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24401 From: "Zach Campbell"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 8:45pm
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) rashomon82

Fred:
> Second, I take your "crisis of the image" to mean
> something different from what Yoel assumes -- that you're talking about
> a shift, in what you take to the be best narrative films of recent
> decades, away from doing the primary expressive work through
> composition, lighting, editing, and so on, the "plastic values," and
> strengthening the emphasis on other things, such as acting, or acting in
> relationships to elements such as editing. Is that right?

This is one path, yes, but one of the things that I and others who argued in favor of
Cassavetes is that he does have some "plastic" (or at least non-acting formal) value to him.
Acting in Cassavetes is incredibly, incredibly important, of course, but these films--which
have something of a reputation for being carelessly messy and "uncinematic" (a term I
don't like to use and generally don't use)--are in fact quite meticulously and lovingly
constructed as objects. Certain visual properties in cinema are also, often if not always,
quite translatable from film to video (e.g., composition), and so I don't think these have
"suffered" or even necessarily undergone significant changes, other than the development
of less and less interesting (i.e., lazier) compositional strategies in contemporary
commercial film.

Also, sometimes a visual property, like color, can vary in translatability from film(maker) to
film(maker). I once wrote something for my own edification about how in the films of
Joseph H. Lewis, colors are largely conceptual and tied to objects (e.g., "red dress," "black
suit," "white wall") whereas in Andre De Toth the colors have a tendency toward
abstraction--it's not a red anything so much as a swath of red on the screen. (Disclosure:
though I've seen some De Toth films in 35mm and some on video, I don't think I've ever
seen one in both formats to compare.) Although De Toth films are still fascinating on
video (there's a lot of translatable stuff) his use of color (and perhaps light/shadow)
doesn't translate as well as Joseph H. Lewis's does, because Lewis, in my view, is less
abstract and more conceptual (more 'literary'?) in this regard. I'm not sure what overall
point I want to make with this other than that I think when we discuss formal properties
(and thus plastic ones) we have to keep in mind their malleability from example to
example. Specifity is vital when discussing issues like these, and I think we should all
(myself included) try our best to hold to this ideal.

I have more to respond to about the FACES/MICROCULTURAL INCIDENTS issue, too, but
that will have to wait. Let me just say, though, that I watched a video of the film today on
my lunch break and found it very interesting, so thanks for bringing it to our (and my)
attention.

Also, remember that Cassavetes, De Palma, Ferrara, Pialat, and others are deeply cherished
by the great French critic Nicole Brenez, to name a respected defender who is not on this
list, and who is someone clearly well-versed in film history and aesthetics, sensitive to
issues of plasticity and form, and very much interested in avant-garde and other forms of
so-called 'alternative' cinema--just as much as you are, Fred, I would wager. When she
writes about films like these, she's doing so on just about the most sophisticated level I've
seen.

I'll respond to Yoel's question later tonight, hopefully. (The only way I've been
responding today is during my breaks at work.) But I have some Boetticher films to see
and a few reviews to finish writing, so we'll see if I can get to it adequately.

--Zach
24402
From: kitebw@...
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 3:50pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) natskoli

In a message dated 3/17/2005 12:49:59 PM Eastern Standard Time,
a_film_by@yahoogroups.com writes:

My reading has always been that until that moment
Kubrick made his kind of horro movie -- a more
cerebral one about the breakdown of and malleability
of minds.

The pivot point is when Jack is "let out" of the meat
locker -- then the movie becomes a conventional
horror movie complete with illogic.

I don't see why the former is necessarily more "his kind of movie", Kubrick
certainly had an interest in metaphysics and the notion of survival in some
form after death appears to be one of the things that drew him to the project.

Also, many horror stories teeter between mundane and supernatural
explanations before landing in one camp or the other (and a few, like THE INNOCENTS,
even keep their precarious position). I don't see this as any failure of nerve
on Kubrick's part, though I suspect many critics would have been more
comfortable with the film if it either remained ambiguous or offered a purely
psychological explanation (perhaps Mike's theory of realist bias applies here).

"The larger issue of why a Black man can bring the
rescue vehicle, but is killed despite his "abilities"
remains fuzzy."

Shining appears to operate elliptically and sporadically in the film. One
could likewise ask why Danny's bathroom vision didn't tell him everything that
would happen at the hotel. Think Kub said in an interview that if shining
were perfect, there would be no story.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24403
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 8:51pm
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING cellar47

--- Jim Healy wrote:

>
> Anyone have any thoughts as to why Paul Mazursky's
> BLUME IN LOVE is on the
> tv in EYES WIDE SHUT? That is the movie, right? A
> favorite of Kubrick's
> perhaps?
>

Mazursky was one of the stars of "Fear and Desire."

> Both the Mulligan and the Mazursky are WB-owned
> movies, which must have
> made it easy to clear rights.
>
>
>

Yep. No big mystery, really.

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24404
From: "Matt Armstrong"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 8:59pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING matt_c_armst...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Jim Healy wrote:

> Anyone have any thoughts as to why Paul Mazursky's BLUME IN LOVE
is on the
> tv in EYES WIDE SHUT? That is the movie, right? A favorite of
Kubrick's
> perhaps?

I was always puzzled by the information that Kubrick's initial idea
for "Eyes Wide Shut" was inspired by watching Steve Martin in "The
Jerk." He'd originally conceived the film as a dark sex comedy with
Martin in the lead. What a movie that would have been!

As it is, "Eyes Wide Shut" reminds me much more thematically and in
its narrative events of Scorsese's "After Hours."
24405
From: "peckinpah20012000"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:14pm
Subject: Re: The Immortal Story on DVD? peckinpah200...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Richard Modiano wrote:
>
>
> > Not exactly appropos to your question, but 16mm prints are
offered
> > for sale in "The Big Reel" from time to time in the $100.00 to
> > $200.00 range.
>
>if the print was also made before 1983 (my date may be a year or
two
> off), you should know that the Kodak stock in use before then
(replaced
> afterwards with a low-fade stock Kodak made thanks to the great
efforts
> of Marin Scorsese, who should be honored for that project again
and
> again) had an unstable cyan layer, which faded in as little as
five
> years, producing the muddy reddish-brown look with pale blues or
no
> blues at all that cinephiles know all too well. I have seen such a
16mm
> print of "The Immortal Story," back around 1981. A print of this
film
> with no blues is ridiculous, since warm-cool color contrasts were
part
> of the basis of the film. Such prints are atrocities that should
never,
> or just about never, be screened.
>
> Fred Camper

I've purchased a copy of the film on DVD. It is not really
atrocious but lacks the original creative color resonance of the
original feature which I saw in England on its original release
during 1970.

(I hope I'm not sounding too much like Herman G. Weinberg in that
irritating "Coffee, Brandy and Cigars" editorial in the old TAKE ONE
who gloated about being the only person alive who saw the supposedly
outstanding A WOMAN OF PARIS. It's an interesting film but not the
masterpiece Weinberg went on about.)

Anyway - back to the subject. The VHS prints are "atrocities" and
the DVDs exhibit the problems Fred describes to a greater or lesser
degree. One can only hope a CRITERION remastered DVD will soon be
available.

Tony Williams
24406
From: "peckinpah20012000"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:19pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING peckinpah200...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Jim Healy wrote:
> > >
> > > The film on the television is Robert Mulligan's SUMMER OF 42,
by
> > the
> > > way.
> >
> > Yeah, I've never been able to figure that one.
>
> Anyone have any thoughts as to why Paul Mazursky's BLUME IN LOVE
is on the
> tv in EYES WIDE SHUT? That is the movie, right? A favorite of
Kubrick's
> perhaps?
>
> Both the Mulligan and the Mazursky are WB-owned movies, which must
have
> made it easy to clear rights.

SUMMER OF 42 deals with a young boy's sexual awakening. THE
SHINING deals with a son's discovery of the dark side of patriarchy.
BLUME IN LOVE may be there to counterpoint a Hollywood romantic
comedy with Kubrick's own version of the 70s family horror movie.

Yes, I admit I'm guessing. Bud did not Kubrick want his audiences
to work at the material. He never inserted anything into his films
unless there was some reason. These references are not there
as "padding" or "filling."

Tony Williams
24407
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:23pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) jpcoursodon

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>> That's another film in the echo chamber. What's amazing is how
many
> films get echoed by such a simple narrative.

You call THE SHINING a "simple narrative"? Aren't you confusing
archetypal and simple? The film is a fairy tale in the
fantasy/horror mold, but it incorporates so many elements from those
genres and their subgenres (it's "about" everything from ESP to
possession, reincarnation, ghosts, demonic creatures, pacts with the
Devil, deja vu... you name it, it's in there)that the resulting
hodgepodge can hardly be called "simple". That's why the film is an
echo chamber -- or you might say a corridor of mirrors.

Re: the BIGGER THAN LIFE/SHINING comparison. I'm reminded that
the James Mason character is a teacher, and so is/was the Nicholson
character. Both are turned into ogre-like murderous fathers intent
on destroying their son.
24408
From: "thebradstevens"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:31pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING thebradstevens

>
> Anyone have any thoughts as to why Paul Mazursky's BLUME IN LOVE is
on the
> tv in EYES WIDE SHUT? That is the movie, right? A favorite of
Kubrick's
> perhaps?

Paul Mazursky was in Kubrick's first film, the interesting (if
pretentious) FEAR AND DESIRE.
24409
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:44pm
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING cellar47

--- Matt Armstrong wrote:

>
> As it is, "Eyes Wide Shut" reminds me much more
> thematically and in
> its narrative events of Scorsese's "After Hours."
>
>
>
Me too! They would make a great double feature.

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24410
From: BklynMagus
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:56pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) cinebklyn

David writes:

> And his forestalled "rescue" operation is explicitly
evoked at the climax of "Elephant" -- a film that's
largely a meditation on the Kubrickian tracking shot.

I had never seen it this way. I will have to re-see it.

But is this another instance like "Prisoner of Shark
Island" where if you got the castration narrative the
final shot with the Black man and his family is seen
differently?

Which leads me to wonder: have films reached a tipping
point of self-referentialism that crib notes need to be
handed out with the tickets?

Several months ago the Brooklyn Museum re-opened
and they had a showing of recent art from Brooklyn
artists. I found it curious that it seemed to me that many
of the small/often not-so-small plates next to what I
would have assumed was the "art," were no longer merely
explanatory, but part of the art now.

