Aurélia1980

“The Dream is a second life”

Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia

Inspired by the short story Aurélia (1854) by Gérard de Nerval, which will influence André Breton and the Surrealists, the film tells, with a contracted rhythm and visual accelerations / dilations, the daily experience of a woman projecting her into an interior dimension where reality and myth are mixed and fused by a dreamlike syntax. In the "descent into hell" of consciousness, Aurélia ends up by detaching herself from her identity as a woman of today to take on the multiple features prefigured, from time to time, by her imagination. Aurélia's frenetic final dance serves as a ceremony to exorcise evil, the furious rediscovery of the “double” savage buried within each of us, the abrupt awakening of the possessed bacchant, liberated vitalism, myth, explosion of fantastic energies. Aurélia faces a discourse on filmic time: real time is decomposed analyzed accelerated in lightning-fast mental paths from a stream of consciousness.

Reviewing the films The interior space and Aurélia, the writer Alberto Moravia stated: “We are faced with two compositions which, in literature, would be two poems. Thus the representation of what Mazzoleni calls interior space takes place with the utmost freedom and autonomy with respect to, we say, exterior space; while, on the other hand, in Nerval, the latter is never entirely absent. Two rather important consequences follow: the formal element prevails over the structural one; the temporal element is modified: relaxed and narrative in Nerval, in Mazzoleni it becomes compressed and flashing. Thus confirming that the difference between avant-garde cinema and narrative cinema is that the first proceeds by illumination and the second is based on duration.

In The interior space and Aurélia, the director unleashes a succession of lightningly illuminated images with a pressing rhythm, like landscapes during the continuous flashing of a summer storm. These images now have an almost physiological body although not referable to anything real; now they are instead images of the real separated and rendered abstract. Faced with this fast succession of pounding illuminations, one experiences the feeling that the director is looking for the definitive image; in fact, more and more often, as the illuminations chase each other and overlap, we see the reappearance of a woman's face. Now, in his story Nerval also proceeded to a kind of anguished research, centered on the question: "who is Aurélia?". At this point, however, we understand that the director did not want to identify with the writer and simply represent, albeit by his own means, Nerval's research; rather he wanted to talk about himself, to allude to his personal, autobiographical research by Aurélia. As for saying that, through Nerval, he expressed something that strictly concerns him and therefore, precisely for this reason, it also concerns us. "

( Alberto Moravia, "Freud and his cousin Nerval", in "Italian cinema. Reviews and interventions 1933-1990" )