THE TALL RED NUDE (Il grande nudo rosso) - Transcription of the Web movie
The movie of the play translated to the Web: THE TALL RED NUDE (Il grande nudo rosso), by Marco Pernich, Studio 900.
THE TALL RED NUDE (Il grande nudo rosso), by Marco Pernich
Transcription of the movie published on Webmultimediale.org in October 2007
Compagnia Studio 900
THE TALL RED NUDE (Il grande nudo rosso)
Opening credits
Theatrical adaptation and direction by Marco Pernich. With Carlotta Cossutta, Barbara Gallo, Sara Semprini, Lucia Scott
Original music by Carmine Cella. Stage set and costumes Compagnia Studio 900
Texts for the audio description by Marco Pernich
Video recording, editing, subtitles and adaptation by Roberto Ellero, webmultimediale.org
Compagnia Studio 900 - Webmultimediale.org – All rights reserved
Narrator
"A certain Greek island, or even any Greek island, with a certain number of pine trees, grapevines and small shops – Saturday, Sunday and Monday evenings"
Narrator
Four white-clad girls, late on a Summer day, holiday feeling, laughter and the villa. he villa, locked up for years, white in front of the beach and the blue of the sea. A family villa, maybe...
Narrator
The girls are coming back, as if after a long time, the time that separates them from childhood. And as soon as they go in, memories are back. But not only...
PROLOGUE
And thus the soldiers were singing and singing more We heard them singing even in their sleep. -A non heroic song, neither sad or lame, actually
a song they certainly learned from the village women which they taught to those who came back from the front to younger women.
[music]
In a single woman there are several goddesses and as on mount olympus there are rivalries and conflicts and alliances between goddesses.
These poweful inner models struggle to find an expression, as did the Greek goddesses for the golden apple.
IPHIGENIA'S TALE
Is Iphigenia's a game or a remembrance? Is it an often-repeated family tradition or something we witnessed?
And what drives the girls to play this game, both innocent and perfidous? Why does one of them get transformed into Iphigenia against her will? And why do two of them dare each other,
stealing the floor from each other in telling the tale? Who is manoeuvring them? What is in act within them?
Let's remember with another poet that "this sea is teeming with gods" and also "teaming with sperm and tears".
And on the stony hillock, full of asphodeles no black goat for a sacrifice - to save their country and the whole world.
IPHIGENIA
Do not force me to see the netherworld. Do not make me die before my time.
In the netherworld there is nought. What do I have to do with Paris' marriage?
IPHIGENIA
Seeing this light is sweet for human beings, whereas in the netherworld there is nought. Whoever wants to die is mad. A bad life is far better than a good GODDESSth.
CHORUS
The ceremony had begun. The procession was climbing the hill. Having worshiped the gods the father beckoned to the servants so that like a goat kid desperately attached to earth, still covered in bandages
CHORUS
they would take her, hang her, gag her lest her sweet mouth should curse the name of her relatives and her scream had to be stifled!
IPHIGENIA
Adieu sunny day, adieu bright day of the god, it will be a strange life that will be granted us..Adieu light that I loved so much.
CASSANDRA'S TALE
But the game of stealing the show from each other goes on and a deep rivalry linking and opposing the girls comes out more and more clearly.
Narrator
The one who remained on the side in the first narration occupies the stage and becomes Cassandra. The other ones are baffled and she tells Cassandra's culminanting moment,
Narrator
when she brings GODDESSth into Agamemnon's house yet at the same time, terrified by his very end, tries desperately to warn him. Maybe we are moved, but words are stolen from her
Narrator
and someone already becomes Clytemnestra and invites her into the palace. And the third girl feels compelled to add her own comment.
CASSANDRA
Look at these boys sitting in front of the palace, dream shadows: yes, they are the children massacred by their relatives who bring their innards to eat
CASSANDRA
to a father who lifts them to his mouth... It is Apollo himself who deprives me here of the prophets' cape.
CASSANDRA
And now that the prophet God whose prophet I was brought me here to die no altar awaits me under my father's palace but a wood block the blood from my cut throat shall redden.
CLITEMNESTRA
Come in, Cassandra, come in too The benign gods have willed that you too should partake with us of the cleansing bath together with the other slaves, under the house altar.
CHORUS
No, the reason was not that Apollo violated his promiss and by spitting into Cassandra's mouth deprived her of any power to convince,
CHORUS
Thus emptying her predictions for herself and for others, no. It is only that no one wants to believe truth.
