The Importance of Being Not Fiery

On Rene Claire’s I MARRIED A WITCH

Kamyar Mohsenin

Once Luis Bunuel wrote that the Europeans are too intellectual to make movies. When thinking of the notions to Dante and Beatrice in the romantic dialogue between Wooley and the Witch in Rene Clair’s American romantic comedy, I MARRIED A WITCH, Bunuel’s point is absolutely comprehensible, but the whole film indicates how it is possible to alter an American genre film.

Interestingly Clair’s film focuses on a main plot and forgets all about the very popular subplots. For instance, the mayor candidacy of Wooley (Frederic March) which could lead to the popular political jokes is simply put aside. In the main plot, there is a triangle, but not an ordinary love triangle. The approach is more similar to a comedy as described in the essential aesthetic texts where there are a man and a woman in love and an elderly man relentlessly trying to make them apart. However when the lovers marry at last, the elderly does not learn a new lesson in life – as prescribed in the old formula. There is no way but putting back the disturbing genie back in the bottle!

This way, in a romantic comedy, Clair marginalizes the fiancée character stereotype, Estelle (Susan Hayward) in order to focus on the two unearthly characters, Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), not to embody a metaphysical love, but to glorify the love as it happens on the Earth – a concept which was glorified 45 years later in Wim Wenders’s DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN. Delving into the paradox, Clair turns one unearthly element, fire, into the fourth character and forms an entertaining piece on the importance of being not fiery.

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A different look into the concepts and the narrative outline of LA STRADA

Kamyar Mohsenin

Maybe after the WWII which led to the misery resulted by the discrimination and the cruelty, it was so unexpected to wait to see what Zarthustra would be saying about his ubermensch and his contribution to the humanity. Maybe it was a proper time to see how a candid observer, not a wise man of knowledgeability, would look into the world and the history destructed by superpowers of inhumanity.

After long years, it seems that Federico Fellini has intelligently pursued this kind of observer in LA STRADA through the postwar Europe. Not only in the confrontation of Gelsomina, as the woman simpleminded observer, and Zampano, the superhuman of masculinity, but also in the every incident premised in the film, there are a lot of paradoxical resemblances and similarities between the adventures of Zarathustra and Gelsomina respectively depicted by Nietzsche and Fellini.

If Zarathustra deliberately chooses the way down to the mountain, Gelsomina is chosen and forced to go up the hill and then the mountain. If Zarathustra believes that he is the chosen one to teach the human to rise to an upper stage, Gelsomina is obliged to learn to herald the entrance of a superhuman. This transfiguration of a speaker to an observer gives a way to see the world through the eyes of the speechless victims when the superhuman, made by the preachers of the ideology, begins act as a betraying, killing machine.

Just like Zarathustra, Gelsomina is enchanted by the presence of an acrobat who endangers himself to bring the joy to the people. The acrobat dies, but here not due to an accident on the path he has chosen, but due to what is conceived by the superhuman of will and dignity. The acrobat is named Il Matto – just like a fool in a Shakespeare’s drama who is marginalized since he is the only man talking out of truth and honesty when faced by the icons of power. When he dies, it seems that instead of Zarathustra, Gelsomina is destined to bear the unbearable lightness of his being on her shoulders all through the way.

Just as Zarathustra was advised by a priest, Gelsomina is asked by two nuns to stay far from the outside world and live in peace and just like him, she does not accept to live outside the world of the reality.

Interestingly both of them are neglected by the people, but they both teach them to undergo a different experience. The fist one teaches words of wisdom to turn a human into a sueprman; and the second one teaches tunes of emotion to breakdown a superman and to turn him into a human.

In the fantasies of both of them, these echoes can be heard – especially when Gelsomina is lost and sees a group passing by, playing a happy tune.

After a great war, LA STRADA shows that there is no way but to learn to be human… there is no way but to rely on sensibility instead of intelligibility.