I wonder if the same thing has happened with movies.
For those who do not see "Elephant" as a meditation
on the Kubrickian tracking shot, can that moment be too
clever for its own good? Does it require too much information
to appreciate totally? Is it too much for a filmmaker to
expect that his audience will share the same "irony quotient"
that he does?

k writes:

> I don't see this as any failure of nerve on Kubrick's part,

I don't either. It just struck me that in most of his films, the
horror is human-originated. I just wonder if he came to this
point of the story, realized he was stuck, and decided to go
Grand Guignol and fill up the rest of the film with the
metaphysical hijnks people at that time expected from a
horror movie.

>though I suspect many critics would have been more
comfortable with the film if it either remained ambiguous or
offered a purely psychological explanation (perhaps Mike's
theory of realist bias applies here).

Could be. I just see it as much simpler: he used a ghost
to extricate himself from a plot dead end, which was okay
since he was making a horror movie. I just get the feeling of
a diptych -- as in "Full Metal Jacket."

> Think Kub said in an interview that if shining were perfect,
there would be no story.

But what is interesting is the event/action he chose to illustrate
that shining wasn't perfect. Why kill O'Halloran? The question
still remains.

Brian
24411
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 10:02pm
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) samfilms2003

It's still not clear to me when and how narrative films lost
some kind of plasticity or when and where this 'crisis of the
image' set in...

-Sam
24412
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:32am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING f_verissimo

Craig:
"I've always understood one of the main
"theses" of 'The Shining' to be the televisual image's infection of
American culture."

You took the words out of my mouth -- and translated it to English, thanks.
I absolutely agree with you.
That's exactly what I meant when I wrote about the ironic subtones missing
from the foreign version. It took a lot of time for me to find out that
"Here's Johnny" was a nod to Johnny Carson's show -- and never understood
the reason for it until I watched the American version, where TV sets
appears everywhere.
Don't know about those awful skeletons though, I just hate those.

I didn't know the TV was showing SUMMER OF 42 in that glorious take. Sorry,
Mulligan fans!

fv
24413
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:27am
Subject: Films (or movies) within movies (or films) (was: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> --- Jim Healy wrote:
>
> >
> > Anyone have any thoughts as to why Paul Mazursky's
> > BLUME IN LOVE is on the
> > tv in EYES WIDE SHUT? That is the movie, right? A
> > favorite of Kubrick's
> > perhaps?
> >
>
> Mazursky was one of the stars of "Fear and Desire."
>
> > Both the Mulligan and the Mazursky are WB-owned
> > movies, which must have
> > made it easy to clear rights.

Well, yeah, but once a director decides to go with the catalogue of the studio
he's working for, he still has to pay rights, and he still has to pick a title. It's
interesting that both clips are from naturalistic films, not genre movies. (I know:
Summer is a coming of age film, but that's not a genre like the western.) Often
a genre movie on tv in a naturalistic film will represent some aspect of the
imagination. For example Barbet was very deliberate in his choice of Crimson
Pirate (a Warners title, of course) for Reversal of Fortune. Von Bulow was a
pirate, but also Barbet wanted to foreground the "movie movie" aspects of his
compositions, color schemes etc. in a film that was basically a docudrama.
The cattle drive from Red River in Last Picture Show is the classic example:
the dream as opposed to the reality, but also one of Peter's artistic
inspirations. He originally wanted Wagonmaster, by the way.

Here we're in a genre movie and two clips from adult naturalistic films are
used (or perhaps more accurately: non-genre films - that's really how the
opposition works in H'wd filmmaking). That usually has the opposite
significance: Nature. But as with Barbet, it can foreground the opposite
tendency, i.e. the naturalistic side of the genre movie, which in The Shining is
the whole subject of domestic violence - not as trendy a topic in 1980 as
today.

But the specific meanings elude me. I don't really see a role for an allusion to
mother-son incest in this, unless the Oedipal subtext of the dysfunctional
family is being discreetly evoked.
24414
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:29am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Matt Armstrong"
wrote:
>
"Eyes Wide Shut" reminds me much more thematically and in
> its narrative events of Scorsese's "After Hours."

And through it, The Trial.
24415
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:37am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) f_verissimo

Brian:
"The larger issue of why a Black man can bring the
rescue vehicle, but is killed despite his "abilities"
remains fuzzy."

Well, we don't know if he can foresee the future or see behind walls. As
Halloran says, people that can shine have the ability to see the traces left
by things that occured in the past, and that's about it.

David:
"it's not fuzzy at all. A racist culure wracked with
guilt over how much it enjoys its own racism is
constantly confecting iconic figures to maintain
denial."

Richard:
"Maybe this is Kubrick's subversion of Stephen King's use of a "Magic
Negro" to redeem the white characters"

When Jack meets Mr. Grady, who happens to live forever now in the 30's
serving booze, he warns him of the menace. Jack's son is a notty boy: he's
trying to ask help to "A negro. A negro cook.", he says. And it appears that
Overlook's ghosts ("kings, presidents. all the best people", as the manager
says) don't like to mix with blacks.

Jack wants to live forever in that party that never ends (not as the
caretaker, not as the loser, but as the soul of the party -- as the great
artist he thinks he could have been, if it wasn't for his stupid family and
the hard times he's living in). And, as we all know, colored persons are not
allowed in the Gold Room.

Comments on racism are overall present in THE SHINING. In the novel, the
Overlook was build on a place where an indian cemetery existed before -- the
allegory is pretty clear, if you agree that Overlook is America. Although I
don't remember any mention to the cemetery in the film, there are some
indian motifs present: some pieces of tapestry hanging on the walls of the
hotel, a few sculptures and so on.

The assassination of Halloran is also kind of ritualistic: the human
sacrifice. Halloran's blood on the ground is necessary to get the party
going on again.

fv
24416
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:39am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) f_verissimo

Bill K:
"The Australian Shining (as I like to call
it...) is a scarier movie than the American one."

True.

"2) How the fuck did that professor conclude that Barry Nelson's
manager was gay??? "

I have absolutely no idea. That Holocaust stuff is quite stupid too.
But since we're in the territory of academics, there's actually a very good
piece on THE SHINING written by Fredric Jameson.

"3) Was the ball the manager gives Danny at the end of the premier
version the one that came rolling at him down the corridor when he
saw the Arbus Twins, or the one Jack was hurling agaginst the wall in
the lobby when he couldn't write?"

I always thought there was only one ball.
The last time Jack hurls the ball against the wall, it goes rolling into the
depths of a corridor. He doesn't go after it.
It's the same one that comes to Danny from another corridor afterwards, I
guess.

fv
24417
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:37am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:

The absence of much in the way of supernatural phenomena in the last half
of Shining is reportedly a result of SK's dissatisfaction w. the current state of 3-
D animation, then in its infancy. He wanted the hedge animals to come to life
and so on as in the book. He ended up w. some skeletons out of an Abbott
and Costello movie!

On movies today needing cribs, not at all. Lots of people loved Elephant w/out
or (in David's case) before seeing the Shining references. What we do here is
depth analysis, and one of the deepest levels of that is influence theory. And
the more you can do that, the more there is there.

It'll be interesting to see if Elephant is being talked about 20 years from now
the way we're talking about Shining right now!
24418
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:43am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Fernando Verissimo"
wrote:

> Comments on racism are overall present in THE SHINING. In the novel, the
> Overlook was build on a place where an indian cemetery existed before --
the
> allegory is pretty clear, if you agree that Overlook is America. Although I
> don't remember any mention to the cemetery in the film, there are some
> indian motifs present: some pieces of tapestry hanging on the walls of the
> hotel, a few sculptures and so on.
>
> The assassination of Halloran is also kind of ritualistic: the human
> sacrifice. Halloran's blood on the ground is necessary to get the party
> going on again.

Michael Cimino says there's a real hotel just like that in Colorado. (Of course
he would have shot it totally differently.) There was also a woman suing King
at the time the film was being made because she claimed he based the book
on stolen records of her sessions w. her shrink. Brrr!

I suspect that if there is a real Overlook, it doesn't have a can out of 2001: A
Space Odyssey.
24419
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 0:46am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) cellar47

--- Fernando Verissimo wrote:

>
> When Jack meets Mr. Grady, who happens to live
> forever now in the 30's
> serving booze, he warns him of the menace. Jack's
> son is a notty boy: he's
> trying to ask help to "A negro. A negro cook.", he
> says. And it appears that
> Overlook's ghosts ("kings, presidents. all the best
> people", as the manager
> says) don't like to mix with blacks.
>

Actually "nigger" is word used. And having it
enunciated by a British actor makes said enunciation
even more intense.

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24420
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:04am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) f_verissimo

Richard:
"By the way, in an interview in the old "Twilight Zone" magazine King
was asked how closely he worked with Kubrick on THE SHINNING and he
answered that he didn't work with him at all, and only heard from him
once when Kubrick phoned in the middle of the night to ask if King
believed in an afterlife."

Kubrick seemed pretty attentive to the whole issue of afterlife,
reincarnation and ESP in the interview that appears in the Michel Ciment
book.

As we know, King didn't like Kubrick's film, so years later he adapted his
novel for TV. It was supposed to be the real thing, but boy, did that suck.
It sucked.

I don't think the novel itself was that bad. If I recall it properly,
Kubrick said in the same interview that it was best to adapt flawed or
mediocre material than truly good books or classics.

And here's the irony: if we make a list of the authors Kubrick adapted,
King's name would appear right there in the bottom. But THE SHINING, IMHO,
is his best film.

fv
24421
From: MG4273@...
Date: Thu Mar 17, 2005 7:59pm
Subject: Re: Summer of 42 (was: THE SHINING) nzkpzq

"Summer of 42" was one of the most famous movies of its era. Everybody saw
it, everybody talked about it, it became part of American folk culture. This is
perhaps part of the reason Kubrick chose it (I've never seen The Shining, and
cannot add much to the Kubrick discussion).
Jennifer O'Neill was interviewed on TV circa 1984. She said that although she
had starred in over 20 films, the only one the public remembered was "Summer
of 42". She was immediately linked in everybody's mind with that film.

Mike Grost
24422
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:36am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) f_verissimo

> Michael Cimino says there's a real hotel just like that in Colorado. (Of
course
> he would have shot it totally differently.)

In fact there is.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==351
6
This is the hotel that inspired King's novel.

The interiors of the Overlook were a mixture of parts of various hotels
visited by Roy Walker. The Colorado Lounge, where the indian motifs appear,
was modelled on the lounge of the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite Park.

