Word: tony
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...TONI MEYER...
...Toni used relatively restrained camera movements, at most slow pans (excepting one frightening tract), to create a world of permanence--the land, into which all the characters' actions flow. This formal method realizes the plot to give the film a feeling of fatality an fixity. The world of La Marseillaise is a world of motion. But the moral structure of the films--Renoir's view of the place of personal feelings and actions in the world--is the same. Both films are created, closed works, the setting of La Marseillaise being as purely evocative (again, one couldn't draw...
...Toni begins with a group of immigrant entering a southern French village, and follows them through a few years of work, marriage, estrangement, friendship, death--all the processes of their lives. The setting is strongly established in the first shots (in a train); and its importance, in the characters' conversations and in the shooting style, is maintained throughout. In outdoor scenes the characters are integrated into the landscape, made part of the natural pattern. These shots of the land have a geometrical quality of which the figures are only one element...
...quality. But such unity is not schematic. You couldn't draw a map of the countryside: where is the railroad station in relation to the mine, or to Marie's house, or to the lake? Even within single sequences the shots are discontinuous: when Marie tries to drown herself, Toni running through the weeds trying to find her could be hundred miles away. This setting is not something documented but something created. You can feel its strength but not organize it into a plan. The land is unified because all of the shots have the same tremendous evocative power, because...
...plot is circular: the world is unchanged, a character is dead--but our understanding of the milieu (characters and setting) has been amazing enlarged. The end of Toni repeats the first shot and it is frightening. Filled with an incredibly strong feeling of the world of film--a feeling almost of aesthetic passion--we are unable to act. This closed world, Renoir's creation, is fixed...