Iedereen weet dat de armen geen film maken. Soms gaan ze naar de bioscoop om een film te zien, maar nooit maken ze er zelf één. Desalniettemin was er in de wijk Ángel Gris van Buenos Aires een man die films maakte, Julius Del Piero genaamd. Het loont de moeite even stil te staan bij zijn oeuvre, aangezien al zijn films verloren zijn gegaan.
Een gelukkige samenloop van omstandigheden besliste over de artistieke roeping van Del Piero: hij woonde naast de Hongaarse immigrant Lazlo Martok, de beroemde schepper van de Wel Erge Korte Kortfilms, wiens beknopte juweeltjes een maximale speelduur van 10 seconden bereikten. Del Piero was leerling van Martok en tevens onverbeterlijk plunderaar van de voorraadkamer van z’n maestro, waar deze laatste lege filmrollen, camera’s en belichtingsmateriaal opsloeg.
De eerste werken van Julius Del Piero zijn documentair van aard. We verwijzen naar Buren van de Artigasstraat zetten het huisvuil buiten, Vrijende paartjes in Villa Luro en Warenhuis Scarinci: een model-etablissement.
Na deze bescheiden oefeningen filmde Del Piero zijn eerste langspeelfilm. Het werkstuk draagt de titel Het leven is een Milonga en betreft een eenvoudig verhaal: een tangozanger triomfeert in het centrum van Buenos Aires en vergeet zo z’n verloofde in de Flores wijk. Uiteindelijk, gelouterd door de keerzijde van de roem, keert hij terug naar zijn oude liefde en zingt onder haar venster. De film eindigt halfweg deze serenade, misschien vanwege dramatische overwegingen van de regisseur, misschien vanwege het plotse einde van de bemachtigde filmrol. In dit werk kunnen we observeren dat Del Piero absoluut niet op de hoogte was van de mogelijkheid tot montage. De film bestaat uit één enkele take die loopt over de hele lengte van de film, wat de kijker verplicht verschillende overbodige reizen van Flores naar het centrum en van het centrum naar Flores mee te maken, en hiernaast ook enkele close ups van vensters en gordijnen die lange minuten duren te doorstaan, die – blijkbaar – dienden om de acteurs de mogelijkheid te bieden zich om te kleden. De film duurt 1 uur en 50 minuten, wat exact de tijd is die Del Piero besteedde aan het filmen ervan.
Het kwam eveneens nooit op aan de geniale regisseur dat de kinderjaren en de volwassenheid van een personage door verschillende acteurs kunnen worden vertolkt. Hij diende dus 30 jaar te wacten om de filmage van En morgen zullen ze chemici zijn te voltooien. Een werk over het studentenmilieu dat de belevenissen van een groep jongeren verhaalt, die met de tijd veranderen in respectabele pharmaceutici.
Bij het opnieuw aanknopen met de werkzaamheden zocht Del Piero moeizaam de vroegere acteurs bij elkaar en diende een ontnuchterende werkelijkheid onder ogen te zien; Velen van de originele cast leken in het geringst niet meer op de jongeren die ze ooit waren, en haast geen enkele had het gezicht van een chemicus.
Voor de uitdaging gesteld het geschreven woord te verfilmen, was Del Piero extreem trouw aan z’n literair bronmateriaal. Zijn versie van Gargantua en Pantagruel toonde enkel een man die hardop de woorden “Muy ilustres bebedores...” leest. En zo verder tot aan het einde van het omvangrijke boek.
De rus Salzman wist, na langdurige smeekbedes, een bescheiden rol te veroveren in Neemt uw twintig centiemen!, de meeste scabreuze creatie van de regisseur. Salzman werd geacht een hevige liefdesscene te vertolken met de jeune étoile Monica Coriale, wiens schoonheid inderdaad pijnlijk was.
In het midden van de actie stond Salzman op, en, de technici en cameralui in vertrouwen nemend, verzocht om wat meer privacy, aangezien hij het gevoel had de actrice verleid te hebben. -Ze zegt dat ze van me houdt-, specificeerde de Rus. Del Piero merkte op dat dit juist de zin was die het script vereiste. Een woedende Salzman waarschuwde hierop dat niemand met zijn gevoelens speelde, zelfs niet in speelfilms.
De laatste films van Del Piero tonen al een zeker verval. Lazlo Martok begon te vermoeden dat er iets niet pluis was en sloot z’n magazijn af met een dubbel hangslot. Niet langer in staat zich op een waardige manier te bevoorraden, diende Del Piero beroep te doen op producers die hem verplichtten insignificante thema’s te verfilmen. Ondanks deze penibele omstandigheden, wist del Piero kort voor z’n mysterieuze verdwijning toch Laat arriverend te voltooien, een delicate expressie van een rijp, misschien zelfs gelouterd artiest
In deze film arriveert de camera immer na de gebeurtenissen. Van een vechtpartij in een kroeg krijgen we enkel het vernielde etablissement te zien. Van sappige dialogen horen we enkel de woorden ter afscheid. Muzikale scènes zijn beelden van de violisten die hun instrumenten opbergen. Grote feesten worden getoond als iederen al naar huis is. De bankroof van de eeuw is een beeld van de dief achter de tralies. De film werd vroeger dan het geafficheerde aanvangsuur vertoond, zodat de toeschouwers enkel de aftiteling te zien kregen.
