Stereotypes

Stereotypes or clichés are sometimes known to be fallacious or at least superficial, but in some cases they hide an undeniable truth and these lines are based on two undeniable assumptions.

"Art anticipates the spirit of the times": we well know how much these last years and how much the current time has been marked by an atmosphere as dark as it is oppressive and some arthouse films, shot in the past months and released in recent times, reflect a sadly familiar feeling without referring directly to everyday life.
First of all, the first two works (both visible on AppleTV) of the career of the American director Robert Eggers and of which the third film The northman (an episode of a Viking saga) will be in our cinemas very shortly. Born in the state of New Hampshire, Eggers makes his films starting from almost mythical traditions of the territories of the other north-east of the USA: the first The witch of 2015 narrates in a dark black and white a historical case of witchcraft of 1630 within a repressive and patriarchal family in the prevailing Puritan society. Nothing explicitly horror, but a constant tension between complex family dynamics traversed by extreme psychological conflicts. Similar tension and artistic representation in Eggers' second work The lighthouse based on an unfinished tale by Poe, which tells of the tensions that flow between two keepers of an isolated lighthouse on the New England coast. A film again in b / w and with a constant dramatic tone also highlighted by the excellent recitations of two actors of the caliber of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Two works in many respects remarkable, but which demonstrate a lack in the narrative development that does not present events and turning points in its development, but prefers to make the conflicts grow slowly in both cases until a final resolution. Eggers is a talented director but still immature screenwriter.

And here we are with the second assumption: the greatest screenwriter for cinema wrote before the invention of the seventh art (and therefore prefigured it) and is called William Shakespeare. Also on Apple you can admire the umpteenth transposition of one of his works: in this case the Macbeth directed by Joel Coen and the actors Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington. A black and white almost analogous to that of Eggers (and before Orson Welles), but on the part of the director a fidelity to the text and its constant tension that enhances the acting and nails the viewer who, although already aware of a story again familiar with pride and prevarication, he never has moments of respite.


Davide Bracco
NP May 2022