Kubrick and Walker reproduced almost every single detail of that lounge in
Elstree. Actually, they added a huge indian mural on a wall.
Here's a pic of the Ahwanee Hotel lounge:
http://www.newenlightenment.com/ahwanee.html
Also check www.newenlightenment.com/overlookinterior.html for a comparison.

> There was also a woman suing King
> at the time the film was being made because she claimed he based the book
> on stolen records of her sessions w. her shrink. Brrr!

How bizarre.
Wasn't that King's wife?
(just joking)

fv
24423
From: "Matt Armstrong"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:33am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) matt_c_armst...

> Comments on racism are overall present in THE SHINING. In the
novel, the
> Overlook was build on a place where an indian cemetery existed
before -- the
> allegory is pretty clear, if you agree that Overlook is America.
Although I
> don't remember any mention to the cemetery in the film, there are
some
> indian motifs present: some pieces of tapestry hanging on the
walls of the
> hotel, a few sculptures and so on.

Interesting. I remember another essay on "The Shining" published in
the 80s in the San Francisco Chronicle. The writer argued that the
film is an allegory for the genocide of Native Americans. This
somewhat nutty reading was based on the facts you mention, as well
as the prominently placed tins of Calumet baking soda (with their
Indian head logos.)

I'm not sure I buy this reading nor the Holocaust one. The film
seems to me to be about domestic violence, denial and the dark side
of patriarchy. I've never read King's book, but the miniseries which
is said to be faithful is definitely about this. The "Bigger than
Life" comparison someone made earlier just really pulled this
together for me.

> The assassination of Halloran is also kind of ritualistic: the
human
> sacrifice. Halloran's blood on the ground is necessary to get the
party
> going on again.

It's an interesting take. The idea that blood must be spilt to
release the ghosts. I am still sympathetic to concerns that
Halloran's murder may have been mere convenience on Kubrick's part.
He needed an actual killing at some point to satisfy horror
conventions, and truly shock us. And the cliche of the expendable
black man was not popularly discussed yet, so perhaps he didn't see
how lame it might appear.

My biggest problem with the sequence is that Halloran's behavior
seems impossibly dumb. A man with psychic powers senses distress,
goes to great trouble to arrive at the hotel and then quite
literally walks down a dark corridor into a swinging axe! It's
either an act of martyrdom or a foolish attempt at heroism by
someone who considers himself invincible.

Thanks to David for pointing out Van Sant's allusions to this
in "Elephant." The black character in that movie is downright calm
as he walks to his doom. I'm not sure if Kubrick intended Halloran
to seem foolish or a martyr, but Van Sant's use of the reference
acts as a kind of meta-film criticism of the Kubrick.
24424
From: "Zach Campbell"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:08am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) rashomon82

Sam wrote:
> I'm not so sure. The legacy of theater, spoken dialog
> from "novelistic" sources has profound effect on blocking,
> placement of the talking bodies in space. If you want to cite
> the 'Mizoguchis' and 'Welleses' it's one thing --- but on average?
[...]
> It's still not clear to me when and how narrative films lost
> some kind of plasticity or when and where this 'crisis of the
> image' set in...

I'm not talking about the construction of the content of the shot
(in which case I concede your point). I'm talking about the flat
image and its attendant properties like flicker, color, aspect
ratio, a certain implied depth (itself often flattened on video)--
the things which became disputable and malleable once images made
with the cinema solely in mind were put on television and then video.

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the final deathly gurgles from the
classical Hollywood system of the past (and I suspect other national
cinemas have their own parallel trajectories), compositions began to
be made with an eye towards subsequent television viewing (even
while widescreen cinemas were the norm), which made for some work
that wasn't so visually rigorous or interesting because it had to
allow for flexibility of presentation. As I indicated before, I
think things are taking a turn for the better, compositionally, what
with (it sure seems) increasing acceptance of widescreen home
viewing formats, and the coming of several young talents who, good
bad or ugly, are at least trying to engage with the image again
(both Andersons, Fincher, Mann, et al). I'm not saying the 1970s
were a complete waste for visual expression in commercial American
cinema, but it wasn't exactly a high point. I think things have
improved, a generation later.

Furthermore, you had to deal with the presence of icons and images
crossing media and having an impact on viewers in multiple ways. A
Western hero (John Wayne or whoever else) was no longer just a
figure "in the movies," but also a figure on television. You didn't
only go and sit and look at him in the dark anymore--you could see
him on Saturday mornings in your own living room. The experience of
film-watching (as separate from moviegoing) was de-centered from the
theatrical, celluloid experience. I think the subsequent self-
consciousness in contemporary American commercial films of
Hollywood, its tropes, and its myths (again: whether good bad or
ugly) has a lot of its roots in this fact.

Does this make any more sense?

--Zach
24425
From: "Zach Campbell"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:35am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) rashomon82

Yoel:
> What you term as the "crisis of the image" is something you
> experience intellectually.

Of course. I was trying to use the phrase as an umbrella term to
describe a broad range of paths taken by postclassical narrative
filmmakers. I'm not at all claiming that using this phrase invokes
an aesthetic defense!

> For me, art is not an intellectual experience, it is a sensual
> one.

Do you not care for poetry and prose then? What is reading but an
intellectual experience? In reality, sense and intellect are
intertwined, not easy to separate, and they influence each other.
Films would make no sense if we experienced them only sensually.

> Can you describe in detail how you explain the greatness of one of
> your favorite directors using the words "crisis of the image"?

Well, as I hope I've made clear, the words "crisis of the image" are
not meant and never were meant as a stand-in for an aesthetic
strategy. They are a way for me to make sense of certain
developments in cinema as it is engaged with, assailed by, competing
with, and symbiotic to home viewing practices and video technologies.

A common picture in postclassical (roughly post-1960) films (more
than classical ones, I think) is the shot of a character in a movie
theater, often with the light of the projector behind him or her and
the flicker on their face. A lot of times this is meant to evoke
the power (or, gag me, the "magic") of cinema. Sometimes it's done
intelligently, as in VIVRE SA VIE. Sometimes it's used to evoke
something else.

I'll use Ferrara as one of my favorite directors here. In KING OF
NEW YORK, one of the characters associated with the protagonist
Christopher Walken approaches another character, a Chinese-American
gangster, who is sitting in a private theater watching NOSFERATU.
(At the end of the scene he says something like, "Why don't you
stick around? I've got FRANKENSTEIN coming on next.") I can't
think of any reason why this gangster is watching old horror
classics on celluloid except that Ferrara wants us to associate his
lifestyle with behavior seen from "the movies." That is, as Fred
has noticed (lamented?), psychology is replaced by filmmaker's
cinephilia. But when this occurs in Ferrara's work, at least, and
in the work of some others, it's entirely self-conscious and is thus
has the potential to be reflective or productive. Ferrara is
acknowledging something about his criminal characters, acknowledging
subtly how their psychology is in fact affected by the images they
see. Walken himself in this film is trying to be a certain type
of "do-gooder," and doesn't seem to understand his own drive for
community generosity. He's a kind of tragic figure from beginning
to end, and his own personal, psychological dilemma comes, I
believe, from his inability to comprehend his actions or his
motivations, which partly stem from movie convention. Movies in
this universe quietly inform the characters' existence, and Ferrara
is deeply aware of this fact.

Another, and very different, instance. There's a fascinating shot
early in NEW ROSE HOTEL where, soon after Walken and Dafoe enlist
the services of Asia Argento, we see an image of Argento's bare
midriff before it dissolves (I believe) into a shot of the
cityscape. This midriff, of course, has Argento's famous angel
tattoo. Immediately the presence of the tattoo raises a question,
however small, in the viewer's mind. "Is it real?" That is, is the
tattoo Argento's and not the character's (Sandii's)? The answer is
irrelevant to the importance of the shot, though, which is one that
reminds a viewer of the imposed line between 'actor'
and 'character,' 'real' and 'fictional.' This shot blurs the line
between Asia and Sandii.

Now, one might counter that this is nothing special, that we could
argue that any shot of a tattoo in a film brings this up. But I
would hold my ground and point out that in NEW ROSE HOTEL this shot
is explicity *of* the midriff (it doesn't simply show it amidst
other things; there's nothing "happening" in the shot). It has no
narrative purpose whatsoever. It is there, it functions, solely *as
an image*. It challenges our perceptions; it reminds us of
the "imageness" of the image, its paradoxical, simultaneous truth
and falsity.

For those who have seen NEW ROSE HOTEL (likely the greatest American
narrative film of the past ten years), it's clear that the question
of Sandii's personhood (and the problem of its fluidity) is at the
core of the film, just as much if not more so than the Gibson short
story on which the film is based. So inserting this image into the
film soon after Sandii is introduced (first as an object of the male
characters' vision in the nightclub scene, second as a character in
her own right in the apartment negotiation) is a highly strategic
and multifaceted move on Ferrara's part.

And this all has no dependence on the plasticity of the image: it
works no matter how it is played. Is it purely "intellectual"
though? No, not really. It took me a lot of time and thought to
realize what was happening with that single shot. The effect of the
shot is, itself, sensual: we're looking at an interesting tattoo
around the navel of an attractive woman, editing according to the
seductive, unpredictable rhythms that mark NEW ROSE HOTEL as a
whole. It's effect is only "intellectual" once one takes the time
to reflect and unpack it, which can be said for absolutely any
cinematic effect.

--Zach
24426
From: "Zach Campbell"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:50am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) rashomon82

I wrote:
> In the 1960s and 1970s ...

I just got a private email that pointed out the developments I'm
discussing most likely had their origins in the 1950s, which is
true. So maybe I should amend my statement to read that the
development gained in steam from that point and became more
calcified by the 1960s and 1970s, but didn't "start" there.

--Zach
24427
From: Peter Henne
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:57am
Subject: Re: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) peterhenne
Online Now Send IM

Yoel,

I hope I am not oversimplifying your argument, but my response to your division between intellectual and sensual responses is, Why not both? The belief that art demands everything of us, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, has held me in good stead.

