This is not the story of one man

King Lear's film version performed by Grigori Kozintsev in 1971 is one of the most significant ever undertaken, not especially reliable as adaptation, but by its ability to move a concrete atmosphere to a more personal level, full of captivating aridity.

The story begins with the abdication of Lear and the decision to divide the kingdom among his three daughters, Regan, Goneril and Cordelia. The monarch put them to the test into a broad audience by making express, spontaneously, how they have regard for their father. Regan and Goneril move their emotions without much difficulty, with a speech full of ornaments, of baroque appearance; Cordelia, overwhelmed by their sense of honesty, is unable to turn into words the love she feels towards his father. The outcome of the meeting translates into a division of the territory into two halves: Cordelia is disinherited because of his alleged lack of affection. From this moment, the tragedy unfolds in a tangle of deceptive poses, hidden interests, always ascribed to an egoistic perception of life.

Kozintsev shapes an atmosphere in which the nature acquires a pre-eminent value, where rich metaphorical references underlie in personal relationships. Boris Pasternak's script insists on the helplessness of Lear, which is part of the landscape, imbued by the greatness of the environment and its unintelligible plans. A multitude of different personalities come together to address a number of premises focused both on the political and familiar. If the monarch's power is based on the indivisibility of his possessions, Lear’s decision to fragment the kingdom, firstly, and to disinherit his daughter, later in an act of arrogance, it is understood as the appropriation of an authoritarianism that perhaps does not belong to him. That unrestrained government falls into a personal scale, where the dismemberment of the emotional environment is caused by delusions of grandeur of a character accustomed to implement his decisions without any hindrance.

Shakespeare encourages the protagonist to regret about his arrogance in a context where it is essential a careful interpretation of gestures, of statements going back to the essence of human behaviour. At the same time, the English playwright promotes in the beginning of Lear an exercise in introspection, guilt, atonement, which prints to the play a universal character, outside the bounds of temporality. Shostakovich's musical score, repeatedly praised, enhances the melancholy sense of a story that it is the voice of suffering.

“Help me, my dear friend!”

'Marat / Sade' (1967) is the result of the conjunction of two geniuses of playwriting, Peter Brook, here in functions of a film director, and Peter Weiss, propellant of such sadistic argument. A bathroom in Charenton’s sanatorium hosts the representation of a hypothetical theoretical confrontation between one of the great instigators of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, and a literary figure as the Marquis de Sade.

The episode portrayed stems from a series of plays that took a great success within the French bourgeoisie in the 19th century, whose appeal was based in a staging leaded by mentally ill people. Sade was responsible for memorable adaptations of his writings in Charenton, and Weiss inserted in that context the dialectical conflict between reason and heart with the aim of knowing the keys of the popular revolt of 1789.

Marat stands in one of the most controversial figures in the revolutionary itinerary admired by the less wealthy classes, and it becomes a martyr to the cause after being murdered by Charlotte Corday in 1793. The political activist spends his last days locked in her house as a result of a skin disease that requires him to take baths repeatedly. Corday, attached to the group of girondists –it´s considered the most radical of belonging to the National Assembly-, visited up three times to the cordelier Marat until she has been received: this meeting will result in tragedy and historic milestone.

In Brook’s film, Marat and Sade exhibit conflicting vital philosophies. While 'The friend of the people' defends a society that does not understand inequalities, drawn from Machiavellian precepts, the writer argues for the individualistic dictates of the soul to achieve a better world. These are the transcendental impulses of two idealistic men guided by a disrupted perception of reality.

The vacuum inside us. A decade without Jeff Buckley

Music, art, often boosts the validity of its greatest exponents, as an immortal tribute to the services rendered. The 'accursedness' is undoubtedly one of the essential elements in this journey into the sky towards the Olympus of the unforgettable; the cursed artist finds in that gained condition an emotional value added to the creative piece.

The cursed artist lives and disappears: his work, his legacy remains unfinished; the public perceive what it could have been, and however it was not. The attraction of his creation grows to the extent that our imagination moves our desires. The creation not finished, imperfect, above the final result, which is not already subject to changes. The first and only record of Jeff Buckley (Orange County, California, 1966), ‘Grace’, released in 1994, marked the rise of an essential figure in the American music scene, and it will be more resplendent after his death in strange circumstances in 1997, drowned in a river while preparing the launch of its second work. The subsequent influence of Jeff Buckley, obviously, is not measured in terms of creative profusion; as a paradigm of artistic integrity, he set a distance with regard to inland industrial promotion. Maintaining independence and developing as first and only term his interest in music, all converge in the self-suggestive talent of the author. The poetic sketches in the writing of Jeff Buckley mean the translation to a level of reality where the sentiment becomes the only thing that matters: it is a palpable feeling that overshadows all the meaning of the mere existence of the individual.

‘Grace’ emanates a particular ‘way of life', envolved with everyday emotions, but also, under the pretension of addressing them to a higher level, aristocratic. The exquisite treatment of lyrical images promotes the celestial elevation of Buckley, a genius without a chair in the collective memory. Meanwhile, the vacuum continues growing inside us.

‘Life and fate’, the overwhelmed magnitude of cruelty

The huge literary work of Vasili Grossman is currently fashionable thanks to the launch of a new edition by Gutenberg Galaxy in Spain. Over a thousand pages in a fascinating itinerary that leads to the significant Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet troops were able to stop, finally, the oppressive delusions of grandeur of Hitler, Goebbels and their vassals.

The war works to Grossman as a pretext to sketch the human portrait of a nation, Russia, which is trapped between German shells and Stalinist guidelines of dubious socializing interests. The author explains with unusual harshness the effort of survival of different characters, from a Soviet scientist overwhelmed by the ideological inconsistencies of his superiors to a Nazi command who imperturbably ensures the proper functioning of gas chambers, from a Muscovite teacher annihilated for his Jewish descent to a group of political Russian prisoners whose are shot for their alleged opposition to the Stalin’s regime, from a woman who gives birth in the midst of conflict while hopeful awaits the return of her husband to a German leader that verifies how arrives, inexorably, the extinction of his plans for the future, his dreams. Only from a point of view so broad is possible to address the complexity of a conflict of this nature; the bitterness that emanates is masterly portrayed, with a wide capacity for self-criticism.

Grossman's work represents the survival of art above the injustices; not surprisingly, the novelist was persecuted by the Soviet Government, and only twenty years after his death, in 1983, it was possible the publication of 'Life and fate', in French.