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Pordenone
2001 Opening
Night Jean Epstein’s 1929 Finis Terrae
marked a turning point in the career of the great French cinema poet. He remains
best known in the US for his surrealist adaptation of Poe’s Fall of the
House of Usher, so the stark, rugged beauty and dramatic simplicity of this
gorgeous picture was an eye-opener for me. Shot on a rocky, barren island off
Brittany, it marked the end of his studio-bound shoots and the beginning of a
realist style with a poetic lilt. The story could be captured in a two reeler: a
group of boys work in isolation with a old man gathering and drying seaweed over
the summer on this bald, bare island. One of the boys cuts his hand and, sore
because of an argument with his buddy, shuns their company just as infection
turns to fever and the buddy braves the deadly currents of the straits during a
storm to get him to a doctor on the mainland. Epstein’s heart is not in the
story or the characters, really, but the faces against the sky, the surf
crashing against the jagged rocks, the mountains, the horizon, the endless sea.
That leaves the boys less flesh and blood characters than figures in the
landscape, looking like holy street urchins from a depression era drama and
acting pretty much the same, but with a streak of stubbornness. The glory comes
from the amazing light of Brittany in the summer and the stunning eye for
composition that transforms the picture from Griffithesque melodrama to a kind
of precursor to Powell’s End of the World -- a celebration of the raw,
harsh beauty of the Breton island of Bannec, and the simple, hard life of the
Breton poor. |
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