Tony Gleaton: Three sisters – Mexico (1986)
Je hoeft maar de gezichten van deze drie meisjes te bekijken en je weet al dat taal tekort schiet. Wat gaat achter hun lach schuil, wat voelen en denken ze? Valt dat in woorden uit te drukken? Misschien in gesproken taal, in zang, in kreten, in gebaren, maar in geschreven taal? James Joyce doet een poging in Finnegans Wake, het meest uitzonderlijke boek in de vorige eeuw verschenen. De volgende film tracht met uitsluitend cinematografische middelen een beschrijving te geven van dat werk.
Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot KaplanDirected by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan
A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.
With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut.
Bron: UbuWeb Film
