Torno su Le Samourai ancora una volta perché voglio appuntarmi un passaggio di un articolo, citato in un libro, per non perderlo e per condividerlo per chi ha visto o vedrà il film di Jean-Pierre Melville.
AVVISO: Il testo citato sotto contiene un paio di parole che di fatto costituiscono uno SPOILER.
Lettura consigliata a chi ha visto il film, quindi.
Leggi tutto: Ancora su Le SamouraiDa una ricerca con Le Samourai nella mia antibiblioteca (a proposito del bello di averne una: puoi fare ricerca sui libri che hai già filtrato e trovare rimandi a volte preziosi), ho trovato un riferimento in The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, dove si legge:
Woo’s films, hugely influential to American cult and genre films and filmmakers, particularly Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino, are themselves examples of transnational influences. The Killer was famously inspired by Jean- Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) which in turn, was inspired by Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962) and other jidaigeki ronin films, providing a paradigmatic example of what critic Trifonova states as the “the geographically and temporally confused nature of cinephilia” (Trifonova 2006).
Curioso del riferimento alla natura confusa della cinefilia, in termini geografici e temporali, sono andato a cercare Trifonova 2006, che altro non è che un articolo di una rivista che si trova online. In questo c’è un altro passaggio (quello con il veloce spoiler!):
The product of a series of international cinematic exchanges, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï is a perfect example of the geographically and temporally confused nature of cinephilia: 1) In the pre- and post-World War II years European émigré filmmakers brought German Expressionism to the US, laying down the foundations of American film noir, which in turn informed the development of the French New Wave, specifically the genre of the “film policier” (commonly contracted as “polar”); both French New Wavers and Japanese directors, particularly Kurosawa and Suzuki, paid tributes to American gangster/noir films (Godard’s Breathless, 1959, Kurosawa’s High and Low, 1963, Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, 1967) while French filmmakers incorporated motifs from Japanese cinema (for example, Kobayashi’s Seppuku, 1962, along with numerous others, and Melville’s Le Samouraï figure ritualistic suicide); 2) The American western, particularly those of John Ford, was appropriated and reworked into Japanese samurai films (e.g. Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, 1954); 3) The French New Wave, and European art cinema more generally, influenced both the Hollywood Renaissance of the mid-1960s to late 1970s (e.g. Le Samouraï anticipates Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, 1976) and Hong Kong action cinema (John Woo’s The Killer, 1989, is a loose remake of Le Samouraï).
Although the development of the French polar depended on the adoption and reworking of American film noir – distinguished by its preoccupation with the criminal underworld, eroticised violence, existential angst, paranoia, death, exotic non-white characters, moral ambiguity, and urban nocturnal settings – the gangster/noir genre was not completely new to French cinema: its forerunners include Louis Feuillade’s crime series Les Vampires (1915) and 1930s French poetic realist films featuring doomed working class male protagonists, who eventually became assimilated into the gangster class of the 1950s (1) in films like Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), Dassin’s Du Rififi chez les hommes (1955), Breathless, and Melville’s own Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1962), and Le Deuxième souffle (1966). These films anticipated the development of a two-way system of exchange between French and American cinema, with French filmmakers giving the noir genre a specifically French twist (e.g. the portrayal of the femme fatale – Valérie – in Le Samouraï as kind, alluring and mysterious, rather than psychotic, conniving, and double-crossing, or the infantilisation of the femme fatale and the probing of female identity, sexuality and memory in Luc Besson’s polar Nikita, 1990) and, in turn, influencing the development of American neo-noir: Le Samouraï partly inspired Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) (2).
La cultura (in questo caso) cinematografica si costruisce attraverso la conoscenza dei classici e l’analisi transtestuale degli stessi. Amen.
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