More from the 1960s

It's like Nietzsche said, books will fall off the shelves into your hands. After the last post, I remembered Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film "Le Mepris" (Contempt). Contempt was shot partly at Casa Malaparte in Capri, designed and owned by Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, which is more a sundeck than a house. Casa Malaparte is the object of artistic worship and it is no wonder that you can find the abundance of data about it. But, there is rarely an opportunity to experience the experience of the Casa Malaparte that happened at one particular moment in time. There's a YouTube video that somebody made, with exactly those moments in the movie when Brigitte Bardot walks on the sundeck, with the roof lines stretching to the blue horizon of this cineastic structuralist plain extending above the Gulf of Salerno. Like with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Brasilia, in these sequences the moment in time with the work of art will outlast the work of art itself. This intention is obvious in the film. Were the 1960s more patient with their moments or was it something that was found back then, the underlying structures that were supposed to connect the world into a single experience of the planetary human and extend to the horizon?

Casa Malaparte was abandoned and neglected, later renovated. Regardless of its previous or current state, there is one permanent state of that architectural marvel that will never change, and that is the state of its moment in this cineastic human time that stretches indefinitely. This is the feature of one particular era where the film camera had an eye for it, there was a special lens - some strange naïveté towards the structure. Open and uncritical of the existence of something underlying the time and space of the planetary human.

Nascent Brasilia

My God, I can't believe that Oscar Niemeyer is still alive and still involved in diverse projects! He was born in 1907! One can say that the glory of the work of art outlasts the glory of the artist. But in the case of Brasilia, as the capital work of art of Kubitschek, Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, situation is somewhat different. The vision of human in artist's mind at that particular point in history, which are the wonderful structuralist 1960s, will outlast the work of art. A sequence of scenes in 1964 movie "That Man From Rio" with Jean-Paul Belmondo was shot in Brasilia, and the perfect photography in that movie captured the movement of the human body through the architecture like never before and never after! Editing played its role, but there is something in the movie that brings that strange feeling of nostalgia for large-scale human projects. The socialist city is still there to remind me of the roads less travelled. "That Man From Rio" is one of my childhood favorites, but more as a proof in favor of Baudrillard's claim that only the child knows that there is no childhood. What I know now I knew back then! I want to run on the great structuralist plains in the City of the Sun.

L'homme de Rio 1964
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It's been a while

Back on this blog after more than a year! I apologize to my co-blogger for missing that last post from September last year. Technology confuses me a little, and I tend to get totally distracted by something that's new and interesting. I began tweeting on Twitter early this year, and later turned to FaceBook, because that's where the action is. However, that does not mean that I have to totally disappear. Graf Oderland showed some of his fabulous writings here. To honor that, I will continue posting. My co-blogger is blogging elsewhere, but we'll surely meet again here.