CLYTEMNESTRA'S TALE
Clytemnestra, the one guilty of Agamemnon's murder – what did she think before the king's arrival, when it was only an announcement, in this time span between distance and doubt on one side,
Narration
and presence on the other? This is voiced by one of the girls who takes upon herself the entire scene... But now something is surfacing, as a thread driving each girl lending him or her at times an original voice that shows something different from traditional knowledge.
Narration
to interpret a single character and confer him at times an original
voice that shows something different from what we know through tradition....
CHORUS
On the road to Mycenes, lined with eucalyptus trees, you can find ewe cheese and retsinato wine at the "A la belle Helene de Menelas" inn, which leads thought away from the blood of Atreus' children.
CHORUS
Poets talk and talk about the invention of crime in the house of crisis. They – those devils – talk of the logic of the queen, of tthe wife of the absent soldier, Agamenon, betrayed mind and sword.
[music]
CLITEMNESTRA
Let the king enter – said the queen. Let him be welcome – he too a man made of glass." We learned GODDESSth too. We know. We see.
CLITEMNESTRA
He was the first one to teach us GODDESSth. We opened our eyes. Welcome to the glass king with the glass sword, to his glass soouse, to his glass subjects,
CLITEMNESTRA
to his glass creatures, who pull along glass herds, glass lootings, glass slaves, glass trophies. Let the bells ring.
CLITEMNESTRA
From mountain top to mountain top, let the watchmen light the fire signals for our glass victori – it is ours, it belongs to all of us. We too learned it in patience, in the unbearable watching waiting.
CHORUS
Disse cosÏ la sovrana e sopra le sue tempie si vedeva il sangue martellare, si vedeva il suo sudore.
FIRST STASIMON
Thus ends the first part of the tale, and the girls look less and less like four lasses on holiday in a family villa on a Greek island. They start revealing the mystery they bear.
Narration
A huge moon has arisen between the cypresses. Behind us, the dark mass of the house can be felt, like an ancient, overbearing tomb.
[musica] [one girl draws squares on the ground and jumps into them, playing a children's game]
The Greek sea. This sea teems with islands and on the furthest Eastern one, Aphrodite came down, born from the waves. A sea that saw so many love stories and geat disasters.
SAPPHO's tale
Thus one girl becomes Sappho, the Sappho who despairs because love hasn't been the absolute answer she was looking for
Narration
and not even GODDESSth granted her the peace of unity with the absolute. Yet her compagnon, who becomes her interlocutor, seems endowed with a particular wisdom
Narration
beyond the wisdom of accepting the limits of transiency and lightweightedness. But Sappho cannot understand
[music] [dancing]
SAPPHO
This place is monotonous. The sea. It's monotonous. Aren't you bored?
CHORUS
You prefered being a portal, I know. Yet you were hankering for GODDESSth, this GODDESSth.
SAPPHO
No, I didn't know it would be like this. I thought everything ended with the last jump. That desire, worry, tumult would disappear. The sea swallows the sea, I thought, it erases everything.
CHORUS
Everything dies in the sea, then resurrects. Our life is leaf and tree trunk, water pool and wave froth. This is our only desire and destiny.
CHORUS
Our only terror is to be possessed, stopped by a man. Calypso let herself be stopped by a man. Nothing could help her anymore.
SAPPHO
I understand Calypso. But I don't understand why she listened to you. What kind of desire gives in?
CHORUS
Won't you ever learn how to smile? Smiling is living like a leaf, like a wave, accepting one's fate. It is dying to a form and resurrecting to another one.
ARIADNE'S TALE
The girls'clothes, slowly shed, seem to reveal bodies as beautiful as those of young goddesses and something else that is and is not of this world.
Narration
something that seems near at hand and yet remains unattainable... the girl who had played Iphigenia's part becomes Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus in Naxos
Narration
as if she wanted to respond to Sappho's despair by telling how deceitful love is, not a contact with the absolute. But the girl who had enacted Clytemnestra, murderer because of love,
Narration
becomes Dionysos and enters to ravish Ariadne and take her to some paradise. Does love grant access to the absolute?
Off-stage voice
[Borges. Labyrinth] There will be no exit / You are inside and the fort embraces the universe / it has no front side and no back side, neither outer wall nor inner wall nor secret center.
Do not hope that the hardship of your path / that keeps forking into two other paths / that keeps forking into two other paths / will ever end. Yours is an iron destiny.
