Pro Se
Inside, that highly practiced part of one
Spoke louder with the intent to note
What could be deciphered by focused pure
Repetition, and details might amount,
Clearly point, to woven particulars
Of the moment it directed these words’
Tracing, as charcoal copies that headstone’s
Call to attention of the infrequent
Visitor, of the whole damned repeating
Rebelling wish to dig up, get out, before […]
Sundays are reserved for Ella. That is, Ella Fitzgerald. I’ve always associated her music with the melancholy of Sundays and rain—her voice offering the last glimpse of hope one might feel before having to return to work on Monday.
Yet, this Sunday I deviated, and instead I listened to Scott Walker. This is after having watched the 2006 documentary, “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man”, which is currently streaming on Criterion. I always love learning about new artists, and now Scott Walker is another to join my roster of names that I’ve discovered late. Among them are singer-songwriter Judee Sill and Sixto Rodriguez, both of whom were neglected in their day.
Scott Walker, however, follows a different trajectory, in that he was well known in the 1960s when he recorded with The Walker Brothers (not brothers and none named Walker, they were a seeming ‘boy band’ at least superficially). He then went on to record his solo work, only to disappear and return wearing a baseball cap to release avant-garde songs. (In fact, it was believed that The Walker Brothers would become the next Beatles—wishful thinking, I suppose.)
A shared language is almost inessential. Even certain specifics—place-names, surnames, titles and designations—might for the viewer remain indefinite for the entirety of Voices Through Time’s eighty-or-so minutes and still, precious little would be lost.
It’s how I saw it, anyway. I don’t speak Italian but I found that Franco Piavoli’s documentary about the lives (or the flashes of lives) of various inhabitants of the village Castellaro, in the Lombardy region of Italy, doesn’t really require of its viewer to know the language. What is spoken is subordinate to what’s being shown, and although the title of the film is Voices Through Time (Voci nel tempo, in the original) it might also be appropriately titled Volti nel tempo, or Faces Through Time, as Piavoli’s priorities seem focused just as well (if not more so) on the changing physical features of the human body as it matures as he is on the changing of its voice.
This is a gorgeous film, and one whose attractions reach the viewer rather straightforwardly; and certainly not from the same aesthetic distance as come in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. Its pleasures, comparatively, are simple, as they find joy and beauty in the places most people everywhere find them: in beautiful faces and locales and music. […]
