February 11, 2012
The Boat, from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
by fosco lucarelli
I’m not a fan of Wes Anderson, but nobody can deny the value that staging and scenery have in his movies.
In a scene from The “Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, the camera moves across a wooden section of a boat, from room to room, without ever trying to hide the scenography.
This movie therefore belongs to a family of works whose “theatrical staging” is itself part of the narration, aiming at concentrating on storytelling and acting, and reminding the audience of the film’s artificiality. Or, better said by L.Lambert: “questioning the relationship maintained between the subject and the representation”.
Comparative exemples include 1954 Red Garters, a musical spoof of the Western gerne, where the setting only “suggests” houses, trees and windows; 2003 Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, whose famous minimalist scenario includes only walls and separation as a blueprint on the ground and very limited use of furniture to symbolize rooms; 1994′s Louis Malle and Andre Gregory’s Vanya on 42nd street, an interpretation of Uncle Vanya, by Chechov, shot entirely within the New Amsterdam Theatre, also on 42nd Street.
Here’s : Let me tell you about my boat:
Watch here some scenes from the movies mentioned on the post:
[...] The illustrations that follow are taken from “Casa Tomada, Julio Cortazar,en traduccion al diseno de Juan Fresan, Ediciones minotauro, Buenos Aires, 1969″ (Thanks to Flickr user Iliazd) expected These drawings are particularly interesting in that they are not limited to the mere translation of the narrated space into one of the possible floor-plans of the house, but they really use the floor-plan as the scenario of the narration, turning it into one of the characters of the story. In this way these illustrations represent a literary and graphic antecedent of that family of works where “theatrical staging” is itself part of the narration we have already written about here: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) [...]