Francis Ford Coppola

Todos nós passamos por aquela sensação que existem filmes que nunca vamos ver na vida. Ou porque a capacidade de produção disparou exponencialmente, ou porque simplesmente nunca surgiu a oportunidade. Eu sou uma dessas pessoas. Isto é, sou alguém que tem muitos filmes que quer visionar na vida.

Já vi alguns, uns bons, outros nem por isso. Por um lado, filmes que pela crítica foram considerados autênticas obras primas, mas eu não gostei. Por outro, filmes que nem na critica tocaram de leve e eu adorei. Contudo, nos últimos dias tenho andado a pensar que começou a existir em mim um desejo fanático de começar a ver esses filmes que não me saem da memória. Então decidi começar a criar oportunidade em mim e no meu tempo para visionar esses filmes. De forma a tornar este meu desejo mais fácil de concretizar, delineei um plano: vou seleccionar um realizador e ver todas as suas obras filmicas. No final de ver o filme irei proceder a uma reflexão do mesmo e colocar no meu blogue. Assim, terei um sítio para mais tarde consultar quando tiver necessidade de recordar o que pensei quando vi determinado filme.

Assim, o primeiro realizador que seleccionei foi Francis Ford Coppola. Deixo de seguida um excelente artigo sobre este realizador que encontrei no Cahiers du Cinema.

EVENEMENT. THE THIRD ROSE BETWEEN THE TEETH

By Jean-Michel Frodon

e’s back. It’s difficult to draw comparisons to Francis Ford Coppola’s return to the silver screen ten years after The Rainmaker. For, like no one else, Coppola has embodied the accomplishments, hopes, contradictions and utopias of cinema. Should I add, “of American cinema of the seventies to the nineties?” That would be as true as it was reductive. Let us recall a story so well known it is often forgotten:
1) A tremendous film artist in the sense of aesthetic invention, as seen in the unrivaled adventure of Apocalypse Now; the Godfather trilogy, with episodes 2 and 3 constructed from and against the previous work; the extraordinary variety of formal invention at the root of the startlingly original worlds of The Conversation, Gardens of Stone, Rumble Fish, Tucker and the unjustly overlooked, surprising Jack.
2) A visionary in his own time, a time he hasn’t described much but has questioned in great depth through the methods of fiction and cinematic spectacle.
3) The “auteur” of a coherent personal meditation, which runs throughout his work, on human beings’ place in time.
4) The audacious strategist of an industrial hypothesis for an alternative to the Hollywood model, the defeat of which says more about the courage and energy required than about the impossibility of the project.
5) A pioneer of technological innovations conceived both on an aesthetic and economic plane, with major landmarks such as the gamble of One From the Heart and Megalopolis, the project that kept slipping over the horizon. The Coppola equation: 1+2+3+4+5 = cinema.

Though the equation hardly sums up a life or a body of work, it provides some references to sketch in the silhouette of a man and an idea on the move, with more than their share of drama and failure. Though Coppola would happily present himself as a jolly icon, a maker of good wine, a Latin family man and a jovial storyteller, the tragic dimension keeps dogging him. As he prepares to reveal his twenty-first film to the world, the break-in he recently suffered - a brutal assault and the loss of a large part of his archives - seems like far more than a banal news item. Anyone who has seen even a single Coppola film can guess what the loss of family pictures represents to a man who has made such an anxious, passionate place for blood ties and devoted so much importance to the notion of leaving a trace and recording. This trauma, during which blood was spilled, has once again threatened the future - the script for the next film was stolen - at a time when it seemed to be on the road to reconstruction. And yet the event also seems like a release, however brutal, from the weight of the past at the moment that it is time to move forward.

From start to finish, Youth Without Youth is haunted by these same tensions and contradictions, these paradoxes and this violence, reaching into the most archaic chasms, up to the most dizzying heights and taking in the wildest storytelling. However freewheeling the Mircea Eliade tale he based himself on already was, Coppola didn’t restrain himself from adding large doses of narrative fantasy to it. The director went to Central Europe, Hollywood’s polar opposite but its original breeding ground, in search of the possibility of reinventing himself, the one who knows everything and has done it all, as a beginner. In that single move, we find Faustian pride, saving modesty and tactical agility. This gesture, which, as always with Coppola, is both an artist’s and a producer’s gesture, transforms Youth Without Youth into a chivalrous quest for a utopia cinema cannot quite do without, no matter how old it gets, what Godard calls, “the childhood of art.” Please make way for Don Quixote’s horse, he who is passing by is not an old madman but the figure of human chimeras on solid ground.

What is Don Coppola looking for? Film buffs and experts in religion alike know the parable of the three roses, which runs throughout mythology, and is one of the central threads of Youth Without Youth and Eliade’s story. This supernumerary flower, which remains as a tangible, colorful trace of an invisible otherworld, the flower given by angels to the dreamer traveling through the heaven and hell of knowledge, terror and love, that flower we call a film when it’s Francis Ford Coppola who grows and picks it, bears witness in two worlds, for two worlds, at a time: the old and the new, reality and the imaginary.

Lights up!