Tag: Literature
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The Darkening of Valinor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” and its Possible Romantic Influence
In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Valinor, the Blessed Realm is shown before the light of the Two Trees was dimmed, the eternal light shone on the land of the gods. The destruction of the Two Trees and its Light is briefly surmised by Galadriel: “We thought our light would never…
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Black Horse [Poem from the Yet Unpublished Book of Verses]
![Black Horse [Poem from the Yet Unpublished Book of Verses]](https://vigouroffilmlinescom.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/melancholia-black-horse.webp?w=640)
Black horse in golden chains/ in the middle of the main square lies…
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Catholic and Pagan Heart of Fellini’s Eternal Rome
I have hung up my heart―both Catholic and Pagan―as an ex-voto between the obelisk of the Trinità and the column of the Conception. Andrea Sperelli in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “The Child of Pleasure”
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Princes and Kings Gazing at the Stars in “The Leopard” and “The Lord of the Rings”
The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out.…
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Yukio Mishima on Visconti’s “The Damned”: Dangerous Decadence
In its Wagnerian manner, its German grotesquerie, its transvestitism, its nervous insanity, its ponderousness, its symphonic sense of psychological danger, its worship of the body, its unceasing dramatic tension, its excesses, its obsession with hurling every single character toward tragedy and death, its ostentation, its sensuality, its love of ritual and ceremony, its intoxication, and…
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Art, Life and Spirit in Emile Cioran’s and Thomas Mann’s Youthful Works
But what is it, to be an artist? Nothing shows up the general human dislike of thinking, and man’s innate craving to be comfortable, better than his attitude to this question. When these worthy people are affected by a work of art, they say humbly that that sort of thing is a ‘gift’. And because…
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Three Colors: Red (Zagreb, Croatia; October 4th, 2020)
“And you will shed tears of scarlet.” Quote from Cowboy Bebop: “The Real Folk Blues (Part I)” More than half a year has passed since the earthquake and the great damage it has done to my home, and I have changed two abodes. One was in the western part of the city, near the river,…
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Early Spring (Zagreb, Croatia; May 1st, 2020)
To keep this blog film-related, I decided that the title of each subsequent post dealing with my experiences after the Zagreb earthquake, and the destruction of my home, will be the film title of a great film I love, with a symbolic undertone. For this post, I chose Yasujirō Ozu’s Early Spring. Although it is…
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In Federico Fellini’s Words: Movies = Dreams
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream. Federico Fellini…
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Chastity and Carnality Shot in Monochrome: Pawlikowski’s “Ida”
Pawlikowski once said that “Ida doesn’t set out to explain history. That’s not what it’s about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They’re not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.” I find this to be immensely…
Vigour of Film Lines 