Archive for the ‘City Lights’ tag
A deep relationship with cinema
I have had a deep relationship with cinemas since my earliest years. When I was five years old, I was in front of the TV, next to my father. It was one of those TVs with a wooden box. I was mesmerized watching a child running and throwing stones at a windowpane, accompanied by a man with a mustache. “That was The Tramp”, my father said.
Then, I asked him: “Why is he throwing stones at the glass? The woman in the house is going to be sad. Will she have money to buy another glass? “My dad just kept laughing and told me to pay attention to the characters’ motivation and the scenario.
That’s when I understood why silent movies were silent, and why the aesthetics make so much difference, especially in art film. He was not mute only because of technological limitations, but because he instilled in the human being the ability to seek answers that could not be given in words. Children of my age loved kid movies and cartoons, me too. But not only that. I loved the films of Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
In front of them, the absence of dialogues did not exist in my noisy child mind. The sounds swirled inside me. The movies had no color, perhaps, for others, not for me who always saw light in the sky, on the ground, and even in the darkness of the characters. “There’s no color there, let’s watch Dungeons and Dragons,” my friend Fabiano said one day. I answered: “Yes, it does! But it only exists if you want it to exist. “That day we slept after watching “City Lights”, twice.