Looking outside of just film and at the history of Western painting, it's clear that some artists--Poussin, Ingres, Mondrian, Barnett Newman, for example--make a primarily intellectual appeal. What's wrong with that? It is there right to do so, and if art establishments were to somehow forbid a principally intellectual approach, you can bet that intellectual art would be the hot ticket for all artists of an anti-authoritarian nature. They would no doubt make a point of proving the value and necessity of the intellectual side of art. (By that I am not implying you would censor, I am simply trying to look at your argument and see where it may lead.) Art loves to experiment and go into places it hasn't or shouldn't. To go back into film again for a moment, I'm reminded of Orson Welles rationale for using the wide-angle lens, in his 1958 Cahiers du Cinema interview. It is worth quoting at length:

"I work, and have worked, with the 18.5 solely because other cineastes have not availed themselves of it. Cinema is like a colony: there are few colonists. When America was wide open, when the Spanish were on the frontier of Mexico, the French in Canada, the Dutch in New York, you can be sure that the English made their way to places that were still unoccupied. I don't prefer the 18.5: I'm simply the only one to have explored its possibilities.... the essential job of every responsible artist is to cultivate what lies fallow.... If everyone worked with a wide-angle lens, I'd shoot all my films in 70mm, because I take its possibilities very seriously."

That said, I don't think any artist is all intellectual or all sensual. They need both and use both. Art always has ideas; art always plays with sensations. Artists simply emphasize one or the other. And we can see the polarities battling it out in history, e.g., the partisans of Poussin and Rubens in the seventeenth century. I think that once the necessity for engaging both types of response is acknowledged, we can agree upon much art which is worthy while allowing that each of us will naturally gravitate toward our preferences. It's often said that classical art emphasizes the intellectual, and romantic art the emotional and sensual; are you smuggling what amounts to your taste into an essentialist argument? Please don't take that as an accusation, I like reading you very much.

Peter Henne

Yoel Meranda wrote:

For me, art is not an intellectual experience, it is a sensual one.
Intellect is something we impose on the world, it is our categorizing
and organizing our ideas; ideas which are not stable anyway. I
believe what sensual images can do is beyond ideas and they touch
somewhere closer to how the nervous system works. Why? Don't know
because science isn't there yet... but I feel it. One of my favorite
filmmakers, Sidney Peterson, says the following about his own films;
I believe it is true for all art: "These images are meant to play not
on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity
within us."

Yoel

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24428
From: "Brian Charles Dauth"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:15am
Subject: Re: Stage Door cinebklyn

The following question contains a spoiler:

I just finished watching the new dvd of "Stage Door."

At the end, after Terry Randall is a success, there has
always been (at least when I have seen it), a quick
montage that carries the audience forward to 4 months
later.

In this version, there is an extra shot of Kay's grave being
mown, and two of the other montage shots are superimposed
on top of this image.

This adds a whole new aspect for me, but I am sure I have
mever seen it before either on tape, tv or in revival.

Any thoughts/info AFB members?

Brian
24429
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:53am
Subject: Racism in THE SHINING f_verissimo

Matt:
> I'm not sure I buy this reading nor the Holocaust one. The film
> seems to me to be about domestic violence, denial and the dark side
> of patriarchy.

But I don't think those themes (racism and domestic violence) are mutually
exclusive. There could be a reading that includes both, don't you think?

After all, in his crazy fantasy Jack puts the blame on his family for his
own failure as an artist. And his fantasy can only materialize after those
ghosts from the past (or from his head) give him the mission to kill his
family AND the "nigger cook".
Only after he accomplishes that task (even if partially), he can join the
eternal ball in the Gold Room. Overlook is the place where "all the best
people" can do their ritualistic display of power, while dancing and
stepping on the blood of sacrified minorities, displaying no guilt
whatsoever. You kill them, you erict a luxuous place over their dead bodies,
you decorate it with their art, and you get in there and dance to your music
and feel sublime. As long as you're richer than any small nation and you
live in the roaring 20's, of course.

Jameson notes in his piece that "the impulse towards community (cf. Danny's
contact with Halloran), the desire for colectivity, the envy of other
developed colectivities come out with the strenght of the return of the
repressed: that's what THE SHINING appears to be about" (I'm translating it
back from Portuguese to English, so please someone correct me). The
nostalgia for that particular utopia of a white society that can at one time
ostentate all its richness with no guilt and subsequently repress other
colectivities at the same time, is what Jack is possessed by, says FJ.

I don't know if he's (or I'm) pushing the envelope too far, but I don't
think those indian motifs are there for no reason.

Now, the Holocaust stuff is obviously just plain absurd.

> I am still sympathetic to concerns that
> Halloran's murder may have been mere convenience on Kubrick's part.

It could be, but that doesn't disqualify any readings.
Artists intentions will remain a mistery, maybe even for themselves.

Anyway, Jack's absolutely crazy, of course, but his face displays too much
hate in the killing of Halloran. It is way too brutal to be mere
convenience, IMO. I'm not inclined to think that the scene stands only for
its shocking value or plot mechanics.

fv
24430
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:54am
Subject: ELEPHANT & THE SHINING f_verissimo

I wrote something regarding this to afb a long time ago.

"There are some other references to THE SHINING in ELEPHANT: like Jack Torrance, Alex is a frustrated artist and the scene of the killers examining the school plans reminds us of Jack watching his prey as they walk the miniature labyrinth.

This kind of thing should not come as a surprise since it's made by the same guy that gave us his own private PSYCHO, but it troubles me anyway. Is Van Sant encouraging us to make some kind of a transverse reading, and, if that's the case (which I think it is), what's his point?

THE SHINING, among other things, is a study about a father-child relationship -- it shows the father as impotent, destructive. Although ELEPHANT leaves some space for us to imagine the possibility of a reconciliation through disaster, as we see John and his father meeting in the end and trying to understand the massacre together, it's "father figures" are equally impotent and destructive (I'm not thinking only about John's father before redemption, who is drunk and causing harassment to his son in the beginning, but also about the principal, who is the only victim that hears an explanation of why he is killed -- it happens in the sequence that features Bennie, also).

Also, deliberately, we are never able to see Alex's parents, even when his mother shows up in a scene. Far from suggesting that Van Sant is trying to establish a cause or explanation for the massacre (after all, Alex's partner is killed before fully explaining his reasons by Alex himself, the mentor), I can't help to regard his references to THE SHINING as an invitation for us to take a shortcut through Kubrick's film as a way to understand Van Sant's own commentaries on fatherhood."

fv

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24431
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:01am
Subject: Re: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) sallitt1

> Second, I take your "crisis of the image" to mean
> something different from what Yoel assumes -- that you're talking about
> a shift, in what you take to the be best narrative films of recent
> decades, away from doing the primary expressive work through
> composition, lighting, editing, and so on, the "plastic values," and
> strengthening the emphasis on other things, such as acting, or acting in
> relationships to elements such as editing. Is that right?

I wouldn't say that acting is the first thing that I think of in this
regard. In fact, acting may be undergoing the same "crisis".

Usually the rejection of plastic qualities is part of some conceptual
angle, I'd say.

Sometimes it's related to issues of realism: i.e., the appropriation of
visual styles that have become popularly associated with the real. These
styles vary over time: the shaky camera of the WWII newsreel photographer,
lens glare, the telephoto (associated with the difficulty of photographing
a real-life subject), the handheld camera, video/TV reportage, video/home
movie, etc. The common idea is that the failure to achieve a perfect
image might convey the tension, speed, difficulty, etc. that created the
failure.

Another thread is the obliteration of the shot as a unit of meaning.
Obviously music video was a big factor here: you go crazy if you try to
interpret each MTV cut as signifying a change of perspective, and so
you're forced to accept the concept of the image soup, or else stop
watching in disgust. Renoir was very explicitly after a devaluation of
the shot in DR. CORDELIER and other films of the time.

And then there's a kind of image minimalism, which is hard to talk about.
But one sometimes has a sense that the image was chosen without much
reference to what's going on within it. Maybe a distant viewpoint comes
to seem like a waiting out of the action rather than a perspective on it;
maybe camera movement or panning seems unmotivated. (I feel this way
about Hou quite often, for instance.) The image can't have too much
compositional identity if this feeling is going to come across.

- Dan
24432
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:29am
Subject: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) blakelucaslu...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Zach, and others,

>
> How many films of the 70s or 80s remade
> "The Searchers"? Or "Vertigo?" Stuart Byron wrote an article about
> remakes of "The Searchers," fingering "Close Encounters of the
Third
> Kind" as one of many, complete with that loony "Monument Valley"
house
> sculpture. Why does the runaway in Paul Schrader's "Hard Core"
return
> with her dad at the end? Not because anything we have learned
about her
> suggests that she might, but because Debbie goes home at the end
of "The
> Searchers." For that matter, why does the hustler in Schrader's
> "American Gigolo" have that moment of revelation at the end? It's
> certainly not comprehensible in terms of anything we've learned
about
> him. It only becomes comprehensible if you remember that Schrader
loves
> "Pickpocket," whose ending he blatantly rips off in his film.

I know Rick C wants to stick to Sarris' original categories, but I
wish we could have a new category, a sort of anti-Pantheon, for
someone like the individual I'm naming here, who would be the first
one in it. Less than Meets the Eye might actually cut it in a way
for someone like Spielberg, for all my animosity toward him, because
Sarris seemed to design it for directors who admittedly had some
talent and craftmanship and maybe even made some good films along
the line. But what of those who somehow have a career but who have
all the talent and sensibility of a dead, rotting skunk? At least
one member observed through recent posts on that New American Cinema
project that Schrader "sucks." (I believe it was Bill but can't
find the post now). I can't be more eloquent than that but would
like to add a few thoughts.

What Fred says above is a good place to start. Hard Core is a
pretty easy target I admit, but Fred's lines above encapsulate the
basic reason why it registers as completely trivial and couldn't be
taken seriously even if Schrader did have even the least stylistic
flair.
But while we're on the subject, does anyone else find it strange
that Schrader, so temperamentally unsuited to dealing with
sexuality, returns to it repeatedly in his seeming treatments of
pornography, pimps, prostitutes, gigolos, et al. I wouldn't have a
problem with him being a self-admitted puritan if this were only a
starting point. Filmmakers from Griffith to Eustache have stretched
within their work to find tension within opposing aspects of their
lives/sensibilities--in this case the opposite, because Griffith
came from a background and culture of puritanism but his impulses
were all toward liberation, and that shows in his films from the
beginning. Eustache, on the other hand, comes along in a culture of
sexual liberation as the accepted thing, but seems to be deeply
puritanical in his own sensibility, and yet he especially uses the
paradox to monumental creative effect in The Mother and the Whore,
which of all his 70s films, seems to have the most compassion toward
individual sexuality of anyone this side of Fassbinder. By
contrast, Schrader's fascination with the very thing which he seems
repulsed by can only make us recoil. And as the formal mastery of
Griffith and Eustache reflects itself in the way characters,
especially women, always seem poised on the edge of a kind of
choreography of movement even when still in Griffith and poised on
the edge of inwardness and a kind of frozen energy in Eustache, even
when in an attitude of physical aggressiveness, so Schrader's void
where his formal mastery wants to be tends to throw his characters,
no matter their actions, into a pervasive, meaningless gloom, even
in very animated scenes of conflict and violence. It has a feeling
of sleaziness in it which I don't attach to the subjects--and if the
characters are not really sleazy, it must be the sensibility, though
I'd prefer to just use the word "personality" in his case--of
Schrader himself which creates it, displacing the sexual energy
someone else might instill in the characters with repression in the
tone and texture of the film.