23.7.08
Flea market find
Jazzmen, Armed Services Edition, 1939, Edited by Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith
New Orleans
New Orleans
“Callin’ our chillun home”
A FANTASTIC and wonderful city. A city with a hundred faces. The hard face for commerce and the soft face for making love. Scratching figures on the back of an envelope where the girl with the deep dark eyes waits on counter. Smell of burnt coffee and sound of ships. The deep face for a sad life and the pinched face for poverty. Maching, singing, laughing. The silver and copper laugh of the prostitute, and the toothless chuckle of the old man who remembers Buddy Bolden of Bogalusa.
Every writer makes his own city. The city of fine living and free spirit, woven into the dream of a poet. The city of brass bands and military marches, grand balls and rowdy lakefront parties. The city of Lulu White and Mahogany Hall, Josie Arlington and the palm tree growing crazily there in a vacant lot. The thin young man who drinks too much, looking at Congo Square, squeezing the last acrid sweetness out of sight and sound.
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
This is our city, not so far from Madame John’s legacy, but carrying with it another legacy, the dark human cargo of a Yankee slaver, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, raising a thin glass above a fringed cuff, drinking the drink and shattering the glass into tiny tinkling fragments. Bamboula and tinkling glass. Flat voices of invitation behind shuttered cribs. Canal street murky yellow with night, her standards the Carnival colors, symbols of transient ownership, like a mistress smiling in turn at her lovers. Up Rampart beyond Canal. That’s Uptown. That’s Bolden territory. Perdido by the gas works. Maybe there used to be a cypress swamp there but nobody remembers now. Everybody remembers Bolden and his barber shop and his scandal sheet and his ragtime band, playing a new music that didn’t have a name of its own. (They say the word for it came from Chicago “down around 22nd”; they say it came from an Elizabethean slang word meaning hit it hard and from an American slang word meaning it don’t mean a thing but it costs real money around 22nd.)
Don’t look for the eagle on the Eagle Saloon. And don’t look for Masonic hall because it’s a vacant lot. But listen hard some night, listen hard at the corner of Rampart and Perdido and you’ll hear a whacky horn playing an uptown rag, way out and way off, filling out the tune. That would be King Bolden, calling his children.
If you want to know why ragtime (the first) wasn’t jazz, and why uptown rags weren’t just a new ragtime but had to wait for a trip up the river to get a name out of the barrel, well, listen to that horn. There’s a little of it in Louis and in Joe Oliver and in Bunk. Maybe if you listen hard (standing on the corner of Rampart and Perdido where the old Eagle sign blew down one night) you’ll see what Bunk meant when he played that way, and what Louis meant when he played that way, and what Buddy Bolden meant what he said,”You can’t play without the king.”
Maybe you’d go down Perdido where there aren’t any sidewalks, even today, and where the battered houses squat in patterns of poverty, with a hedge or a flower or a puny palm tree out front, trying to say what poverty can’t say…
I knows how to write!
And maybe you don’t think this has much to do with jazz, or the city we’d like to build for you. But if you want to go with the saints to the funeral (to a slow march) you want to know where he lived and died, don’t you, and what he was up against because his skin was black or white or maybe a shade in between? You want to know why he came from the beat side of town (but wasn’t beat) to play down in Storyville where they wanted the blues slow and mean and the rags fast and dirty, to play for a gangster out at Pontchartrain (the big shot from Chicago who threw the dough around), to play in the brass bands Carnival day and on the wagons Sunday night.
Maybe you’ll turn back, see the slave ships unload their flesh-and-blood cargo, see the trickle from the plantation country...free bewildered black skin, coffee skin, saffron skin, coming to the hard city of commerce, soft city of song, martial city of music, dream city of silver and copper laughter. And you’ll find the answer, you’ll know why it just began there, not somewhere else.
You have to think of New Orleans the band city or it will be hard to understand why it couldn’t have happened on the levee at Memphis, on the waterfront of Savannah, or on the Gulf Coast with the deep, sobbing blues. You think of the band city, the opera, the funerals and the balls, you think of the Creole Negroes:
“Jazz came from uptown.”
“It was that raggedy uptown stuff.”
Elsewhere they forgot the music that they had brought with them, and they forgot the words. In Carolina all that would be left would be the blues and a children’s nonsense game with some words that might have come over in the hold of a Yankee clipper or might have been made up out of the sharp phonetics of children at play.
In New Orleans you could still hear the bamboula on Congo Square when Buddy Bolden cut his first chorus on cornet. You could still hear the bamboula and you couldn’t see a note of written music. Whatever he learned he put away when he started off on the real tune. It was something like Bunk: If you put down what Bunk played, he would say, do you think I’m a fool, I can’t play that!
