The Salamander

Rosemonde is an existentially gifted girl from a poor family who is neglected by the culture, abused by people and exploited by the system that keeps her on mechanical job and cheap mindless entertainment. When impoverished intellectuals appear in her life she gradually starts to feel that she as if was waiting for them since her childhood. Relations with them make her understand her weaknesses and potentials and taught her to respect her humanity and be intellectually alert. ?The Salamander? is Tanner?s early attempt to find a political meaning in personal friendship in an epoch when progressive political agenda either becomes petty and purely financially oriented or streamlined and dissolved into conformism. The most fascinating aspect of the film is Tanner?s depiction of the creative process of trying to understand the world better as a part of personal relations. What always was considered as the function of individual mind became a function of actual existential togetherness. We see how intellectual process can be not retrospectively but future-oriented and be the very living through friendship. Read the article about Tanner? film ?One Liberated Human Face in the Crowd of Somnambular Shoppers? and analyses of the film?s shots, and articles about films by Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Kurosawa, Pasolini, Cavani and Bertolucci at: www.actingoutpolitics.com by Victor