Even without imprinting the film formally, that personality is just
poisonous to the overrated Taxi Driver, which would be a far
worthier target for Fred's scorn, as it has the virtues at times of
some arresting mise-en-scene on Scorsese's part (and Bernard
Herrmann's last film music too). But the idea that this movie in
any meaningful way resembles The Searchers is just ludicrous--an
idea I'm guessing Schrader sold Scorsese on and they
enthusiastically ran with it until their "Scar scene" became a kind
of Monument Valley in New York head trip. I have no doubt that
Scorsese at least does appreciate The Searchers for itself, and it
would be interesting indeed if he and Schrader could be confronted
with just how little affinity Taxi Driver really has with The
Searchers, not just its narrative and structure, but in ideas,
notions of character, vision of life, resonance of America, and
perhaps most, understanding of art and how it really takes its place
in a culture. I've hit this example especially hard (Schrader
didn't direct it, after all), but as long as Fred brought up the
point above, I'd just like to say that I'm getting sick beyond words
of reference books and the like which use up one of their three
lines on The Searchers to say "An important American movie, which
influenced Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Schrader and Cimino, among
others." Fortunately, I'm certain this too will pass and The
Searchers can certainly outlast anythng dumb that is ever said about
it.

Getting back to Schrader, Hard Core is innocuous compared to what
followed. His appalling reimagining of Cat People is the wet dream
of a stunted adolescent, Mishima a pretentious nightmare almost
beyond belief, and Patty Hearst was for me the equivalent of
actually being locked in a dark closet for several hours, only less
pleasant. Then, of course, there's American Gigolo--yes, a cool
opening title song and a cool guy driving along in a convertible can
get you feeling open when you have been assured you're going to see
a "serious" and even "spiritual" movie, and I'm ashamed to say this
one kind of sucked me in--the first time--at least until the
ending. But on second viewing I felt the hollowness of Schrader
building toward that completely absurd Pickpocket paraphrase all the
way through it. The constructedness of the central character and
again, the absence of any real style, here presumably meant to pass
as the equivalent of the "transcendental style" of Brsson was all
too evident. Of course, Patty Hearst should have been the end for
me. Somehow though I saw Light Sleeper--and maybe its typically
depressed atmosphere matched my low mood or something because it
seems completely Schrader-like in retrospect (no I don't have any
desire to revisit it) but I kind of enjoyed that one, if that's the
word.

The end of this comes in 1999, several weeks after finishing and
delivering to my then agent a revision of a screenplay I'd worked
years on, and after my beloved dog had died in those same weeks.
What can you do on a day when you suddenly have no responsibilities
and are for the moment all used up with grieving? The answer is go
to an actual double feature--just like the ones we used to know.
Two first-run movies playing together for one price (and the only
time I can remember anything like this lately), because they were up
for Oscars. First was Gods and Monsters (Bill Condon), a fine
movie, kind of old-fashioned in the filmmaking but bracingly fresh
and striking a chord in my sensibility anyway in its ideas and
relationships (the same filmmaker's recent Kinsey had these same
qualities also). It put me in a pretty good mood, I must say. Then
came the second feature Affliction. And as it lurched along its
grim gray way, all those other Schrader movies rolled through my
mind, and I realized yes, this guy wrote a book about Ozu, Dreyer
and Bresson. He likes The Searchers and even the Westerns of Budd
Boetticher. But sometimes people just yearn forwhat they are not.
And to assert an actually opaque notion of transcendental style when
neither spirituality or any real artistry are part of you is only to
try hopelessly to fill a void in which the true austerity which has
marked the work of many a great artist will never find a place. As
I walked out of the theatre it became blindingly clear. This guy
doesn't have a ray of light in his heart.

No more, Paul.
24433
From: "Patrick Ciccone"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:39am
Subject: Re: Plasticity and Shot Duration pwciccone

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:

> Another thread is the obliteration of the shot as a unit of meaning.

I cut your following comment about minimalism, but isn't one of the
most prevalent countertrends to the devaluation of the shot the
overvaluation of the shot in art-festival cinema? Two of my three
favorite films of this decade (WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES and RUSSIAN ARK)
use extreme shot length to great and profoundly original effect, but
elsewhere it seems that this device (Haneke's CODE UNKNOWN comes to
mind first, with countless others) is merely a the cointerpoint to
overedited films, with no real purpose or effect.

Don't know where to place the recent Gus Van Sant films in this
rubric--ELEPHANT is a major work of the long take school--

PWC
24434
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:52am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) samfilms2003

> Maybe a distant viewpoint comes
> to seem like a waiting out of the action rather than a perspective on it;
> maybe camera movement or panning seems unmotivated. (I feel this way
> about Hou quite often, for instance.)

I think in Hou it can literally be what you said, "waiting out of the
action" (cf 40 yrs martial law in Taiwan) i.e. IS the perspective on it
as it were.

>The image can't have too much
> compositional identity if this feeling is going to come across.

I think you're sorta right, but nonetheless the 'not too much' may be
the identity; by the end of a Hou film we have a sum of identities.

-Sam
24435
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:03am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) samfilms2003

>
> Does this make any more sense?

Yes it does, thanks !

But what I'd add, is that you do have, in this period, a move away from
studio sets - and even when it's soundstage sets the "model" is often
on location inspired realism; maybe this as much as television leads
to the reduction of the iconic shot to the psychological shot; the over-
the-shoulder, the 2 shots. Perhaps, even - boy am I out on a limb here ! -
but the suburban living room as the archetypical space replacing the
prarie, the mountainside, the dark city street in receeding lines...

Wil this make any sense when I read it after a nights sleep ? ;-)

-Sam
24436
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 7:01am
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) tharpa2002

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Lucas"
wrote:

"Even without imprinting the film formally, that personality is just
poisonous to the overrated Taxi Driver, which would be a far
worthier target for Fred's scorn, as it has the virtues at times of
some arresting mise-en-scene on Scorsese's part (and Bernard
Herrmann's last film music too). But the idea that this movie in
any meaningful way resembles The Searchers is just ludicrous..."

Another major Schrader reference is DAIBOSATSU TOGE/SWORD OF DOOM
(both Uchida's version and Okamoto's version.) The nihilist anti-
hero turns up in TAXI DRIVER and ROLLING THUNDER; the blood bath in a
whore house is used in TAXI DRIVER, ROLLING THUNDER, THE YAKUZA;
crashing through the shoji screens in HARDCORE and THE YAKUZA.

His brother Leonard must have got him interested in Japanese cinema
and literature. Leonard has lived in Japan since the late 1960s and
teaches there. He translated a number of important texts on Japanese
film that exist only in manuscript at the Pacific Film Archives in
Berkeley. Even though Paul had Leonard to advise him, MISHIMA is
unbelievably lame (I'm aware of the obstacles Schrader had in making
it but MISHIMA is still inexcusably bad.)

Richard
24437
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 8:26am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) f_verissimo

I just found out that you can read Jameson's piece right here:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html

> I remember another essay on "The Shining" published in
> the 80s in the San Francisco Chronicle. The writer argued that the
> film is an allegory for the genocide of Native Americans.

That one can be read here:
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0052.html

fv
24438
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:24am
Subject: THE SHINING'S only special effect (Was: ELEPHANT & THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Fernando Verissimo" verissimo@u...> wrote:

Jack watching his prey as they walk the miniature labyrinth.

Can anyone tell me how the high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the
miniature maze was made?
24439
From: "thebradstevens"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:07am
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) thebradstevens

> I don't think the novel itself was that bad. If I recall it
properly,
> Kubrick said in the same interview that it was best to adapt flawed
or
> mediocre material than truly good books or classics.
>
> And here's the irony: if we make a list of the authors Kubrick
adapted,
> King's name would appear right there in the bottom. But THE
SHINING, IMHO,
> is his best film.

King is actually a very interesting writer - vastly superior to
Anthony Burgess.

One of the things I'll always be grateful to Kubrick for is
introducing me to the work of Arthur Schnitzler.

On the other hand, I read Nabokov's LOLITA recently, and found it
incredibly disappointing. All those things that make the film so
interesting prove to be Kubrick's inventions. The film is constructed
as a study of the different acting styles of James Mason and Peter
Sellers, which imply two different ways of presenting the self. For
Humbert/Mason, the self is a solid block, unchanging and rigid. Even
when Humbert does something uncharacteristic, such as falling in love
with a teenage girl, he does it specifically as a deviation from a
norm - the norm itself remains unquestioned. But for Sellers/Quilty,
there is no norm, no center from which the character/actor could
deviate, His identity is created (and destroyed) spontaneously, from
one moment to the next (it is, I think, crucial that we should always
be aware that Peter Sellers is 'doing' an American accent). Look at
the opening scene, in which Humbert sets up a scenario for the death
of Quilty, and Quilty refuses to play the game, instead parodying
Humbert's pretentions (by reading Humbert's note in a Walter Brennan
accent). None of this is in the book, which renders Quilty a much
less interesting character - Adrian Lyne's remake seems to me
the 'faithful' adaptation this book deserves.
24440
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:02pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) fredcamper

Blake Lucas wrote:

> ....Even without imprinting the film formally, that personality is just
> poisonous to the overrated Taxi Driver, which would be a far
> worthier target for Fred's scorn....

Oh, I hated that one too!

I remember seeing it with a film student who liked it and one who
didn't. In a restaurant afterwards I drew a rectangle on a napkin and
gave some kind of incoherent lecture about how cinema depends on a
precise sense of the frame and how this film didn't have it. Talk about
visual "soup."

