tonight at 18.21 local time globally, I invite you to my first live cinema screening, of my short movie "Selva Oscura".The Polymorphic Man meets his Iron Queen for the first time, on the crossroad.
Dialogues by the Translators (on posters, road signs, hanging newspapers etc. all around you)
Sound design/music: Traf & Natur
360 degrees, Color, Sound, duration 15'.
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Forests used to be places of danger to a degree difficult to appreciate
today, when for modern city-dwellers they are retreats or playgrounds;
perhaps only arctic forests or tropical jungles retain something of the
fearful vastness and strangeness they once implied. Forests are tradi-
tionally dark, labyrinthine, and filled with dangerous beasts.
The earliest literature is sometimes structured on the contrast
between city and wilderness. The Gilgamesh epic, for instance, moves
from the walls of Uruk to the pastures of Enkidu and thence to the great
cedar forest of the monster Humbaba. Euripides' Bacchae sets the civic
order of Thebes, in the person of King Pentheus, against the wooded
mountain Cithaeron, where the maenads dance to the alien god
Dionysus.
To be “lost in the woods, ” or “not yet out of the woods, ” remain
common phrases. It is there that one loses one's way or path, which
taken allegorically has meant to wander in error or sin. So Dante finds
himself in a selva oscura or dark wood at the opening of the Inferno, and
Spenser sends the Redcross Knight and Una into “the wandring wood, ”
the den of Error, where the trees shut out heaven's light (FQ 1.1.7,13).
Bunyan's pilgrim progresses through “the wilderness of this world”;
Shelley, following Dante, goes forth “Into the wintry forest of our life”
(Epipsychidion 249). Hawthorne's character “Young Goodman Brown”
leaves his wife, Faith, to go into the forest where he has an experience
that leaves his faith shattered. The natural basis of this symbolism is sec-
onded by the ancient notion that “wood” (Greek hyle, Latin silva) is fun-
damental matter, the lowest stuff — hence Dante's punishment of
suicides, who treated their bodies as mere matter, is to imprison them
in, or change them into, trees (Inferno 13).
Roman writers treated their country estates as restorative havens
from the corruption and pettiness of urban life, but those estates were
not primarily forests, which remained forbidding. Shakespeare in
several plays uses the natural world — the forest of Athens in A
Midsummer Night's Dream or the forest of Arden in As You Like It — as sites
of reversal of city relationships and restoration of right order. With
Romanticism a new appreciation of wildness emerges, especially
forests, mountains, and seashores, sometimes with religious intensity.
Coleridge recalls how he pursued “fancies holy” through untrodden
woods and there found “The spirit of divinest Liberty” (“France: An
Ode” 11, 21). Wordsworth claims “One impulse from a vernal wood / May
teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages
can” (“The Tables Turned” 21—24). In Germany the forest, especially the
Black Forest, became a symbol not only of the true naturalness of life
but also of the “roots” of the German nation. Wanderers and huntsmen
abound in the poems and stories of the period. The Grimm Brothers'
fairy tales often turn on forest adventures; dwarves and gnomes and
other woodland creatures know things and do things townsfolk cannot.
The Grimms published a journal called Old German Forests, which linked
the forests to the true German culture.
In ancient times the myth of Arcadia countered the more frightening
and realistic image of the forest. In book 8 of Virgil's Aeneid Aeneas meets
the Arcadians at the site of future Rome, and their simple forest life
stands, perhaps, both for the natural roots of Rome and for what has
been lost with the building of the great city. Much of American litera-
ture deals with the theme of the “virgin land, ” through which brave
(usually male) explorers and fighters penetrate, leaving civilization
behind; their more primitive life serves as a standard for judging the life
of (usually female) settled society; but sometimes there is a feeling that
the conquest of the American wilderness is a rape of the land and an
unjust slaughter of the “savages” (the word comes ultimately from
Latin silva), or that to “go native” is itself false or dangerous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNGzoJFj9g8
(A memory not heuristically equipped was called a silva, a "forest" of disorganized, unretrievable junk.)
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/carruthe22.htm
http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader?reader%5Bpanel_count%5D=4
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