We need to ask ourselves about reality: what is its real importance? E: What is the real importance of Factual? Of course we can not ignore the factual; It contains normative power. But he can never offer us the kind of enlightenment, the ecstatic glimpse, from which the Truth emerges. If only the factual, on which the so-called "cinéma vérité" is fixed, is important, we could argue that "vérité" - the truth - in its maximum concentration is found in the yellow pages - in its hundreds of thousands of Data, all factually correct and therefore corresponding with the truth. If we called all of the yellow lists that are called "Schmidt," hundreds of people whom we called confirmed that they are Schmidt; Yes, their name is Schmidt.

In my film "Fitzcarraldo", there is a dialogue that raises this question. Rumbling toward the unknown in his boat, Fitzcarraldo stops at one of the last warehouses of civilization, a missionary station:

Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?

Missionary: We simply can not cure them of the idea that ordinary life is nothing but an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams. Baywatch (2017) hindi dubbed trailer.

The theme of the film is the setting up of an opera in the rainforest; As you may know, I began to actually produce operas. In doing so, a maxim has become crucial to me: a whole world must undergo a transformation and become music; Only in this way is it possible to produce an opera. The beauty of opera derives from the fact that reality does not operate at all within it; And what happens in opera is an overcoming of nature. When we study the libretti of operas (of which Verdi's "The Force of Destiny" is a good example), we realize very quickly that the plot itself is so implausible, so far removed from anything we might actually experience that The mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music allows the viewer to experience that as a truth.

The same is true of the emotional world [gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstract that they can no longer really be subordinated to the daily human nature, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and presented in the purest form; And, in spite of all this, we perceive them, in the opera, as natural. Feelings within the opera are basically as axioms within mathematics, which can not be concentrated or explained beyond what they already are. The axioms of feeling in opera guide us, however, in the most secret way, by a direct passage to the sublime. As an example, we could cite the "Casta Diva", from the opera "Norma", by Bellini.

Perhaps you ask: why do I claim that the sublime becomes "experiential" [erfahrbar] in opera, in all its forms, if the opera was not renewed in any essential way during the twentieth century, while other forms took its place? This seems to be only a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera does not depend on major or new developments. Its sublimity allowed the opera to survive.

Our whole sense of reality has been called into question.

But I do not want to stick to it anymore, since I've never been moved by reality, but by a question that lies behind it [dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes the facts go far beyond our expectations - they have such unusual and bizarre power - they seem unbelievable.

But in fine arts, music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth-a poetic and ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be mastered through effort; It is possible to achieve it through vision, style and technique. In this context, I see Blaise Pascal's quotation on the collapse of the stellar universe not as a falsification [fälschung], but as a way to enable an ecstatic experience of deeper inner truth. Likewise, it is not a falsehood when Michelangelo's "Pietà" portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old girl.

However, we have also attained our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, with which we have been able to rise above nature. Kant states: "The irresistibility of the power of nature also makes known to us, considered as natural beings, on the one hand, our physical impotence, but at the same time discovers a faculty of judging ourselves as independent of it, and a superiority over nature ... "I'm leaving some things out for simplicity. Kant goes on to say: "Thus, nature is considered sublime in our aesthetic judgment not because it engenders fear, but because it constitutes an appeal to the force that is in us (which is not, however, nature) ..."

I must treat Kant with the necessary caution, for his explanations of the sublime are so abstract that they have always remained strange to me in my practical work. However, Dionisio Longino, whom I met in my explorations on such subjects, is much more expensive, because he always writes in practical terms and with the use of examples. We do not know anything about Longino. Experts are not even sure if this was his name, and we can only speculate that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his treatise "Do Sublime" is also quite fragmentary. In the earliest writings we have of the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are many pages missing, sometimes entire series of them. Longinus writes systematically; In this context, there is no way to begin to explore the structure of your text. But he always cites very vivid literary examples. Again, without following any schematic order, I will use what I consider to be most important to me.

What is fascinating is that, early in his text, Longino evokes the concept of Ecstasy, even though it does so in a context different from what I identified as "ecstatic truth." Referring to the rhetoric, Longinus says: "For it is not by persuasion, but by ecstasy that the sublime nature leads the hearers. Surely everywhere, accompanied by the shock, the marvelous always surpasses that which seeks to persuade and to please; Since being persuaded, for the most part, depends on us, while what we are talking about here, bringing an irresistible domain and force, lies well above the listener ... "In this passage he uses the concept of" ékstasis "In which a person comes out of himself and enters a high state - where we can rise above our own nature - that the sublime reveals" immediately, like lightning. " [2] No one before Longinus had so clearly discussed the experience of enlightenment; Here, let me apply this notion to rare and fleeting cinematic moments.

He cites Homer to demonstrate the sublimity of the images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example, of the battle of the gods:

"And the Lord of the Dead was afraid in the depths, Aidoneus; And in his fear he leaped from his throne and cried out, fearing that afterwards Poseidon, who shaken the earth, split the earth, and the mortals and immortals showed the terrible houses, emboloradas, that make a horror to the gods.

Longinus was an extremely learned man who quoted exactly. What is striking is that, in this case, it was possible to group two different passages of the "Iliad". It is impossible that this is a mistake. However, Longino is not falsifying, but actually conceiving a new and deeper truth. He states that without the truthfulness [wahrhaftigkeit] and the greatness of the soul, the sublime could not be realized. In addition, he cites a statement that modern scholars ascribe to Pythagoras or Demosthenes:

"For the one who has declared that we have something like the gods is right, naming beneficence [wohltun] and truth."

We should not translate their "euergesia" simply as "charity," a concept carried by Christian culture. In the same way, the Greek word for truth, "alêtheia", is not a concept of easy comprehension. From the etymological point of view, it derives from the verb "lanthanein," or "hide," and from the related word "lêthos," or "the hidden," "the hidden." "Althetheia" is therefore a form of negation, or a negative definition: it is the "not hidden," the revealed, the truth. Through linguistic thought [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks therefore wanted to define truth as an act of revelation - a film-related act in which an object is brought to light and a latent yet invisible image is conjured to the celluloid , Where first it will have to undergo an emulsion process, then to be revealed.

The soul of the hearer or spectator completes this act; The soul concretizes the truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: "For by nature in a certain way, under the effect of the true sublime, our soul rises and, reaching superb summits, fills with joy and exaltation, as if it had generated what it heard. Click here for baywatch (2017) trailer online.

But I do not want to lose myself in Longino, whom I always think of as a good friend. I find myself before you as someone who works with cinema. I would like to cite some scenes from another film of my own as evidence. A good example would be "The Great Rapture of the Steiner Engraver", where the concept of ecstasy is already presented in the title.