Fred Camper
24441
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:38pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "thebradstevens"
wrote:

>
>
> King is actually a very interesting writer - vastly superior to
> Anthony Burgess.

I agree that King is good - The Shining especially - but A Clockwork
Orange is also a nice little book. Kubrick was being unfair to his
sources. He never adapted a major novel, but the minor ones he chose
were terrific, with the exception of Red Alert.

> On the other hand, I read Nabokov's LOLITA recently, and found it
> incredibly disappointing. All those things that make the film so
> interesting prove to be Kubrick's inventions.

Lolita, of course, is the exception, being one of the great novels of
our era, but I love The Brad's unorthodox take on apportioning praise
for the film. The clash of acting styles is indeed where the film
achieves an original vision beyond mere adaptation. But the book is a
masterpiece in its own right.

I guess this proves the value of my rule that - because seeing the
film before reading the book inevitably hurts the book if the film is
good - you always read the book first if it's by a good writer,
unless the adaptation is by a great filmmaker. In this case - great
filmmaker, great novelist - I happen to have read the book first.
Clearly by not doing so, The Brad, you have missed out on one of the
wonders of the English language!

Lechery, wicked lechery is the only reason to see the Lyne "remake."
24442
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:49pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Lucas"
wrote:
>
>
> No more, Paul.

History will record that the only critic-filmmaker of the Seventies
who was a protege of Pauline Kael was a lousy critic and a worse
filmmaker. I also find his scripts for Scorsese - Last Temptation,
particulalrly - just plain dumb. His only real gift was for self-
promotion, and alas, in this business that's sometimes enough.
24443
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 1:52pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Modiano"
wrote:
>
Even though Paul had Leonard to advise him, MISHIMA is
> unbelievably lame (I'm aware of the obstacles Schrader had in
making
> it but MISHIMA is still inexcusably bad.)
>
Judging by the evidence that has filtered onto the screen, Leonard
Schrader had more to offer cinema than his glib brother. But "de
mortuis nil nisi bonum."
24444
From: "thebradstevens"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 2:19pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) thebradstevens

>
> I agree that King is good - The Shining especially - but A
Clockwork
> Orange is also a nice little book.

It seems to me both the worst novel that Kubrick adapted (of the ones
I've read), and the only one wherein he remained essentially faithful
to the original (okay, he cut off the ending, but then so did the
original UK publisher).

Kubrick was being unfair to his
> sources. He never adapted a major novel, but the minor ones he
chose
> were terrific, with the exception of Red Alert.

I haven't read that one, or BARRY LYNDON. Much as I like both King's
THE SHINING and THE SHORT-TIMERS, I can see Kubrick's point - neither
novel was so perfect that it couldn't be improved. But TRAUMNOVELLE
is certainly a major novel

> Lolita, of course, is the exception, being one of the great novels
of
> our era, but I love The Brad's unorthodox take on apportioning
praise
> for the film. The clash of acting styles is indeed where the film
> achieves an original vision beyond mere adaptation. But the book is
a
> masterpiece in its own right.

I'm sure that I'm being unfair, and expecting the novel to do the
same things as the film. Perhaps I should read it again. But I really
couldn't understand the appeal - all the wordplay struck me as
positively sophomoric.

>
> I guess this proves the value of my rule that - because seeing the
> film before reading the book inevitably hurts the book if the film
is
> good - you always read the book first if it's by a good writer

Interesting that we should be having this discussion, because I
recently found a second-hand copy of Newton Thornburg's novel CUTTER
AND BONE (in MURDER ONE on Charing Cross Road, one of London's best
bookshops), and picked it up because I liked the film. Suffice it to
say that as great as the film is, the book is even better. I am
currently reading through all the other Thornburg books, and
discovering one masterpiece after another.
24445
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: Plasticity and Shot Duration sallitt1

> I cut your following comment about minimalism, but isn't one of the
> most prevalent countertrends to the devaluation of the shot the
> overvaluation of the shot in art-festival cinema? Two of my three
> favorite films of this decade (WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES and RUSSIAN ARK)
> use extreme shot length to great and profoundly original effect, but
> elsewhere it seems that this device (Haneke's CODE UNKNOWN comes to
> mind first, with countless others) is merely a the cointerpoint to
> overedited films, with no real purpose or effect.
>
> Don't know where to place the recent Gus Van Sant films in this
> rubric--ELEPHANT is a major work of the long take school--

I'd like to point out that the sort of thing I'm talking about is just a
tendency at best. There's nothing stopping today's filmmakers from
expressing themselves through composition, lighting, and other plastic
qualities, and it's not a rare occurence.

I'd also be careful about throwing filmmakers into "plastic" and
"non-plastic" (paper?) categories. I mentioned Hou as an example of
someone whose compositions suggest to me an anti-plasticity thread of
modern cinema, but on the other hand the lighting in his films is often
stunningly beautiful and requires no modernist credentials to appreciate.

I'm not a huge fan of Van Sant's ELEPHANT (I love Clarke's), but I'd
certainly say that Van Sant cares about the plastic qualities of those
images, which are quite striking. What he does with that beauty is kind
of weird, but whatever.

As for the overvaluation of the shot: I dunno, I need to nail this idea
down a bit more. I cited the multiplicity of angles in MTV style (or,
say, in Oshima's VIOLENCE AT NOON, so as not to load the argument against
poor MTV) as a way of breaking down the emphatic structure of
Griffith-derived decoupage: shooting from everywhere is like shooting from
nowhere. So maybe I was calling "devaluation" what you were calling
"overvaluation."

(Maybe films like EFFI BRIEST, where the beginning and end of each shot is
a big dramatic inflection, could be said to be "overvaluing the shot" in
some sense. I'm just playing with the phrase now....) - Dan
24446
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:27pm
Subject: Re: Re: Plasticity and Shot Duration cellar47

--- Dan Sallitt wrote:

>
> I'm not a huge fan of Van Sant's ELEPHANT (I love
> Clarke's), but I'd
> certainly say that Van Sant cares about the plastic
> qualities of those
> images, which are quite striking. What he does with
> that beauty is kind
> of weird, but whatever.
>

Van Santian plasticity is even more marked in "Gerry"
-- a landscape film well on par with "La Region
Centrale," "La Cicatrice Interieure" and all of james
Benning. Among other things it's my cat's favorite
movie. He finds the last part, where Matt Damon and
Casey Affleck (the younger, more talented brother) are
lurching over the salt flats especially enchanting.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
24447
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:21pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) tharpa2002

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:

Brad:
"King is actually a very interesting writer - vastly superior to
Anthony Burgess."

Bill:
"I agree that King is good - The Shining especially - but A Clockwork
Orange is also a nice little book..."

King's ideas are interesting but his prose style is J.K. Rowling for
adults (everything that Harold Bloom said about Rowling is true of
King in spades.) I agree with King's own evaluation of his style, "My
prose style is the equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries." In
other words, it's junk prose.

Douglas E. Winter has made the case for King in several books about
him, describing King as "our Dickens," and S. T. Joshi has made the
case against him in "The Modern Weird Tale" which may be of interest
to you Bill since you like fantastic literature.

Kubrick's version of THE SHINNING is a case of turning a sow's ear
into a silk purse, and as a stylist Kubrick is far beyond King.

"Lolita, of course, is the exception, being one of the great novels
of our era, but I love The Brad's unorthodox take on apportioning
praise for the film. The clash of acting styles is indeed where the
film achieves an original vision beyond mere adaptation. But the
book is a masterpiece in its own right."

Alfred E. Appel, Jr.'s annotated "Lolita" is fascinating for the film
references he uncovers (among other things,) and his book "The Dark
Cinema of Vladimir Nabokov" explores the connections between
Nabokov's novels and film noir. Nabokov was a big movie fan and he
liked Kubrick's version of LOLITA given the constraints of censorship
of the era (and King hated K's version of THE SHINNING.) Too bad
Nabokov declined Hitchcock's invitation to write a screenplay for him.

Richard
24448
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:27pm
Subject: Re: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) cellar47

--- Richard Modiano wrote:
Nabokov was a big
> movie fan and he
> liked Kubrick's version of LOLITA given the
> constraints of censorship
> of the era (and King hated K's version of THE
> SHINNING.) Too bad
> Nabokov declined Hitchcock's invitation to write a
> screenplay for him.
>

I recall aliveradio broadcast of the New York premiere
with Nabokov and the Mrs. being interviewed. They were
dazzled by the whole thing. Nabokov is on record in
interviews praising Kubrick's film and Sue Lyon's
performance in particular. While she was far older
than the Dolores Haze he wrote he found her physical
grace marvelous.
>
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
24449
From: BklynMagus
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:45pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads!) cinebklyn

Fred writes:

> In a restaurant afterwards I drew a rectangle
on a napkin and gave some kind of incoherent
lecture about how cinema depends on a precise
sense of the frame and how this film didn't have
it. Talk about visual "soup."

I am using this statement by Fred as a jumping
of point and will also reference other recent
posts.

One possible way to think about the "destabilization"
of the frame is that it is symptomatic of the
transition from the "High Renaissance" phase of
cinema to the "Mannerist" phase.

One definition of mannerism from the net states:

"Mannerism rejected Renaissance balance and
harmony in favor of emotional intensity and ambiguity.
In Mannerist painting, this was expressed mainly through
severe distortions of perspective and scale; complex and
crowded compositions; strong, sometimes harsh or
discordant colors; and elongated figures in exaggerated
poses."

Mannerist films, like Mannerist paintings, always seem to
me to want to escape the confines of their frames. But
El Greco et. al., did not have the technical tools to
do what filmmakers can do. Filmmakers today can
destabilize the frame, creating what Fred calls "visual
soup."

In my view, film went from a period of frame stability
(1900 - 1945) to one where the frame remained
stable, but filmmakers such as Fuller, Sirk, Hitchcock,
Mankiewicz, Huston, Preminger destabilized what was
within the frame (1946 - c. 1976) to the present state
where destabilization affects not only the content,
but the plastic elements as well (am I using this term
correctly?).

Now I am not saying that these phases are clearly
demarcated; there is, of course, overlap. But I think
the rise of Mannerist cinema is clear, with its
accompanying emphasis on the technical and the
subjective/unstable. A recent example would be
Schrader's "Auto Focus" where the frame and image
destabilizes as Bob Crane does.

