When I look at what is proposed in the “Renaissance” section in the New York Film Festival, and, in this regard, whenever I see that the remarkable retrospective, which comes to one of the repertoire houses of the city, I think about these slices not as the past of Cinema, but rather, as protecting his future. A life thing in the history of this form of art is its creative power, its ability to charge directors of later generations and inspire films. In connection with this, one of the main events of the festival of this year is the world premiere of the restoration of Mary Stephen's film “Ombres de Soi” (“Silk curtains”) since 1978.
“The shades of silk” were the first feature of Stephen, and he remains the tournament force of form, style and historical imagination. In the mid -twenties, when she starred in the film, Stephen was born in Hong Kong in a Chinese family, which immigrated to Montreal in 1967. She shot several short films in Canada, and then, in the mid -seventies, she received a grant to study the film in Paris, where she shot “shades”. The film was shot cheaply in 16-mm, with a tiny team and Stephen herself, playing one of the main characters. But the result cannot be further from the acquaintance of the impossibility of independent film production. In the spare sixty -two minutes of winding elegant images and tempting surfaces, this unfolds a narrative that covers the continents for decades.
History-one of impossible love, concentrated on two young Chinese women, the best school friends in Shanghai in the nineteen-twenties, whose relations have an intense erotic current, continuing in adulthood. In 1934, Lisanna (which is played by Alexandria Brauer) lives in Paris and writes her friend Marlpe (performed by Stephen), who studies at Welleshi, begging her to go to the university in Paris. There are glimpses of the life that they shared, but the requests of Lizanne are in vain. Desperately in need of Marlene, she has a nervous breakdown, and she goes to stay with her mother, who now lives in the colony of French Indochina. Once there, Lizanna marries a rich young man. Marlene is invited to a wedding, attends and lays a good front as much as he can, until a sociable facade is broken, with tragic consequences.
An important aspect of modern cinema is that step The so-called experimental film production, it does not reject stories, but clearly puts forward the methods that are told stories, often by means of a bold or distant connection between narratives and images and performances that cause it. “Shades” opens with an epigram taken from the script of Margarita Duras for Alain Resnais “Hiroshima Mon Amur(1959), and Duras gradually appears as a presence approaching the film of Stefan. Despite the fact that he is most famous as a novelist, Duras achieved fame as a director in the nineteen -seventies, and her 1975 film “Indian Song” was a key inspiration of Stefan for “Shades”, which is in a “connected dialogue” with an earlier film about the general “Deplice of Deplice” in “Column” “Column” in the “column” based on the “colony”. The scenes and the plot, mainly set forth in the vote, including in the “shades”, the letters that women write, and the omniscient storyteller. Visit the university there, Stefen – unlike Dura, whose family was white and from France – that he is experiencing tension of colonialism on the other hand, like an ethnically Chinese object of British rule. (including romantic) with colonialists.
Stephen causes life among colonized not only in the history of the film, but also in his form. The action is largely desinchronized, actions on the screen contrast with the narratives of the voice, with the effect of the destabilization of the present time of the film, absorbing it with nostalgia and striving for possible future. Stephen depicts female school communications in hypnotic memories, and their separation mainly through the absence itself, with sliding, thoughtful pictures of places – rooms, buildings, streets – where women were and can be again, but which, on the screen, are vacant. Stephen, despite the shooting in Paris on a slight budget, reaches a strange call of Asia and the past. She even jumps up the time frame of history at a time when she shot the film: the Lizanne wedding banquet, shown in dramatic fragments, is strengthened by a series of photographs of a modern banquet, which visually repeats the one that also tears it out of the artistic framework in history. There is something timeless in the “shades”: in the mid-nineteen-thirties, he shows the twenties, this was done in 1978; He harmonizes stylistically with several masters of his own time, but so many memories of the past and so aesthetically and thematically advanced that it seems to inhabit the zone outside the chronology. As if the film is somehow moved and distant from itself.
It makes sense that Stephen, as the director of omissions, has made a significant career as an editor of the film-at present in Eric Romer’s films, with whom she worked shortly after she created “Shades”, and then steadily from 1991 until his last films, in 2007. There, to call, especially since no. With “shades”, Stephen expands and expands the connection of the drama and shape in such a way that he offers approximate lessons for directors today.