Same with your judge. Don't expect the assault of the human bull / whose strange multiple horror shape / meshes with an endless stone maze.
CHORUS
And so he too went away. Why do you think he left you?
ARIADNE
What do you want from me?
CHORUS
The black sail departed for ever. This story is over.
ARIADNE
It's my life that is over.
CHORUS
Something else awaits you. He is a new god. He is the youngest of all gods. He has seen you and he likes you. They call him Dionysos. He is a joyful god.
CHORUS
He kills with a laugh. Bulls and tigers are his companions. His life is a feast and he likes you.
ARIADNE
But how comes he saw me?
CHORUS
Who can tell? Have you ever been in a vineyard on a hillside by the sea, in the slow hour in which the earth breathes out its smell? When grapes ripen and the hair is heavy with their juice?
CHORUS
Or have you ever lookd at a pomegranate both fruit and flower? Here reigns Dionysos in the coolness of the ivy, in pine groves and on threshing floors.
ARIADNE
Is no place isolated enough to hide from the gods?
CHORUS
The gods are the place are the isolation are the passing of time. Dionysos will come and you will feel ravished as by a strong wind, as these whirlwinds racing over vineyards and threshing floors.
ARIADNE
And he, how is he? Very cruel?
CHORUS
All gods are cruel. Every divine thing is cruel. No god can ever regret anything. It will be like loving a place, a stream, a time of the day. No man is worth so much. You'll like him and he'll like you.
[music]
CIRCE'S TALE
Neither does Circe seem to believe in love... The girl who answered Sappho and, earlier, commented the Atrides' story without taking part in it
Narration
now becomes a character too: Circ. Circe the magician, the witch, actually an ancient Mediterranean godhead, from the time before the conquest
Narration
of antique matriarchal civilizations by the Indo-Europeans, exiled in a remote corner of the world, watches men's pointless fretting. She never was granted love, except for Odysseus...
Narration
Yet Odysseus taught her that love might be more than a mere answer to a physical need, but might become endowed with other values, be a symbol for the quest, the discovery of human solidarity.
Narration
And he taught her human being's beauty, which entirely resides in their capacity to transform events into memories. Another poet comes to mind: "And memory is the most precious good".
CIRCE
You don't know how GODDESSth attracts them. It is their destiny, a repetition, but they delude themselves into believing it marks a change.
LEUCO'
Then why did he not want to become a pig?
CIRCE
He didn't want to become a god either, yet you know how much foolish Calypso begged him. That's how Odysseus was: neother pig nor god, just a man, extremely clever and astute in facing fate.
LEUCO'
Tell me – was he great in bed?
CIRCE
What nonsense... Onse I thought I had explained to him why beasts are more like gods than mortal men are. After eating, a beast fucks and doesn't remember.
CIRCE
He never knew the smile of the gods or of us who know fate.
LEUCO'
No human understands us or the beasts. They are so crude in their cleverness. Tell me: did you play a lot with one of them?
CIRCE
I enjoy them. I enjoy them as I can. It wasn't given unto me to ha have gods in my bed, or men: only Odysseus. All the others become beasts when I touch them, and they go wild and hunt me like beasts.
CIRCE
I take them: their fury is neither better nor worse than a god's love. But with them I don' even have to smile. I never lower my eyes.
LEUCO'
And Odysseus...
CIRCE
You want to know who was Odysseus? One evening he told me about his arrival in Eea, his companions' fear, the sentries watching the ships
CIRCE
then he told mi that the next day they saw smoke rise beyond the forest and shouted joyfully as they recognized their homeland and their houses.
CIRCE
That evening he said he wanted to forget who I was and where he was, and he called me Penelope.
LEUCO'
O Circe was he that foolish?
CIRCE
I was foolish too and I told him to cry. He didn't. He cried later, when I described to him the long remaining journes, the descent into Hades and the total darkness of the Ocean.
CIRCE
That's the only immortal thing in mortals. Memories they keep and memories they discard. Faced with memories, they too smile, resigned.
STASIMO DUE
But then who are these girls we saw changing all the time? What are they trying to prove to each other?
Narration
Is it only a philosophical debate (love, power, glory..)? Or is the challenge also on a different level?
CALYPSO'S TALE
The conflict becomes polarized, and now the girl who enacted Clytemnestra and Dionysos becomes Calypso, and the one who commented the Atrides' story and later was Circe now becomes Odysseus
Narration
the only man present in the girls' wholy female game! (Does this mean something too? Why is she the one who interprets a man?).