In some ways, mannerist cinema has the potential
for a greater visceral/emotional impact than that of
earlier cinema. I think that it is also interesting that
the high priest of Mannerism -- Scorsese -- often makes
films about characters who are tormented over religion.
Mannerist film might be a response to the decline in
social/religious authority, a warning saying "See what
happens when the safeguards are removed?"

Baroque Cinema, which could be the next phase, may
reassert the cohesive and the traditional, as happened
in the original Baroque period. To my mind, the
Catholic Counter-Reformation of that era is reflected
in the contemporary rise of fundamentalist religious
dogmas around the world. Maybe the "Vermeer above the
bed" a member cited is a first indicator of the emergence
of Baroque cinema.

Brian
24450
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:51pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) samfilms2003

>. But for Sellers/Quilty,
> there is no norm, no center from which the character/actor could
> deviate, His identity is created (and destroyed) spontaneously, from
> one moment to the next

I'm not so sure. Read the book again, keep your eye on the mirrors ;-)

>(it is, I think, crucial that we should always
> be aware that Peter Sellers is 'doing' an American accent).

I think Strangelove takes of from Quilty, but I prefer Sellers' Quilty.

As for Nabokov (who discovered rare butterflies in Telluride in anticipation
of future festivals) I don't know, what I would give to write or shoot this:

"While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian
glow, truly mystical in contrast with the moonless and massive night,
on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin
phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous
dishwater by the oblique angle of that receeding world, -and the next
moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation."

I say, Damn !

-Sam
24451
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:21pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads!) samfilms2003

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:
> One possible way to think about the "destabilization"
> of the frame is that it is symptomatic of the
> transition from the "High Renaissance" phase of
> cinema to the "Mannerist" phase.

That's good, Brian. Food for further thought.

Gotta confess Fred's remark re "Taxi Driver" gets a "huh ??"
from me, though)

-Sam
24452
From: "joe_mcelhaney"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:33pm
Subject: Re: Stage Door joe_mcelhaney

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Charles Dauth"
wrote:
> The following question contains a spoiler:
>
> I just finished watching the new dvd of "Stage Door."
>
> At the end, after Terry Randall is a success, there has
> always been (at least when I have seen it), a quick
> montage that carries the audience forward to 4 months
> later.
>
> In this version, there is an extra shot of Kay's grave being
> mown, and two of the other montage shots are superimposed
> on top of this image.
>
> This adds a whole new aspect for me, but I am sure I have
> mever seen it before either on tape, tv or in revival.
>
> Any thoughts/info AFB members?
>
> Brian

I haven't picked up this disc yet. I've seen "Stage Door" umpteen
times but have never seen this shot. However, Roger McNiven does
refer to it in his essay on La Cava in J-P's book. He says it was cut
from many 16mm. and television prints in the U.S. but doesn't come up
with a reason for the cut having been made in the first place. I
wonder if perhaps the shot had been eliminated from the film at some
early point in the film's original run for being, as Roger puts
it, "savagely ironic," but that some prints with the original shot
survived and that this is what Warners used for the new version.
This print is certainly not the one they used for the VHS tape Turner
put out over a decade ago, which was still derived from 35mm.
material. So I don't think it's simply a question of 16mm. and
television. Is there commentary on the disc that would explain
anything?
24453
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: Sarris/Benayoun sallitt1

> Both Cahiers and
> Positif were totally male-oriented in their early period, and
> feminism caught up with them slowly and more or less simultaneously.

It's not that either magazine was feminist, but I have the feeling that
the Positif aesthetic would have led them more often into praising films
for their masculine vigor. (Seems to me that, back then, it was not
uncommon for the Left to associate fighting the good fight with masculine
virtues.) Cahiers' tastes (which I think were influenced, at one or two
removes, by religion) took them down a more "feminine" road. - Dan
24454
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:21pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "thebradstevens"
wrote:
I love The Brad's unorthodox take on apportioning
> praise
> > for Lolita. The clash of acting styles is indeed where the film
> > achieves an original vision beyond mere adaptation. But the book
is a masterpiece in its own right.
>
> I'm sure that I'm being unfair, and expecting the novel to do the
> same things as the film. Perhaps I should read it again. But I
really
> couldn't understand the appeal - all the wordplay struck me as
> positively sophomoric.

LOL

>you always read the book first if it's by a good writer
>
> Interesting that we should be having this discussion, because I
> recently found a second-hand copy of Newton Thornburg's novel
CUTTER
> AND BONE (in MURDER ONE on Charing Cross Road, one of London's best
> bookshops), and picked it up because I liked the film. Suffice it
to
> say that as great as the film is, the book is even better. I am
> currently reading through all the other Thornburg books, and
> discovering one masterpiece after another.

My rule was pragmatic, actually - I know that with most novels I
won't have the strength to read them if I've already seen a
relatively faithful adaptation, but I'm sure there are exceptions. On
that principle I made a point of reading LA Confidential before
seeing the film, and as a result ended up paraenthetically attacking
the later in print.
24455
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:25pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Modiano"
wrote:

>
> King's ideas are interesting but his prose style is J.K. Rowling
for
> adults (everything that Harold Bloom said about Rowling is true of
> King in spades.)

He says the same things about King!

Too bad
> Nabokov declined Hitchcock's invitation to write a screenplay for
him.

That was in the leadup to Torn Curtain. I THINK he wanted VN to write
not Torn Curtain, but the other project, about a restaurant. But you
cd say that a little of VN made it into Torn Curtain anyway.
24456
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:28pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads!) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:
> Fred writes:
>
> > In a restaurant afterwards I drew a rectangle
> on a napkin and gave some kind of incoherent
> lecture about how cinema depends on a precise
> sense of the frame and how this film didn't have
> it. Talk about visual "soup."
>
> I am using this statement by Fred as a jumping
> of point and will also reference other recent
> posts.
>
> One possible way to think about the "destabilization"
> of the frame is that it is symptomatic of the
> transition from the "High Renaissance" phase of
> cinema to the "Mannerist" phase.
>
> One definition of mannerism from the net states:
>
> "Mannerism rejected Renaissance balance and
> harmony in favor of emotional intensity and ambiguity.
> In Mannerist painting, this was expressed mainly through
> severe distortions of perspective and scale; complex and
> crowded compositions; strong, sometimes harsh or
> discordant colors; and elongated figures in exaggerated
> poses."
>
> Mannerist films, like Mannerist paintings, always seem to
> me to want to escape the confines of their frames. But
> El Greco et. al., did not have the technical tools to
> do what filmmakers can do. Filmmakers today can
> destabilize the frame, creating what Fred calls "visual
> soup."
>
> In my view, film went from a period of frame stability
> (1900 - 1945) to one where the frame remained
> stable, but filmmakers such as Fuller, Sirk, Hitchcock,
> Mankiewicz, Huston, Preminger destabilized what was
> within the frame (1946 - c. 1976) to the present state
> where destabilization affects not only the content,
> but the plastic elements as well (am I using this term
> correctly?).
>
> Now I am not saying that these phases are clearly
> demarcated; there is, of course, overlap. But I think
> the rise of Mannerist cinema is clear, with its
> accompanying emphasis on the technical and the
> subjective/unstable. A recent example would be
> Schrader's "Auto Focus" where the frame and image
> destabilizes as Bob Crane does.
>
> In some ways, mannerist cinema has the potential
> for a greater visceral/emotional impact than that of
> earlier cinema. I think that it is also interesting that
> the high priest of Mannerism -- Scorsese -- often makes
> films about characters who are tormented over religion.
> Mannerist film might be a response to the decline in
> social/religious authority, a warning saying "See what
> happens when the safeguards are removed?"
>
> Baroque Cinema, which could be the next phase, may
> reassert the cohesive and the traditional, as happened
> in the original Baroque period. To my mind, the
> Catholic Counter-Reformation of that era is reflected
> in the contemporary rise of fundamentalist religious
> dogmas around the world. Maybe the "Vermeer above the
> bed" a member cited is a first indicator of the emergence
> of Baroque cinema.
>
> Brian

Very interesting argument, Brian. There's a lot out there to support
it, although of course there are technical revolutions going on at
the same time that've had their impact as well.
24457
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:34pm
Subject: The next colorization - digital 3-dization hotlove666

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?
tmpl=story&cid=509&ncid=509&e=26&u=/ap/20050318/ap_on_bi_ge/film_digit
al_3_d_1
24458
From: BklynMagus
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:38pm
Subject: Re: Adaptation (was Kubrick vs Nabokov) cinebklyn

ht666 writes:

> On that principle I made a point of reading
LA Confidential before seeing the film, and as
a result ended up paraenthetically attacking
the later in print.

The film deserves some special award as the
most (in)famous 180 degree switch in moving
from page to screen. I thought: why adapt
Ellroy if this is the movie you wanted to make.

Brian
24459
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:46pm
Subject: Re: Cassavetes' Faces (was Re: Off with their heads!) sallitt1

> But the acting grows grotesque in scene after scene: the laughing
> and crying come too much, or too soon, or too easily. The sense of
> verisimilitude is constantly challenged soon after it is introduced;
> any identification a viewer has with the actor is bound to be
> strained far and probably broken. And yet why does Cassavetes keep
> repeating these patterns? (Easy answer that gets us
> nowhere: 'Because he's not a good filmmaker.') I think it's because
> the acting style and its structured repetition are a formal strategy
> used to jolt and pull a viewer out of complacency and into active
> consideration of performance and the relationship between human
> subjects and human objects.

I get jolted by Cassavetes, but it never comes together for me into a new
kind of sense.

It always seems to me that Cassavetes' films are about performance as
well - particularly, about actors, about the practice of acting, the
pleasures of the actor, the needs of the actor. This perception gets in
the way of my appreciating Cassavetes: I feel as if the director and
actors are taking a private pleasure while I'm suffering.

> (And Fred, I'm only bringing in avant-garde film because I want to
> stress how important isolation and perceptual restructuring
> principles are to Cassavetes' cinema

It's the "restructuring" part I need help with. I can see the breaking-
down part.

> The camera is all over the place in each scene. It's "careless" in
> the sense that Cassavetes is no Blake Edwards and doesn't have a jaw-
> dropping talent for composition. But the editing together of many,
> many camera angles suggests that Cassavetes was really interested in
> the formal effect of such an approach.

Once, while watching A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, I had the sudden
realization that Cassavetes was emulating the decoupage of live TV: the
way the director punches up the wrong camera for a second, then screams,
"No, camera B, camera B!" Random bits of key actions are missed just
because of slow reactions in the control room.