Cajun or Creole, black or white, the others heard. They heard because their lives were part of that life, and because the music didn’t draw a color line. White or black or a shade between, they listened hard when the Bolden Band pointed its horns towards Lincoln Park, because that was the King.
Every writer makes his own city. The city of fine living and free spirit, woven into the dream of a poet. The city of brass bands and military marches, grand balls and rowdy lakefront parties. The city of Lulu White and Mahogany Hall, Josie Arlington and the palm tree growing crazily there in a vacant lot. The thin young man who drinks too much, looking at Congo Square, squeezing the last acrid sweetness out of sight and sound.
Come on and hear
Come on and hear
This is our city, not so far from Madame John’s legacy, but carrying with it another legacy, the dark human cargo of a Yankee slaver, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, raising a thin glass above a fringed cuff, drinking the drink and shattering the glass into tiny tinkling fragments. Bamboula and tinkling glass. Flat voices of invitation behind shuttered cribs. Canal street murky yellow with night, her standards the Carnival colors, symbols of transient ownership, like a mistress smiling in turn at her lovers. Up Rampart beyond Canal. That’s Uptown. That’s Bolden territory. Perdido by the gas works. Maybe there used to be a cypress swamp there but nobody remembers now. Everybody remembers Bolden and his barber shop and his scandal sheet and his ragtime band, playing a new music that didn’t have a name of its own. (They say the word for it came from Chicago “down around 22nd”; they say it came from an Elizabethean slang word meaning hit it hard and from an American slang word meaning it don’t mean a thing but it costs real money around 22nd.)
Don’t look for the eagle on the Eagle Saloon. And don’t look for Masonic hall because it’s a vacant lot. But listen hard some night, listen hard at the corner of Rampart and Perdido and you’ll hear a whacky horn playing an uptown rag, way out and way off, filling out the tune. That would be King Bolden, calling his children.
If you want to know why ragtime (the first) wasn’t jazz, and why uptown rags weren’t just a new ragtime but had to wait for a trip up the river to get a name out of the barrel, well, listen to that horn. There’s a little of it in Louis and in Joe Oliver and in Bunk. Maybe if you listen hard (standing on the corner of Rampart and Perdido where the old Eagle sign blew down one night) you’ll see what Bunk meant when he played that way, and what Louis meant when he played that way, and what Buddy Bolden meant what he said,”You can’t play without the king.”
Maybe you’d go down Perdido where there aren’t any sidewalks, even today, and where the battered houses squat in patterns of poverty, with a hedge or a flower or a puny palm tree out front, trying to say what poverty can’t say…
I knows how to write!
And maybe you don’t think this has much to do with jazz, or the city we’d like to build for you. But if you want to go with the saints to the funeral (to a slow march) you want to know where he lived and died, don’t you, and what he was up against because his skin was black or white or maybe a shade in between? You want to know why he came from the beat side of town (but wasn’t beat) to play down in Storyville where they wanted the blues slow and mean and the rags fast and dirty, to play for a gangster out at Pontchartrain (the big shot from Chicago who threw the dough around), to play in the brass bands Carnival day and on the wagons Sunday night.
Maybe you’ll turn back, see the slave ships unload their flesh-and-blood cargo, see the trickle from the plantation country...free bewildered black skin, coffee skin, saffron skin, coming to the hard city of commerce, soft city of song, martial city of music, dream city of silver and copper laughter. And you’ll find the answer, you’ll know why it just began there, not somewhere else.
You have to think of New Orleans the band city or it will be hard to understand why it couldn’t have happened on the levee at Memphis, on the waterfront of Savannah, or on the Gulf Coast with the deep, sobbing blues. You think of the band city, the opera, the funerals and the balls, you think of the Creole Negroes:
“Jazz came from uptown.”
“It was that raggedy uptown stuff.”
Elsewhere they forgot the music that they had brought with them, and they forgot the words. In Carolina all that would be left would be the blues and a children’s nonsense game with some words that might have come over in the hold of a Yankee clipper or might have been made up out of the sharp phonetics of children at play.
In New Orleans you could still hear the bamboula on Congo Square when Buddy Bolden cut his first chorus on cornet. You could still hear the bamboula and you couldn’t see a note of written music. Whatever he learned he put away when he started off on the real tune. It was something like Bunk: If you put down what Bunk played, he would say, do you think I’m a fool, I can’t play that!
Cajun or Creole, black or white, the others heard. They heard because their lives were part of that life, and because the music didn’t draw a color line. White or black or a shade between, they listened hard when the Bolden Band pointed its horns towards Lincoln Park, because that was the King.
Old Willy Cornish said the crowd would be over there, with Robichaux, and Bolden’s Band would start right out like the killers they were. You could see a glow on his very dark cheek and the soft voice seemed to come from back there, wherever his eyes were. He said that was
Callin’ our chillun home.
Charles Edward Smith
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