Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph.
Perched on the island's rocks, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community.
For Clémenti, the main purpose of creation was to shake up the usual order of things by rubbing against the unknown.
The act of creating would be "to be a virgin before the new, to do everything that one does as for the first time".
With regard to camera movement, there is a predilection in these films for traveling shots and 360-degree panoramic shots. ACÉPHALE opens with a panoramic shot, circling the head of painter Jacques Monory. In DEUX FOIS, Jackie Raynal relies five times on a panoramic. In LE RÉVÉLATEUR, the child is separated and then reunited with his parents with the help of a panoramic. Garrel repeats this movement in LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE where he abandons and rejoins Nico thanks to a double circular traveling. In an interview, Thomas Lescure asked Garrel the meaning of such a camera movement, occurring ostensibly "for no reason". Garrel's response is relevant:
The New Wave filmmakers were much preoccupied with the sequence shot. A sequence-shot is characterized by its continuity and its depth of field. Now, in a desert, there is nothing, which right away does away with the question of depth of field. In addition, the end of such a shot in the desert would be identical with its beginning, and thus the idea of duration is also discarded. Such a traveling is thus a sequence shot in all its purity, a kind of zero degree for the sequence shot.
ZG W16
HOME MOVIE, AUTOUR DU 'LIT DE LA VIERGE' • HOME MOVIE: ON THE SET OF PHILIPPE GARREL'S 'THE VIRGIN'S BED' (Frédéric Pardo, 1968)
Filmmaker Philippe Garrel has always discussed the importance of painting for his cinema and, specifically, the painting of his longtime friend Frédéric Pardo. In this film, Pardo documents the Garrel inner circle in Morocco in 1968 on the set of Le Lit de la Vierge.
There's a mythologizing the everyday that Pardo works very well by opposing a cinema de vérité kind of approach of filming
Perched on the island's rocks, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community.
