Blog: Film festivals

Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest "What's past is prologue" implying that there is a natural continuity in history and that the present is a direct consequence of immediately preceding historical conditions.


What Shakespeare could not imagine is that in our time there would be a current within the film and TV narrative (especially in the fantastic variant) in which the past is prologue and the present... is also prologue, as if a production seeks to highlight what will happen in an indeterminate future instead of what it is trying to tell, as if what really matters is what it shows and not what it tells, as if the creators cared more about drawing a map than inhabiting it. Thus, we find (to use a very recent example) the 1st season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in which everything is presentation, introduction, prologue, in which the narration doesn’t seem to have a central interest for its authors, so that everything refers us to a future that is actually in the past, in the film trilogy Peter Jackson made 20 years ago.