Adventure

"... and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." (Friederich Nietzsche)



This is a sequence from Le Bal, a French/Algerian film by Ettore Scola adapted from a theatre play (1983).
It begins in a dimly lit dance hall. The first to enter are women, one by one. Then the men enter and they settle at the bar. The selection of dancing partners ensues.
Women attract.
Men select.
The former, an art form.
The latter, a lottery.
We are then treated to a series of vignettes in music and dance over a period of fifty years, each vignette ending with a photo still. Finally, each character departs as alone and anonymously as they entered the dance hall.
The entire film takes place in the dance hall. Not a single word of spoken dialogue takes place.
In Europe, such social games between adult strangers are extinct.
Borges was right about tango, though. In Argentina, tango ballrooms remain packed with courageous men, seeking adventure and seeking to dance the tales of their forefathers with a mother, a wife, a daughter, a granddaughter.

Except tango

The dancing sequence is taken from Tango, an acclaimed film by Carlos Saura (1996).
This film is the ultimate tango film.
At the same time, tango is imaginatively used to narrate the story of Argentina and its past.
Everything is subject to change in Argentina, except tango.
At least, this is what is believed in Argentina.
The past, to quote Borges, is indescructible; sooner or later everything returns, and one of the things that comes back is the effort to destroy the past.
In Argentina, collective memory dances.

Tango poems

This is Milonga para Jacinto Chiclana, taken from El Tango (1965), an album of tangos, milongas and musical poems by Jorge Luis Borges (lyrics) and Astor Piazzolla (music).
The poem of the posted piece, in English translation, can be found here.
Tango is a fusion of habanera, milonga, condombe and every other musical style known to man in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Once tango came to be, it returned to every culture, as a dance of eros, as a dance of tanatos, as a dance of brothels, as a dance of grieving husbands, as a dance of elements, as an elemental dance.
"Tango," wrote Borges, "encloses, as does all that which is truthful, a secret."

Tango

Tango, a highly acclaimed and awarded short animation film by Zbigniev Rybczynski (1982). The host will probably soon remove this video, as the copyright police seems to be tracking it down regularly. If so, try your luck at one of the Chinese hosts, such as for example this one.

The Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок)

Yuri Norstein made this 27-minute stop-motion animation film in 1979. Consistently selected as "the best animated film of all time", the film remains surprisingly obscure. Norstein wanted to make a movie about his childhood memories of World War II in Russia. He remembered little more than a feeling: a smell of frost and snow, and a haunting melody of a tango (The Weary Sun, see my previous post), which in the 1940s was being played all the time in Russia.
Rather than just reconstructing this feeling in a film, Norstein structured the film itself as a fleeting collective memory of those who, like him, were little children in the 1940s. This is why creatures from Russian poetry, folk stories and even lullabies (such as сeренький волчoк, the little grey wolf) are no less real than mothers, soldiers and dancers. Go to sleep, batyushka, or the little grey wolf will carry you away into the woods...
Note how the wolf for a brief moment hums the tango, not the lullaby (at 7:25). Сказка сказок is all poetry, music and psychology. As a result, the film leaves you with a fleeting feeling - almost a memory; as if you yourself, in Norstein’s words, stood on the floor of a departed sea.

Slavic Tango: Last Sunday

This haunting Polish tango was composed in 1936 by Jerzy Peterburski. Today it goes by its adopted Russian name Утомлённое Солнце (Weary Sun). The original title of Nikita Mikhalkov’s movie “Burnt by the Sun” (Утомлённые солнцем) is inspired by this song and carries an almost identical title. This is to mourn this past Sunday, but also to pave the way, and set the mood, for the Tale of Tales.