By Ignacio Oliva
"Nobody´s rose" takes the title of the book of poems "Niemandsrose" (1963) of Paul Celan, in addition to having a dramatic and symbolic journey in the film, it represents a metaphor for life and also about MANUELA´s life and her relationship with other characters in the story.
We propose a film about instincts which have characters that could bump into on the street. Characters who have been drawn in a realistic tone and in the middle of a unpredictable and conditioning life. Characters of this story are moved by dark impulses, sometimes present and others hidden from the rest. The quality could goes something like this: territory of the instincts and hypnotics behaviors. All this borns from my own observation of the world and the spell that caused me peoples behavior.
For composing this story I have include many memories and recollections of people I have known. Each character has its roots in someone who lives or has lived, who have or have had a real presence in life. “Nobody´s rose” is a film that reveals the facts and recreates. Is not literal as a "portrait" or "adaptation of real events" but it shows reality made with some kind of pieces of their owns lives and their real actors, pierced by an artistic intention close to black film. Sometimes subtext matter more than the script text, as invisible things are sometimes more important than what we can see.
For composing this story I have include many memories and recollections of people I have known. Each character has its roots in someone who lives or has lived, who have or have had a real presence in life. “Nobody´s rose” is a film that reveals the facts and recreates. Is not literal as a "portrait" or "adaptation of real events" but it shows reality made with some kind of pieces of their owns lives and their real actors, pierced by an artistic intention close to black film. Sometimes subtext matter more than the script text, as invisible things are sometimes more important than what we can see.
Film instincts were called to the typed in the twenties the German writer Carl Mayer for UFA. Characters driven by fatal passions, dark places, ambivalence of reality. We can also put some work in this context the German writer Thea von Harbou, wife of Fritz Lang to the rise of Nazism.
Film instincts is much of the American black film called "All I care about is breaking you" ( "What really matters is to kill you") tells Leonora Eames Ohlring Smith in "Caught" 1949. In the thirties the American cinema is nourished by the technical staff of the exiled German film of Nazi persecution. His aesthetic concept of light and space that they had learned in the theater of Max Reinhard, coupled then with the hard life on America streets and devastating crisis of 1929. This gave to American cinema a new impetus from this instinctive quality that has spanned nearly three decades with films like Law of the underworld, Frontiers of crime, The predator, The Scar, Notorious, Wife guilty secret behind the door, The sentence, I am the law, Marked by hatred, Panic in the Streets, Asphalt Jungle, Touch of Evil, On the Waterfront, Eternal Night, homicidal Brigade, Heart of Ice, Special Agent, Alone in the night … The list is really endless.
The vampire of Dusseldorf. Fritz Lang. 1931
The black film has an undeniable American flavor but also extends its in another key: the war-torn Europe with the first Rossellini and his fellow neo-realists, splashed the French Nouvelle Vague –good known is the admiration for this period American cinema by Nouvelle filmmakers- and “contaminates” many contemporary filmmakers. In Spain we can appreciate this kind of inspiration in films such as Fanny Pelopaja, Todo por la pasta, Caja 507, El arreglo, El Crack, 15 días contigo, La distancia, or 25 kilates o Celda 211..
Caja 507. Enrique Urbizu. 2002
The visceral quality in film depicts conducts that hypnotize with their relentlessness, its fatalism, its disappointment when the reality is the fact and the relation with these behaviors. Any hint of inner life is questionable and disconcerting. "Philip Marlow has the social conscience of a horse," said Raymond Chandler. Characters who live instinctively and where psychology is absent, appear as dark heroes, if they can be called heroes, prisoners of an inexorable fate that imprisons them, without enough air for breathing. Heidegger proposes the term "Geworfenheit" to talk about “a human being thrown without explanation into an existence ruled by incomprehensible rules”.
"Nobody´s rose" borns from this tradition, or I would like to be in that way, and tries to place itself in a dramatic space of its own essential emotions and near to black gender.
MICRO-TRAGEDIES AND TRAGEDY
I am passionate about the stories of Raymond Carver. It amazes me how direct, concise and essential is the way that he present his characters and places in the middle of normal stories, seemingly "harmless". The power of Carver is simplicity and the notion that everyday can be infinite. In any life, if you look it closely, can find and reveal aspects that make it "universalized" able to transcend itself. Then, the work of the writer, filmmaker, artwork finally, is to approach to itself. Filmmaking starts and born in great narrative that life is. Heidegger again –so admired by Paul Celan- described it in his book "Holzwege": The task of art is revealing or "un-hidden" the truth. The truth, if it really exists, has a chance to reveal itself through the dark dreams of film characters. And in any case, the "artistic truth" goes in this way.
By Beatriz Escribano Belmar
Tragedy takes shape from chain of events triggering exposed and stated with these facts. In “Nobody´s rose” you can not find an usual tragedy but a succession of “micro-tragedies” that add up to compose a map of tragic geography. Drama goes along small dramas experienced by the characters and their own circumstances. The worst thing of psychoanalysis, probably, is that its analyse your responsibility with past events and try to explain it and exonerate you, but you have to learn to live with the guilt and bear its consequences. Something like this said Orson Welles. Micro-tragedies in "Nobody´s rose" draw a reality crossed by dark motives, instinctual, but also luminous from the moment they have a really clear in their contradictions, their information hidden in their silence. Sándor Márai told that we are what about we keep in silent and it is probably right.
Ignacio Oliva, scriptwriter and director
