12 short movies, 5 minutes for each for them. They talk about the beginning of a love story in one of the five boroughs of the Big Apple. Once again, very famous directors (for Europe : Yvan Attal and Fathi Akin) but also movie stars make (for instance, Nathalie Portman, Scarlett johansson, hayden Christensen, Orlando Bloom or Isabelle Adjani) have worked for this project.
CITIES
You can learn everything about a city by watching its people
The speed they move tells you the cities attitude
fast, they run from life
slow, they observe it
the way they greet you
if they greet you
tells you what they think about man kind
friendly, they have hope
intreverted, their hope is lost
Their Height
tall, there's plenty of good food
with diners on each block
small, too many coffee shops
If the city has bridges
its people want to travel
If it has walls
its people want to stay
If the city has art
its people can find beauty in their city
If the city has sky scrappers
its people want to find beauty from their watch towers
The more people a city has
The more opportunity the city has
The more people a city has
The more ideas the city has
The more people a city has
The more history the city has
The more people a city has
The more war the city has
The more war a city has
The less people the city sees
Don't let the People destroy your City
because the City will destroy your People
The more people a city has
The more love the city has
The more love a city has
The more people the city has
The People produce their Cities
The People make their Cities
The People love their Cities
and the Cities produce their people
and the Cities make their people
and the Cities love their people
John Dohoney
Baudelaire knew and understood Paris very well. The poet's life can only be enlightenend by the fact that he lived in this capital city. The modern life he paints shows how deeply he loved the place.
The poet is an experienced witness of the Parisian atmosphere and his Paris is sometimes not so different from the city that Parisians experience today. His writings being forerunner talk about the first symptoms that face the disturbed people living in our "megalo-metropolises". Their anonymous galbes are lost in a consum mass and an empire of money.
Here is the preface of Petits Poèmes en prose, in which he explains why he chose a poetic prose and the link between this way of writing and the megacity.
" For Arsène Houssaye
(...) I have a little confession to make to you. It was as I was thumbing through, for at least the twentieth time, Aloysius Bertrand's famousGaspard de la Nuit (doesn't a book that is known to you, me, and some of our friends have the right to be called "famous"?) that I was struck by the idea of trying something analogous, and of applying to the description of modern life, or rather of a modern and more abstract life, the approach he applied to the painting of life in the past, so strangely picturesque.
Who among us has not, in his more ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic and musical prose, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt itself to lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to sudden leaps of conscience.
This obsessive idea owes its birth above all else to the frequenting of enormous cities, to the criss-crossing of their innumerable relations. Did you yourself, my dear friend, not attempt to translate into song the strident patter of the street-seller of glass, and to express in a lyrical prose all of the distressing suggestions that his cry sends up through the street's highest fogs, to the very garrets? (....)
Your very affectionnate,
C. B."
The following poems are related by a common aesthetic and by the underlying unity of the place. We will soon come back to this subject. A whole article will be written about the "Paris of Baudelaire" and the "Baudelaire from Paris".
No comments:
Post a Comment