www.scene4.com

Apropos...

Arthur Danin Adler - Scene4 Magazine | www.scene4.com

Arthur Danín Adler

    After a moment, she began to speak... Ophelia's last speech from Hamlet, then a verse from Rilke's Duino Elegies, then she stopped, looked at the audience, began again. Quietly at first, she spoke about her life in Europe, the war, her travels to America, her husband, their love of theatre. She never sat, occasionally she walked, once she turned her back to the audience, once she covered herself with her hands and arms as if to withdraw when she spoke of her child. For a little over an hour, she created a portrait of a woman lost in the time of her memories, like an old tintype photograph kept under glass in a bell jar. She painted that same delicate self-possessed loneliness with the music of her voice and the careful, unpredictable changes in her face and body.

In this time, as an invisible, dark cloud irresistibly embraces the planet, I am drawn to visions of the past and... the future.

Every time I revisit the film, Children of Men, I am heart-struck by Alfonso Cuarón's menacing vision of life in a flooded, suffocating land—a landscape wet, covered with residual mud, a blue-grey landscape inhabited by mud-people, who no longer can hear their own thoughts, who are suffocating in a dissolving world and like dying fish are frantically trying to pierce the surface for a gasp of air, for the sound of their own names. It is a coldly frightening, almost intolerable view of a tolerated reality. It is Kubrick's "2002" and Malick's "New World" and Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven."

In his film, Cuarón acquires the status of a visionary filmmaker and all the artistry that goes with it. As in the apocalyptic visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Cuarón sets his image in England, that persevering bastion of civilization, healthy or sick, which at a time of Earth-shattering catastrophe offers the only home for temporary human survival. Cuarón's England, whose language has become a polyglot of world tongues, is now reduced to an unrelenting, 24-hour-a-day babble: police-state government babble, enterprising commercial babble, insane political babble, babbling people who cannot close their mouths or still their voices for fear that the light will go out in their eyes. It is an image of a melting world that has lost the rule of law and the balance of human rights, whose only hope is in the belly of a young woman, who doesn't know how that hope got there.

A dream?... or a familiar view of the horizon of our ungovernable planet as it disintegrates after 600 years of disappearing resources, the result of an uncontrolled, overwhelming explosion of population, lack of understanding, refusal to understand, a mushroom of babble that culminates in one arrogant phrase: "Good night and good luck!"?

Unbearable? Depressing? No, I don't think so. Think of Helen Keller and Siddhartha. Think of nonvocal music and nonverbal dance. Think of the silence of mother-evolution. Think of the silence in the loving eyes looking at you in which you can see yourself... and all the colors of the sea.

Send Us Your
Comments On This Article

Share This Page

View other readers’ comments in Letters to the Editor

Arthur Danín Adler is a playwright, writer and the founding Editor of Scene4. He is the author of Medea Noir, directs the Talos Ensemble and produces for Aemagefilms. More at
Darcy-Kane. His latest book, The Lyriana Nocturnes, will be published this year.
For more of his commentary and articles,
check the Archives.

©2020 Arthur Danín Adler
©2020 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

torchsong1-cr90Writings
Index of Danín Adler’s
columns and writings in
Scene4.
Click Here for Access

 

www.scene4.com

April 2020

  Sections~Cover · This Issue · inFocus · inView · inSight · Perspectives · Special Issues 
  Columns~Adler · Alenier · Bettencourt · Jones · Luce · Marcott · Walsh 
  Information~Masthead · Submissions · Prior Issues · Your Support · Archives · Books
  Connections~Contact Us · Comments · Subscribe · Advertising · Privacy · Terms · Letters

Search This Issue |

Search The Archives |

Share via Email

Scene4 (ISSN 1932-3603), published monthly by Scene4 Magazine–International Magazine
of Arts and Culture. Copyright © 2000-2020 Aviar-Dka Ltd – Aviar Media Llc.

www,scene4.comSubscribe to our mail list for news and a monthly update of each new issue. It’s Free!
 Name

 Email Address


Please see our Privacy Policy regarding the security of your information.

sciam-subs-221tf71
Thai Airways at Scene4 Magazine
calibre-ad1