The water encapsulates so much of all that is life and all that dominates our planet and all that swallows up our existence and makes it pure and deep and real that one can easily forget that the sea is a very lonely place for a reason. Being at the top can have its misgivings as only those who have occupied its desolate throne can attest.
And the water runs through all, encapsulates everything that we are, and hope to be, runs around in circles, bends upwards, twists downwards, explores ‘neath the shallow waves until it stops somewhere for a brief moment before daylight, sunlight, washed-out light beckons from upwards (or is it down?), and life races forth, to replace the bends in the darkness, cradling one’s amnesiac head, searching for the limbs of some weird aura thief. Honey spills from the tree, onto a racing body of water, and it disappears like all life.
Up above on the surface, one dwells in the sense of self-importance, inner ambition, outer rage, in betwixt some sort of answer hiding in many questions. Meanwhile, in the deep blue sea, nothing seems to matter quite like that—as the universe expands outwards, inevitably to disappear, or, quite contrarily, to contract back into the Big Crunch, seeking nothing, pulling all that it once was into a singular focal point—OK Computer wedded with In Rainbows washes ashore to herald a twin-side masterpiece as time marches on—life serves no purpose whatsoever other than to see what can endure…and what cannot.
In Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema, a fisherman and his family, are washed ashore by reality, and within its 165 minutes of melancholic sorrow and remorse is the dawning specter of doom. But one would be hard-pressed to see the film as JUST that. And, considering that we are about to hit the end of a season in which every little hidden piece of the human soul has been dissected and tossed out like some giant whale carcass, one can see the light in the darkness, the glimmer of faith in something; indeed, some hope.
READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – La Terra Trema…
