Don’t look up and The seventh seal

29 december

With friends, and for few days away from home, in the ongoing open conversations that thread us together along the years. The ones that when replayed I see the changes, my answers and questions re-articulating themselves in new contexts and new ideas. More interestingly, those conversations where I see our friends changing along time, with our relations, our loves and our hatred changing too, us all threaded in ways that are ongoing and new -or not-.

Among others, the conversation on movies, the movies that really made an impression. Obviously triggered by our seeing together of the movie that people-like-us should see in these days, “Don’t look up”. I’ll spare you my commenting on the obvious shortcomings of that, the sheer waste of talented performers or the sad use of highly defined and yet unfocused camera work. I really don’t want to go there, certainly when people-like-us already agreed, long time ago, in whatever point such film wanted to make. Anyhow and eventually, we did talk about other movies and I know also that I missed my chance to mention what I should have mentioned, in our times of massive death and massive alucinacion. I should have brougth, at least mentioned The Seventh Seal.

Thinking back about it, there is the element of the exotic in its appeal. After all I am an argentinian, an italian at that, that happened to grew up in the Caribbean. For such a person the grey landscapes, the slow panning of the camera and the the way slower dialogues, the long declarations in a language that I can’t understand, translated in the subtitles with a “yes”, are as exotic, I suppose, as a cafe full of people dancing salsa would be for a norwegian. Yet, beyond the admiration and the surprise at other ways of expression, lies the pest. Could you really make a meaningful movie using the biggest known human catastrophe as a background? Or, better ask, could you make any other movie? Aren’t all the movies about this, about our confronting death -or stupidity and innocence and sheer love- at the end of times?

So here we are, in the middle of our pest. In the middle of evolving and still threatening viruses, in the middle of unsuferable pestiferous politicians, assisted by predator providers of digital dreams and more stupid, way more stupid, fellow citizens. So here we are my friends and I, in a rented house, enjoying our company. Walking in the dutch dunes under grey skies, seeing a documental on Marina Abramovic, hitting the keyboard. I suppose that I should start playing chess to round the image.

And the question hangs in the keyboard, in my badly -if at all- articulated comments against the stupid journalist interviewing Abramovic, in my way way! worse articulated lines that you are reading. Aren’t we all, always, floating in the tsunami of the ignorant many, fencing with death for some few moments more, telling one more tale to our daughters and sons and ourselves, so that they and perhaps us, fall sleep and see not, not now at least, our sad and also content, and perhaps even meaningful, dance?