Na passada quinta-feira estreou o filme A Viagem dos Cem Passos que eu já tive oportunidade de ver e de que gostei bastante.
O livro que lhe deu origem já tinha sido publicado entre nós em 2011, pela Dom Quixote, mas sinceramente nunca me tinha chamado a atenção.
O bom de uma adaptação é isso mesmo, voltar a chamar a atenção para um livro, embora pelo contrário ver o filme sem ter lido o livro me torne um pouco avessa a vir a fazê-lo de todo.
É mais fácil ver um filme baseado num livro do que o seu contrário, na minha opinião, simplesmente porque o filme já molda algumas ideias que não se conseguem depois afastar das páginas escritas - a cara de Helen Mirren, por exemplo.
De qualquer maneira, o livro está aí com uma capa nova, relativa ao filme, muito embora até prefira a antiga capa!
Outro filme directamente relacionado com literatura é Tar, inspirado na poesia de C. K. Williams.
Embora o género de filme não me atraia, fiquei interessada na obra deste vencedor de um Pulitzer que parece não ter sido editado em Portugal.
Encontrei a sua TED Talk "Poetry of youth and age" já de 2001 onde ele lê slguns dos seus poemas.
Acho que há algo de muito mais intenso quando um poeta lê a sua própria obra, como se tivéssemos acesso à essência da mesma que só ele conhece.
Podem visioná-la ou fazer o seu download seguindo este
link.
E deixo-vos com a transcrição do poema que dá nome ao filme.
Tar
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a
hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake
at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders
shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making
little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance
of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there
are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on
the curb across, gawking.
I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrow-
ingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are
bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the
underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey,
chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a
cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth
wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on
your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with
burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost
from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention
in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch
along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shim-
mers and mirages.
Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was
upon us.
However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it,
we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon,
then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an at-
mosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits
and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear
to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should
hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking
absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Sus-
quehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, cling-
ing like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts.
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