Clint Eastwood, or the art of being old behind and in front of the camera

A curious feeling embraces us as we discover Cry Macho, new film by nonagenarian Clint Eastwood, to see him crippled, stooped, dragging his leg, stumbling around a plan, whatever charm he continues to attribute to himself. This sentiment marks the passage of a rhetoric sufficiently shared to amount to a marketing argument – “This may be his last film”, “How long will he last?” “, etc. – to a sudden conviction: yes, this guy is a pure Stoic; no, he will never really stop filming. With this idea that arises that Eastwood would have the temper to stage, God forbid, his own agony.

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Is there, after all, reason to be surprised, even though the director has never stopped filming, in these chiaroscuro he loves, the agony (of feelings, of moral , the cinema) ? Revealed as an actor by the mannerist westerns of Sergio Leone (For a handful of dollars, 1964, etc.) and the baroque criminal tales of Don Siegel (Inspector Harry and The preys, 1971), Eastwood put his career as a director under the auspices of neoclassicism. These are all ways to revere the past, to keep the flickering flame of dying art. In this sense, one could say that Eastwood has never claimed anything other than to be old, and it is not the characters (deliberately aged) that he likes to embody – marked by loneliness, minerality, the meaning of sacrifice – which will testify to the contrary.

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At the same time, by developing the consummate art which is his of being, both behind and in front of the camera, he takes the risk of an exhibition of himself which is part of modernity. Its iterative presence on the screen, weighted down by the weight of the passing years, becomes, with each new film, a kind of rebirth, like an almost juvenile challenge to the representation of death at work that is the cinema itself. . This is to say that, between the dead or the alive, Eastwood has never chosen. Coming too late for the first, too early for the second, he has operated, on the edge of classic and modern, a synthesis of which he is perhaps the only director in the world to hold the secret.

Ghosts of the Classical Age

The operation took place in two phases during his career as a director, which began in 1970 at the age of 40. The first sees Eastwood, come to his artistic maturity, reinvigorating the great ghosts of the classical age. Masterpieces such asRuthless (1992), A perfect world (1993), On the road to Madison (1995), Midnight in the garden of good and evil (1997) and Mystic river (2003) give back strength and life respectively, be it to the twilight glow, to the western, to the training story, to the melodrama, to the southern saga, to the thriller. Dark, tragic, inexorable tales, poisoned by the idea of ​​revenge, greed, extreme violence, the fate of fate.

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