WE LOVE YOU BUSTER

02.08.04


Yesterday Anna and I went to see the ‘General’ of Buster Keaton. What a great movie. It was like an apocalypse for me, since I haven’t seen many movies from the good oldies’. It’s pure joy to watch the idols of old times dance in front of you, reminding you that if it hadn’t been for them, some of the later actors would have never existed, like Benigni, to whom I referred recently. And something else: The old movies can really make you burst out laughing, even when they deal with dramatic situations, precisely because laughter isn’t something that derives from specific situations but it’s a spontaneous reaction even in unhappy moments, not only in happy ones. The people of the generations before mine knew well that a situation can be both funny and dramatic at the same time. This is why they did not constrain laughter; neither was it enough for them to have a cheap sense of humour. All right, all times have trash but, mutatis mutandis, the crap we swallow today is definitely much more.

Knowing that people who pass away never come back makes me always melancholic, especially every time that I watch great black-and-white films or listen to the songs of people who are not here any more and whose memoirs are preserved only by posters and badly printed stamps on T-shirts. These are not the idols that I cherish. These are the dreams and the times that I didn’t manage to experience. These are the smells that I’ve never sensed through my nostrils, the pictures that were never before my eyes. My only consolation is the joy I feel every time an old secret is indeed revealed right in front of my eyes. It’s the pleasure of the Peeping Tom who manages to ‘steal’ a few pics by looking through the tear of a cloth covered in dust. For some people it is just a useless cloth. For others it is a symbol – a flag.