Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 20

Sabzian Selects (Again): Week 20

This week we propose three films that portray forms of nobility through movement, animating characters who live in difficult material conditions but become imbued with a certain dignified grace through a filmmaker’s gaze. In our first film, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (2019), a woman of the same name goes to Portugal to trace her husband’s death. Upon arrival, she is told that nothing left remains for her there, only the marks left by her husband’s life. Costa spoke many times about how he works with actors in his films, saying: “you have to make them truthful, or sometimes larger than life”. Stark contrasts in light and dark shots structure the appearances of Costa’s monumental characters, who seem to reclaim the night, the “night of their desires”, with each step, each articulated word. Another larger-than-life character assumes his accustomed role of “the tramp” in our second film, often admired by Costa: Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). From rags to riches and back again, Chaplin’s character falls in love with a blind girl selling flowers. Fabled for its sparse use of sound in the first years of the “talkies”, Chaplin instils his scruffy character with unparalleled grace, comically unravelling the strange upper-class behaviour of those around him. In our last selection, the collaborative silent short film In the Street (James Agee, Helen Levitt & Janice Loeb, 1948), the streets of Spanish Harlem (New York) form the décor of movement. Coincidentally also one of Chaplin’s favourite films, it captures scenes mostly of children playing, caught by a glance. The film’s prologue provides an apt description of the street as a space where “unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.”

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019) is available on Eye Film Player.
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931) is available on La Cinetek.
In the Street (James Agee, Helen Levitt & Janice Loeb, 1948) is available on Tënk.

Online Selection
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05 Apr 2021 - 11 Apr 2021