Melancholy perceptions
Ettore Scola’s film Le Bal recounts fifty years of European history with no dialogue and a complete unity of place. It consists solely of music and the motion of people moving and dancing.We remain in the same room with the same people throughout, while time goes by and the dancers grow older. The focus of the film is on its main characters. But it is the ballroom with its tiled floor and its paneling, the stairs in the background, and the |ion’s paw at theI side that creates the film`s dense, powerful atmosphere. Or is it the other way around? ls it the people who endow the room with its particular mood? l ask this question because | am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness.
Naturally, in this context l think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use. But when l close my eyes and try to forget both these physical traces and my own first associations,