A day like today 37 years ago premiered at the Cannes film Festival “Pink Floyd-The Wall”, Alan Parker’s screenplay by Roger Waters and animation by Gerald Scarfe that immediately became a cult classic and an object of study for filmmakers and fanátic The band alike. The story behind “Pink Floyd-The Wall” is almost as fascinating and chaotic as the movie itself. Based on an initial draft of just 39 pages, the Wall was to be starring the Waters itself and to have the presence of the rest of the band with footage of live performances, but the talents as a musician of the screenwriter did not move to the screen , so it was replaced by Bob Geldof in the skin of Pink, a rock musician on the verge of madness.
After the game horrified by the chaos of original director Michael Resine, Alan Parker was recruited to stand behind the camera in what he has defined on several occasions as “one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had working in a film.” Parker, accustomed to maintain absolute control over his projects, encountered the figure of Waters, another obsessive control. This fight of egos was added to that of the animator Gerald Scarfe, who admitted that the fundamental element during the whole process of realization was the bottle of whisky that had in the car. ” I had to take something before I came in every morning because I knew what I expected and I knew I had to protect myself somehow, “he said in an interview a few years ago. An infernal production of 61 days with 977 scenes and 4885 shots (plus fifteen minutes of animation), and a grim, depressing and critical history of the system that replicates the consequences of war and child neglect and portrays the lives of rock stars in the The end of his career as well as the public’s obsession with celebrities resulted in an utterly uncontrolled Roger Ebert once defined as “a 95-minute music video” that took eight months of editing.
History is not developed in chronological order or respects the narrative conventions, but alternates past, present, dreams and scenes of high symbolic and metaphorical power that make it a dull experience and at times incomprehensible. Music is a representation of chaos in a system that seeks absolute control through the creation of false leaders hidden behind the figure of tyrants and the destruction of individualism. However within the rebellion the subjects also seem to lose their humanity following a new leader and a new ideology without a real understanding of their own place or role — a parallel that would replicate Chuck Palahniuk years later in “the Fight Club.” It’s an amalgam of Roger Waters ‘ lunatic Ideas, “director Alan Parker acknowledged in 2003. “I think he’s the only person in the world who really knows what it’s about. I’m sure most of us don’t know. I think it’s an interesting movie, but I find it would be pretentious to pretend that someone knew what we were doing intellectually. Maybe Roger knew. The rest we did on the fly. ” For the premiere in Cannes the production team took part of the band’s sound system to exponentially increase the volume of the room and turn the experience into something unique. Parker recalls that when the projection ended Steven Spielberg (that same year premiered “E.T.: The Alien”) rose, he bowed and then said Terry Semel, the then chief Warner Brothers: “What the fuck was that?”
The original poster of the film
“Pink Floyd-The Wall” was originally going to have a soundtrack created especially for the film, composed of some songs that had been left out of the album “The Wall” and new compositions. But when England declared war on Argentina, Waters reformulated the album (originally titled “Spare Bricks”) and wrote new music and lyrics to protest against what he believed to be an unnecessary response by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That work became the album “The Final Cut” released in 1983 that the musician dedicated to his father, a veteran of the Second World War who, as the father of the protagonist of the Wall, died in combat. “The Final Cut” was the last participation in Pink Floyd of a Roger Waters ideologically estranged from the rest of the members and that became during the last years one of the most important spokesmen and defenders of the Argentine sovereignty on the Falkland Islands. Pink Floyd-The Wall “can be found divided into fragments on YouTube, but unfortunately is not part of the catalog of any streaming service available in the country. In this note:
