We often tend to disassociate the film from Ridley Scott, maestro frescoes, lavish and one of Tony Scott, an artisan of film action graphics and thunderous. Marc Moquin blend filmographies for developing a long conversation between brothers, writers and artists.
They could have been painters. They have been in some way in their respective work of the filmmakers. Ridley Scott in component of the frescoes, the visual evoking the splendor of the paintings of the Renaissance or academic art of the Nineteenth century. Tony Scott experiencing a grainy image, rough, saturated color, developing a material aesthetic that synthesized forms of audiovisual of his time, while giving to the result a dough personal. In his essay, TONY AND RIDLEY SCOTT, BROTHERS-In-ARMS, Marc Moquin reminds us, quite rightly, that the two brothers have studied at the Royal College of Art, and that their approach to film is largely influenced by painting and fine arts. But this biographical factor is not sufficient to explain the correspondence between the cinema of Tony and Ridley, and Moquin goes back to the childhood of the brothers to understand the world in which they were born and raised. A England post-war, industrial decor, planted in the middle of the Twentieth century, “the century of warfare”. The origins of the Brothers Scott are in them, the language audacity of Ridley with the look of the machine Tony.
By building their filmography straddling the Twentieth and the Nineteenth century, the Brothers Scott have sought to understand what was their place in History, both on the cultural, aesthetic, and mythological. If they are proof of a strong culture called the “classic”, they both make their weapons in the advertising, media which obviously requires a modern approach to the image. Trained to revisit the classic through the modern, unless the process is inverse, the two filmmakers were given all the cards in their hands to conquer Hollywood. The frescoes of Ridley Scott’s synthesizing approach of the classical and modern spirit ; as to Tony Scott, if he focuses primarily on the genres associated with the cinema of exploitation and action, his approach is ultimately not so different.
Marc Moquin has not stopped, a biographical chronology in order to develop his observation of the careers of Brothers Scott, his book is first of all to connect the filmographies of the two filmmakers, starting from the premise that the films discourent together on common issues. If the inside of the filmographies of each brother, the movie can be linked to and mirror their pattern of narrative, or their common use of a historical context and a philosophical doctrine, Tony and Ridley also seem to be responding by film interposed. Moquin discerns as well a fear and a questioning common to the two brothers, as to the place of the individual within a system oppressive.
What appears already at Ridley, as an entity sprawling as inhuman of the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner , and Weyland-Yutani in the saga Alien, reflected in Tony Scott in Enemy of the State , where the NSA seems to have eyes and ears everywhere, to the point that you eventually start to wonder where is the freedom of the citizen in such a system. The fear of a world where nobody can hide haunts the filmography of the brothers Scott, but this fear is not a reflection of the struggle of these two artists in Hollywood ? How are they in the final their place in the world of the show, this gigantic commercial machine for which they must create the worlds ultra-visual, which they denounce as much as they sublimate ?
TONY AND RIDLEY SCOTT, BROTHERS-In-ARMS gives off the theme that irrigate the filmographies of the Brothers Scott, and invites us to ask ourselves, why decades after decades, filmmakers continue to make films, to come back on the subjects that haunt them, they dig the furrow, which will appear in the end as a work coherent. How to understand the worlds they depict ? Should it be considered the elder as an optimist and the cadet as a pessimist ? Or is it come to reverse the roles, let them inform one another ?
Ridley seems to ask a question about the fact that History will inevitably repeat itself and condemn the men to make the same mistakes over a historical fresco from the ancient Egypt ofExodus : Gods and Kings at the America’s interventionist Falsehood to State, by way of the crusades Kingdom of Heaven. Tony seems to meet with Already Seen that the principle of a time loop can have the advantage to correct errors and redefine the course of events. Ridley’s evidence of nihilism and does not find from encouraging to existential to Deckard, the detective in Blade Runner left the face of the vertigo of his mortality, or that of the lawyer corrupted in Cartel, whose fall is predictable. Tony answers him by way of Revenge, Man on Fire or True Romance than the characters, corrupt, or corruptible, can be found at the end of their story, redemption and forgiveness.
Regardless of their degree of defiance in the face of the universe and the systems they bring to the screen, the Brothers Scott have kept the sons of the decades the hope of a horizon to which their characters will be able to head to research the purity, the innocence lost. Not to spoil you the reading pleasure of TONY AND RIDLEY SCOTT, BROTHERS-In-ARMS I would stop, therefore, on this question of exile, whether it is geographical or symbolic, and could not have found a better conclusion than the words of the author, himself :
In the brothers Scott, we dream of lost worlds, to the point of imagining new or offer a vision fantasy universe real.
TONY AND RIDLEY SCOTT, BROTHERS-In-ARMS of Marc Moquin, published at Playlist Society
160 pages, 14 euros. In bookstores since 23 may.
It is to be noted that Marc Moquin is the co-founder of Reviewed and edited, a magazine of the most attractive, dedicated exclusively to the news of the movies heritage, whose first issue is planned for this summer.
Arkham
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