The Beresford Short

This film short is the most seductive one of the lot. Most film critics knock it because of the unconvincing lip sync-ing and the less than riveting roles given to the actors. However, these are minor flaws – it’s the cinematography that’s irresistible. The shots of Bruge in Belgium are mouth wateringly beautiful. They make you want to give up whatever life you’re leading and just be there, happily spending the rest of eternity pottering about those streets, entranced, deep in meditation, pondering life. The silent streets in that dawn light, the shimmering water, the pure white doves, the baroque architecture, the statues, the winter backdrop – its all spell binding – pure magic. Beresford gives us a visual experience just as alluring as the music.

Carl Jung once said "We all have an unconscious wish for deserted places, for quiet, for inactivity. We are suffering in our cities from a need of simple things. We would all like to see our great railroad terminals deserted, the streets deserted, and a great peace descend upon us."

The opera from which the aria is taken is called “The Dead City” and the aria is about the dream the man has of his beloved late wife coming down from her painting to comfort him. However Beresford film short diverges from the opera in that he has both man and woman fade away at the end, equating it perhaps with the that form of death you see described as “resting in peace”. Why ?

Aldo Carotenuto said “Love, is the rupture of individuality that returns a being to the primordial state of continuity, of fusion, and appearing as such, something like death.

People in love can become so wrapped up in their beloved that their own individuality fades away and some religions describe death or the afterlife as a merging with god or as "ego-less" one-ness with everything - implying the same sort of blissfull oblivion of the individual - true unconsciousness. That's why I think in Beresford's Dead City there are no people and why he has the two actors fade away into nothingness.

Beresford's dead city is so so seductive it's almost irresistible but I don't think we should yearn after it too much because I hope that our consciousness identity can survive death rather than fading away into nothingness. Derek Jarman’s film short is I think more positive in this respect.