Late premiere after the lockdown: Pietro Marcello’s wonderful remake of Jack London’s “Martin Eden” is finally coming to the cinema.
The corona crisis has turned films into flotsam. Only years after their festival premieres do some of them sail to us, and the anxious question is: How did you get the time for the precious cargo? Are you still interested in us? Is it spoiled or aged like fine wine?
We have already discussed “Martin Eden”, the Jack London adaptation by Italian Pietro Marcello, at the Venice Festival 2019: Not entirely negative, but not enthusiastic either. Perhaps it was the excess of a bulging, attractive program or simple oversaturation, mea culpa. Thank you, Corona, for this second chance. That too can mean film criticism: see you again and see you again. And if it has to be and to stick to the language of the maritime subject: row back, why not?
Jack London’s novel about a sailor who learns to write out of love for a young woman from the upper class is considered to be his most demanding. As early as 1914, the film pioneer Hobart Bosworth succeeded in a film adaptation of remarkable realism and almost Chaplin-like poetry with the assistance of the writer. Marcello has obviously taken a close look at the film, which has only been preserved in an incomplete, badly damaged copy. You can recognize small details of the staging, for example when Eden does not receive a rejection from a publisher for the first time and a little girl is happy with him. He even imitates the fragile character of celluloid film at one point.
Found film material appears again and again in his montages; early cinema was a time of aesthetic excess. Like the fascinating, blue-tinted picture of a sailing ship, which only turns out to be a sophisticated trick shot when it appears far away – the tides swallow it up. These found objects break open what the director respects at the same time: the straightforward dramaturgy of an initiation story based entirely on his main character. The constantly expanding and revising self-image of Martin Eden inspires a constantly renewing visual flow.
Main actor Luca Marinelli received the Actor Award in Venice for his embodiment of a character that is continuously deepening. Marcello integrates the political levels of the narrative just as easily and fluently: Eden’s social advancement was only possible to a limited extent, his struggles with socialism, anarchism and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism.
With a simple trick he breaks with the conventions of historical naturalism: While some figures from the upper class remain true to the costume style of the turn of the century, others play scenes in Italian fascism; Eden’s portable typewriter, on the other hand, is a product of the sixties, just as the setting ultimately leads to the seventies. Each epoch confirms the timelessness of the subject of Jack London’s central message, the indictment of class barriers. Perhaps we will have defeated racism in Europe one day, but the class barriers will probably remain with us for a while.
But the anachronistic narrative style is also not a repetition of Christian Petzold’s similarly operating alienation in “Transit” – Marcello’s montage cinema is far too luxuriant for that: Even more unselfconsciously than in the chronology-breaking setting, individual underlying chansons jump through time – but none of this is intrusive . The scenes in which Eden threatens to lose himself after the suicide of his mentor, the philosopher and poet Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), show how boldly images and sounds come together in a highly emotional way.
Already halfway into pathos, director Marcello saves himself with the film music that Marco Messina and Sasha Ricci took over. Here it is a silent film pianist who is artfully and with the best of intentions wrong. And again we’re back to early cinema. But the result is not nostalgia. It’s a kind of acoustic “art brut”, raw, inarticulate and true. What a wonderful metaphor for the autodidactic poet’s struggles that he has just overcome.
In one scene, he has long been established as an author, he insults his audience: Today everyone loves him who spurned him in the beginning. Which again raises the question: How could this wonderful film in all its poetry and audacity remain hidden from us the first time we see it? Do you sometimes need a lockdown to look again? Let’s hope that this lonely sailor from a movie doesn’t go down in the sudden flood of cinema releases.
Martin Eden. Italien 2019. Director: Pietro Marcello. 129 Min.
