say is that it is not advisable to adore your executioner! But this may happen. In the love process, each one wants to be loved exclusively. And lovers are found to be always trapped by their love. In other words, by loving each other, they become captives of their love. They also love a third thing: their love.

People love to love. And in the quest of its exclusive appropriation, we deny it even to God. We no longer say: For the Love of God or for God’s sake. Everywhere we have denied this Love of God. We have found ourselves, by a strange phenomenon, submitted to subcontractors, who are the leaders, the parties, the organizations, fetishes, images and objects of our own creation.

 

4. The Mobilizing Films

The mobilizing film has a role to unfreeze the psychological blocking of the audience, so they become uninhibited and can be easily oriented towards a goal to reach. There is a reality that a lot of people seem to ignore: human populations’ development on the planet has not followed the same path and has not been made in a homogeneous manner.

The same Africans who were taken as slaves to the United States, and their counterparts who had remained in Africa, have not followed the same pattern of civilization development. The interchangeability of human persons and their displacement in space always raise a problem.

For example, if you bring an Indian from the bottom of the Amazonian jungle and put him in the heart of Paris or New York, you can praise to him all the benefits of modern life, yet he will not be able to adapt. He will surely die of maladjustment, solitude and disorientation. The place of residence of an individual reflects the structure of his personality. He is made for this environment to which he reacts and with which he lives in symbiosis.

In general, communicative people live in the city. Reserved, withdrawn, and aggressive people live in the countryside. Consequently, anyone from any part of the world is a particular target that can be reached only through a language that is particular to him. And the problem we face in the mobilizing process of these persons lies in how to find the means to make knowledge accessible to them. How to channel this sleeping human energy into becoming functional?

The mobilizing films have this particularity of being highly pedagogical in content. They differentiate from films of propaganda which are of ideological charge and last only as long as the object of their incensement lasts, but time always gets the better of them.

We have an example with a film which is a clever blend of both: film of mobilization and film of propaganda: The Earth (Zemlja) (Soviet film in black and white of Aleksandr Dovjenko- 1930)

 

5. The Therapeutic Films

The therapeutic film has this particularity of being frank and honest. Like a good physician, it tells you, without hiding anything, what pain you suffer from. And this, most often, triggers off in you the salutary shock: the recovery.

Among therapeutic films, we can quote films that give good conscience. Like: Schindler’s List (American film of Steven Spielberg – 1993)

Adapted from a true story, Steven Spielberg’s film tells about the rescue of 1300 Jews by a German businessman linked to Nazis. Today, if we look well, all the humanity is on the list of Schindler and waits to be saved. Humanity carries with it painful memories and it suits the movies to heal them.

Jews have this particularity. Their history has scattered them in all regions of the World. We find them everywhere. And now that they have a country, they must be the most polyglot nation in the world. At this point, they are taken to be the most comprehensive nation in the world, because they know the mentalities and cultures of almost all the nations they had lived in.

We can be incapable of expressing our feelings because they are accompanied by traumatizing and painful memories. Then, there is no possibility of communication or effective exchange with others. We can not invest ourselves. But there seems to be a solution. Among all these languages that the Lord has created, isn’t there one that could enable us to exorcise our past, to express our memories no matter how traumatizing and painful they may be?

At the scale of humanity, the presence of a multitude of languages suggests the multitude of functions. And what if each language could serve to better decode than the other languages, a particular field of the human feelings and knowledge?

For example one language would allow us to master scientific knowledge better, another would allow us to better understand the religion, and the third one music, or teach us how to better forgive. This way each language that the humanity possesses could be a secret code, a particular access language to a particular area of knowledge and human mystery.

Languages are a universal patrimony, in the same way that monuments are. Then what matters here is to know this language that has pushed Schindler to love: German, the same language through which the Nazis expressed their hatred of Jews in 1939-1945; or this language, so recent and that it tends to become universal: the cinema?

We have loved, through screens, Gary Cooper (and others), John Gabin (and others), Dilip Kumar (and others) Ingrid Bergmann (and others), Garbo (and others) – Proof that the movies can make us love our fellow men, like us and yet so different!

 

Conclusion

We are the passengers of this spaceship that is the planet Earth. Indeed there are passengers of first, second and third class. It is a matter of means. But nobody, among these passengers has the right to undermine, to deteriorate this blue vessel and this in the name of the unity of humankind’s destiny. It is a matter of global safety.

It seems that those who are currently aware of this are the ones we commonly call the “green”: the ecologists. Perhaps they remain the only sensible people in a mad world.today

Will we be one day in the situation of Charlton Heston, in front of what remains of the Statue of Liberty (and of the world) in the film The Planet of the Apes, when in despair and in anger, he dropped the word: sadists?

Sadism is part of today’s reality. Only art can defeat it. But the good artistic seed needs a fertile terrain to develop. By helping man to understand the secrets of his constitution, to become aware of his endless capacities, and therefore to conquer his self respect, the cinema, will then have kept its promise of a dreams factory and a manufacturer of hopes, as well as an evening university with pedagogical and very agreeable courses to follow.

The Past has been lived only as a Present by man and the Future will be lived only as a Present too. The Present is the eternal point: it is a field of consciousness open to all the dimensions of life. It is also the time of the cinematographic spectacle. The great countries are those, which know how to father great masterpieces, in all respects.

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