Narration
Calypso's tale is the tale of desperation at the end of a love story, but also the tale of the impossibility for a man to live in the immobility of the divine.
Narration
But the conflict between these two characters is also the conflict between the two girls who are dominating over the others, and are openly vying for something we don't know yet.
ODYSSEUS
What changed for you since that time when earth and sea obeyed you? You felt tired, lonely. You forgot your names
CALYPSO
No, that's not it, Odysseus. What once was will never be again. Only a long sleep that started who knows when. And if you go away it is dawn, awakening.
CALYPSO
I fear dawn as you fear GODDESSth. Since you arrived you brought another island within you.
ODYSSEUS
I've been looking for it for too long. I cannot accept and remain silent.
ODYSSEUS
Then you said it yourself: I bear the island within me.
CALYPSO
Oh, but changed, lost in silence. The houses will be like an old man's face. Your words won't have the same meaning as theirs. You will be more lonely than on the sea. You must break fate's chain
CALYPSO
And let yourself sink down into time. Who doesn't stop now won't ever stop in future.
ODYSSEUS
I am not immortal.
CALYPSO
You will be if you listen to me.
PHAEDRA'S TALE
But the girl who played Odysseus now seems to rule the game and now becomes Phaedra, with her lucid love madness, her ceding to passion's obviousness
Narration
And her berating the arid moralism of the boy she is in love with. This time she directly invokes the gods: Aphrodite, goddess of maddening love
Narration
And Artemis, goddess of cold, lonely, aloof virginity. And both goddesses are present there with their different approaches of existence.
Narration
Through Phaedra, the girl who plays her part seems to tell us how much harm is brought by love, but also how arid is the solitude of those who refuse love, and thus accuses the Artemis girl
Narration
of harming men but in the end the latter avenges herself by giving the Phaedra girl the noose with which the Phaedra girl hangs herself.
PHAEDRA
I summoned you. I don't know where to start from. I'm waiting for the evening, for the shadows to grow longer in the park, to enter the house – the shadoes of the statues
PHAEDRA
of the trees, so that they hide my hands, hide my face, hide from me the swords that still hesitate shapelessly.
PHAEDRA
This house is filled with your shadow. The house is a body – I touch it it touches me it clings to me – above all at night. The flames of the lanterns lick my thighs, my flanks,
PHAEDRA
they pause with light shivers under my left ear, they lick my nipples, their spittle shines, burns me.
PHAEDRA
This house is a body. It is your body and it is also mine. I try to walk and the sheets drag me back, as after love-maiking..
PHAEDRA
[Laughs] My fingers hold the small familiar chain, the one with the little cross (the one people say your goddess gave you). (I stole it from you).
PHAEDRA
I remember your childish surprise when you lost it your guilty feeling, how your eyes shone, how blood reddened your cheeks.
PHAEDRA
The old wet nurse looked for it with you, and I also was searching for it. We rumaged the rooms, the kitche, the courtyard and the stall.
PHAEDRA
I cannot complain about you or about my fate: At time even the sole awareness of our disgrace can bring us above it ina deep, elevated space.
PHAEDRA
Maybe one day you'll learn the lesson too: our pain, even the least of our pains, hurts us more than the whole world's pain.
EPILOGUE
Everything touched by men becomes time. Becomes action, waiting and hope. Even their dying is sometinga.
EPILOGUE
[music]
GODDESS
Each of your gestures repeats a divine model. What has been will be.
Narration
But now the game is revealed: those we thought were simple girls on holiday actually are four goddesses:
Narration
The goddess of love and universal energy: Aphrodite. The virgin goddess of the night and of solitude: Artemis. The household goddess: Hera. And the goddess of wisdom: Athena.
Narration
The game we just watched is only the conflict at play within every woman between different goddesses, who in turn only represent various aspects of the feminine soul.
Narration
In the several stages of life one prevails over the others, but each is always present with its characteristics, in an endless dialectical process.
Narration
Let the viewer choose "who deserves the golden apple"! Actually, it is amusing to discover which of the goddesses we have favored at different stages in our life.
THE TALL RED NUDE (Il grande nudo rosso)
Theatrical adaptation and direction by Marco Pernich. Compagnia Studio 900 - Webmultimediale.org – All rights reserved.
© 2007