Technicolor. Oregon e os seus verdes e amarelos, montanhas e planícies. O fogo avermelhado das paixões e o frio acinzentado da ganância. Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward e o monumento Ward Bond. Canções à desgarrada e melodias solitárias. Todo um mundo em progressão pelo milagre original do Cinema.
Muito do grande Western e dos seus espaços míticos, mas também um nítido interesse pelas actividades humanas e pelas suas evoluções que levou o crítico Miguel Marías a comparar Canyon Passage aos filmes didácticos de Roberto Rossellini.
«Muitos, muitos se esforçaram por aceder a um "realismo poético". A Tourneur - neste filme único - isso foi dado de graça. Bastou-lhe saber que todo o real é poesia e toda a poesia é real», escreveu João Bénard da Costa sobre Stars in My Crown. Mas será que não se poderá dizer o mesmo das vivas cores de Canyon Passage?
Chris Fujiwara, autor dos livros Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger e Jerry Lewis, editor geral do livro Defining Moments in Movies, editor da revista online Undercurrent, crítico do "Boston Phoenix" (entre outros) e ex-director artístico do Festival Internacional de Edimburgo, gravou um vídeo para nós.
No prefácio do livro de Fujiwara sobre Tourneur, Martin Scorsese escreveu o seguinte sobre Canyon Passage, "Take Canyon Passage, an example of the short-lived but very interesting sub-genre of the “noir western” and a picture that’s very special to me. It’s one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the western genre ever made. When you think of “westerns” you immediately picture the plains or the desert, vast spaces that stretch on and on for miles. But this film, Tourneur’s first in color, is set in a small town in the mountains of Oregon, and it is lush, green, muted, and rainy (one of the first scenes in the movie shows the cramped main street of Portland turned into a muddy bog by a downpour). Even the open spaces in this movie are just small mountain clearings. If you study Canyon Passage carefully you’ll see that Tourneur constantly composes diagonally into small spaces, showing people walking up or down inclines, and it gives you the feeling that this is a real settler’s town. One of the first shots in the movie is of Hoagy Carmichael singing a song as he slowly rides his donkey up the steep little main drag of the town—it’s repeated in the end (it’s in this movie that Carmichael also sings “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” a song that instantly transports me back to my childhood whenever I hear it). And it embodies the muted, understated beauty of the entire film.
There are some beautiful set pieces in Canyon Passage like the Indian attack and the barnraising, but the overall tone is so carefully controlled that every small variation or nuance has an impact. That’s what makes Tourneur’s films so unsettling, this strange undercurrent that runs through every scene but that somehow enhances the dramatic impact of the whole film."
Em 2010, Pedro Costa e Chris Fujiwara conversaram sobre Tourneur em Tóquio. Conversa que se pode ler aqui.
No prefácio do livro de Fujiwara sobre Tourneur, Martin Scorsese escreveu o seguinte sobre Canyon Passage, "Take Canyon Passage, an example of the short-lived but very interesting sub-genre of the “noir western” and a picture that’s very special to me. It’s one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the western genre ever made. When you think of “westerns” you immediately picture the plains or the desert, vast spaces that stretch on and on for miles. But this film, Tourneur’s first in color, is set in a small town in the mountains of Oregon, and it is lush, green, muted, and rainy (one of the first scenes in the movie shows the cramped main street of Portland turned into a muddy bog by a downpour). Even the open spaces in this movie are just small mountain clearings. If you study Canyon Passage carefully you’ll see that Tourneur constantly composes diagonally into small spaces, showing people walking up or down inclines, and it gives you the feeling that this is a real settler’s town. One of the first shots in the movie is of Hoagy Carmichael singing a song as he slowly rides his donkey up the steep little main drag of the town—it’s repeated in the end (it’s in this movie that Carmichael also sings “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” a song that instantly transports me back to my childhood whenever I hear it). And it embodies the muted, understated beauty of the entire film.
There are some beautiful set pieces in Canyon Passage like the Indian attack and the barnraising, but the overall tone is so carefully controlled that every small variation or nuance has an impact. That’s what makes Tourneur’s films so unsettling, this strange undercurrent that runs through every scene but that somehow enhances the dramatic impact of the whole film."
Em 2010, Pedro Costa e Chris Fujiwara conversaram sobre Tourneur em Tóquio. Conversa que se pode ler aqui.
Apareçam e passem a palavra.
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