A vida escrita em O cavalo de Turim: diálogos contemporâneos com Pier Paolo Pasolini

Abstract

The long tracking shot (or long take) is as old as the cinema - since some authors consider so the films by Edison and by the Lumière brothers. Some of the best directors in cinema history, such as Welles, Hitchcock, Kalatozov, Antonioni, Scorsese, Sokurov and muchothers, are prominent by the use of this technical and narrative device. Andre Bazin was one of the greatest defenders of the long take as a creative feature of the “effect of real”. Nowadays, the long tracking shots by the Hungarian director Béla Taar stand out. The Turin Horse (A torinói ló – Hungary – 2011) was inspired by the episode in Turin that supposedly triggered the process of madness of Nietzsche. The horse owner who spanked the horse and shocked the German philosopher goes home and we see six days of his life with his daughter – six long, silent, windy and repetitive days, beautifully photographed in long takes in black and white. Those long takes tell about life and time, are an important discursive resource. This interpretation leads us to the concept of cinema and long tracking shot by Pasolini. The Italian thinker and artist states that life is similar to cinema, as film is similar to death and the long take is like our experience of reality. The singularity of Pasolini's theory is that he states the similarity of the cinema with reality (our experience, mostly audiovisual, with the world that surrounds us) but advocates and practices a “new formalism” in film.