Sorrentino, "The Great Beauty", 2013
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Cinema Paradiso
Cinema Paradiso has done something rarely seen in cinema, which is to make nostalgia feel like a main character. Everything from the story to the lighting and the score makes the viewer not only long for a time when going to movies was a grand social event, but also instills in the viewer a deep love of cinema, or deepen it if that love was there previously. Though the story spans the much of the life of the main character, Salvatore or Toto as he's called, it isn't too biographic to the point of being disconnected. This culminates in a moving and powerful final scene that needs the context of the entire movie just witnessed to understand. Otherwise, it's just a man watching a montage. But through the use of nostalgia and epic storytelling, Giuseppe Tornatore makes something that should be simple, and should also remove the audience from the story, deeply emotional. That scene and the film as a whole are quite the achievements.
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I think Joe makes some great points here. Tornatore's ability to heavily incorporate nostalgia is key to the film. The sense of nostalgia helps connect the viewer to the characters. This connection captures the viewer and creates a feeling of importance in the film. Even a non-frequent movie goer such as myself began to long for the days when communities would be tied together by the cinema.
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I also agree with Joe. I think the nostalgia prevalent in the film can be attributed to the division of the story in three parts. What the audience witnesses in Toto's childhood is also seen when Salvatore reminisces as an adult. The film is about a collective film memory--a concept that is universal.
ReplyDeleteI like the point of making nostalgia a main character. I definitely felt this way as well. In a way it reminded me of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks; the importance of aesthetics is central to the movie and Lynch’s series and sometimes feels like both a main character and plot point in itself.
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