Blog #5/16 - That Most Important Thing: Love
Love, a form of insanity tolerated by society, a source of strength and life. Love is impossible without truth. Love, as Andrzej Żuławski once described in the title of one of his timeless films, is the most important thing. To experience a film by Andrzej Żuławski is to experience a radical love: restless, longing, moving, youthful, consuming minds and bodies.
He was a director who never hesitated to express large gestures, a director who challenged his actors to become gestures, to embrace expression, madness, and ultimately: love. L’AMOUR BRAQUE, MES NUITS SONT PLUS BELLES QUE VOS JOURS, LA NOTE BLEUE, LA FIDÉLITÉ – films inhabited by the director’s love to Sophie Marceau. Images that embody love, personifications of love.
The characters of his last film COSMOS get driven to insanity by a thirst for life, a thirst for love, grasping for words to describe the restlessness of their hearts and minds. Emotion becomes not tool but essence, confusion becomes natural, a game for all of us to engage in, to lose ourselves in.
Getting lost in the final film by Żuławski feels, after his hiatus of 15 years, as if he had never stopped to make films. Like every single film he created in the last four decades will keep overwhelming our eyes and hearts as if he had never passed away. We dedicate these words to a force majeure of cinema. And inspired by his visions, we will never rest.