> A shot of
> a character talking might be followed by a shot of an unexpected
> character listening intently (or intently not listening).

This is a lot like live TV too. Cutting away to a listener is a way to
change lenses or camera position. - Dan
24460
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:47pm
Subject: Melinda and Melinda hotlove666

I like it. Its a nifty little conceptual film, marred as always by
WA's inability to write realistic dialogue in the serious parts. I
also thought Ferrell was doing a good job of "doing" the Woodman, but
it was not a brilliant creation in its own right like the actor
who "does" Rohmer in Tale of Springtime (the lead). As usual, that's
the screenwriter's best dialogue: "We can get married and hire a
laundress!"

Allen will never be a natural, but by God he tries to do something
different and not just make the same ol' same ol', and he does give
gifts to his actresses - like the two parts for Radha Mitchell, who
will be getting offers off of this. It's amusing to note that Chloe
Sevigny's presskit bio doesn't mention Brown Bunny. She's very good
here too, as is an actress I don't know, Brooke Smith, in a
supporting role. People who have been asking where all of Manhattan's
African-American inhabitants went should be pleased with this one.
And Wallace Shawn, with his head-splitting grin, is fun as always
playing the Mask of Comedy.

Not one of the (rare) great ones, but one of the good ones.
24461
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 6:48pm
Subject: Re: Adaptation (was Kubrick vs Nabokov) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:
> ht666 writes:
>
> > On that principle I made a point of reading
> LA Confidential before seeing the film, and as
> a result ended up paraenthetically attacking
> the later in print.
>
> The film deserves some special award as the
> most (in)famous 180 degree switch in moving
> from page to screen. I thought: why adapt
> Ellroy if this is the movie you wanted to make.
>
> Brian

At a certain point it becomes what some CdC critic taxed Cukor with
doing in Justine: "urinating on someone else's masterpiece."
24462
From: "Matt Armstrong"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 7:02pm
Subject: Re: The next colorization - digital 3-dization matt_c_armst...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?
>
tmpl=story&cid=509&ncid=509&e=26&u=/ap/20050318/ap_on_bi_ge/film_digi
t
> al_3_d_1

The article must be in error when it says people will have to use
the anaglyphic red & blue glasses. That's a common mistake w/r/t 3D.
24463
From: Charles Leary
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 7:18pm
Subject: Re: Cassavetes' Faces (was Re: Off with their heads!) cw_leary

Yes, I think Cassavetes' work in live television - for example, the
close-up, the limited sets - provided a major influence for his
filmmaking aesthetic, and also production practice. At least, this is
one of the arguments in my dissertation on JC which has a chapter on
his TV career. I haven't found too many occasions where Cassavetes
discussed television at length, but before his film career really took
off, he did say in 1959 for an oral history project that "Television is
the only American art form, the only INDEPENDENT American art form." Of
course he goes on to lament how the sponsors ruined it, which I think
is actually a point being made in the opening of FACES (the more widely
seen opening, not the additional one on the new DVD) in the screening
room scene. The lights dim and then the credits for FACES come up, but
I think this is less a meta-cinematic moment than more referential to
the tv industry, as John Marley and company watch the "Dolce Vita" of
commercials.

Charley

> This is a lot like live TV too. Cutting away to a listener is a way
> to
> change lenses or camera position. - Dan
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24464
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 8:50pm
Subject: Adaptation (Was: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov ) blakelucaslu...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>
>>
> I guess this proves the value of my rule that - because seeing the
> film before reading the book inevitably hurts the book if the film
is
> good - you always read the book first if it's by a good writer,
> unless the adaptation is by a great filmmaker. In this case -
great
> filmmaker, great novelist - I happen to have read the book first.
> Clearly by not doing so, The Brad, you have missed out on one of
the
> wonders of the English language!
>

We all know that someone once said more good movies have been made
from the novels of W. R. Burnett than the novels of Dostoyevsky.
What about cases where it's a great writer and a great filmmaker?
In that regard, I'm just curious of the thoughts of any a_film_by
members who love The Tarnished Angels who have read Faulkner's Pylon.
I haven't yet--have always meant to. I've always thought that a book
comparing and contrasting Pylon, The Tarnished Angels and Cather's
My Antonia could be a uniquely interesting one, though would have to
be written by someone who appreciates both the art of cinema (Sirk)
and the art of literature (the two books) and formal aspects one
specifically values in each. Not having read it I don't know if
Pylon makes any reference to My Antonia, or if this is only in the
film (it has sounded in interviews like Sirk himself may have come
up with its use and that he rightly loved the book), but I have read
My Antonia, a novel as great as Angels is a film, and the
relationship between the two is profound. The reason I thought a
book considering all three would be good idea is that these are
three American works of art, from different perspectives, one a
female voice, one male, one male but with the perspective of the
European outsider. I won't go into why My Antonia relates so deeply
to Angels here--a subject for that book!--though I guess those who
know both know what I'm talking about. And it's not surprising
given the great discernment and cultural background of Sirk himself.
Mainly, just asking for any thoughts about Pylon and how it rates
with the movie if anyone wants to share. I know it's widely
considered minor Faulkner and he is said to have liked the movie,
which is surely quite different in some ways. But it's still at the
top of my list. I am wanting to post something on Angels relevant
to certain of the ongoing theoretical discussions which have been
coming along and will do so in a week with more time and less
demands, so this is prelude to that.
24465
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:03pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) tharpa2002

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:

"That was in the leadup to Torn Curtain. I THINK he wanted VN to
write not Torn Curtain, but the other project, about a restaurant.
But you cd say that a little of VN made it into Torn Curtain anyway."

I've pulled Appel's book of the shelf (the correct title
is "Nabokov's Dark Cinema" and it covers VN and cinema more broadly
than just film noir contrary to what I said earlier; my failing
memory.) Anyway here's what Appel wrote (after a very interesting
discussion of Hitchcock for several pages):

"Not by chance did Hitchcock, one-time employer of Thronton Wilder
and Raymond Chandler, telephone Nabokov from London during the winter
of 1970...'Yes, of course I know who you are, and I admire your
work,' Nabokov told Hitchcock, whose modest self-introduction was
predicated on the assumption that a 'high brow' artist--another
active child of 1899--would be ignorant of his existence. Hitchcock
wanted Nabokov to do an original screenplay, but Nabokov declined
because he was committed to "Transparent Things" (1972), a ghost
story and eschatological thriller...Why did Hitchcock think to ask
him for a scenario, ten years after Nabokov's sole screen effort for
Kubrick? 'Oh, his humour noir is akin to my humour noir, if that's
what it should be called,' answered Nabokov. 'Perhaps there are
other reasons, too. I don't know. Do you?'"

So although the request was after TORN CURTAIN, you're right about
its VN flavor. Appel also reports that VN was very fond of THE
TROUBLE WITH HARRY.

Richard
24466
From: ptonguette@...
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:10pm
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda peter_tonguette

I thought "Melinda and Melinda" was great; along with "Anything Else," the
two films constitute a return to a more serious side of Allen (following the
minor, though charming, run of comedies which began with 2000's "Small Time
Crooks"). The major quality of "Anything Else" which was barely written or talked
about was that it represented Allen's return to 'Scope for the first time
since "Manhattan."

"Melinda and Melinda" has Allen working in 1.85 again, but the film is not
without formal interest. I thought the long, slow dolly-in to Melinda as she
was delivering that long monologue to Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller was
brilliant. The way he visualized the three friends - Melinda, Sevigny, and Brooke
Smith - was interesting, too; I think of the scene of the three of them on the
bridge, with Sevigny and Smith together in a two-shot and troubled Melinda in a
close-up by herself.

Bill, you're the second person I know to evidently find the comic sequences
stronger than the dramatic, but I felt just the opposite: I thought that the
aforementioned monologue is as fine a piece of dramatic writing and direction as
Allen has ever done. That's not to say that Ferrell wasn't funny, or those
scenes weren't well staged, just that I felt Allen was more invested in the
other parts.

I'm in the middle of writing a review of the film which I'll post when it's
published in The Film Journal in a few weeks.

Peter

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24467
From: ptonguette@...
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:14pm
Subject: Re: Re: "Monkey on My Back" peter_tonguette

A very belated thank-you to all who provided feedback on Andre de Toth's
new-to-DVD "Monkey on My Back." I appreciate it. Given the apparent lack of
auteurist enthusiasm for the film, I wonder why this de Toth - when so very few de
Toths are available on DVD - was put out? Cameron Mitchell is not exactly a
huge star name these days, so it can't be his presence. One of those
oddities, I guess.

In any event, when I do see the film I will post my impressions.

Peter

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24468
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:16pm
Subject: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads! (was: NEW American Cinema) blakelucaslu...

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Blake Lucas wrote:
>
> > ....Even without imprinting the film formally, that personality
is just
> > poisonous to the overrated Taxi Driver, which would be a far
> > worthier target for Fred's scorn....
>
> Oh, I hated that one too!
>
> I remember seeing it with a film student who liked it and one who
> didn't. In a restaurant afterwards I drew a rectangle on a napkin
and
> gave some kind of incoherent lecture about how cinema depends on a
> precise sense of the frame and how this film didn't have it. Talk
about
> visual "soup."
>
Though I did say it "has the virutes at times of some arresting mise-
en-scene on Scorsese's part (and Bernard Herrmann's last film music
too)..." I actually agree with that harsh "visual soup" judgment for
most of the movie. "At times" actually just refers to occasional
scenes of the taxi lurching along through the New York night to the
strains of Herrman's sombrely powerful music--and that's literally
all I value in the movie. Interestingly, certain images in those
scenes alone retain the "plasticity" now being debated as presumably
absent in later American cinema, at least as I understand it--there
is someone wanting to work formally back there behind the muck that
is this movie--but I don't think this has been the rule with
Scorsese. He seems more in the category of a "mannerist" as
discussed elsewhere today, and I'm only offering that objectively.
I didn't really want to try to rate Scorsese overall in talking
about Schrader.

Hot Love 666 wrote
I also find his scripts for Scorsese - Last Temptation,
particulalrly - just plain dumb.

And that's the only issue I wanted to put out about the two of
them. For though he is uneven, there are Scorsese movies I like,
and gradually as there has been less and less Schrader, I've come to
whatever appreciation I'm probably ever going to have of him. I
know which highly touted Scorsese classic Schrader's name is on
besides Taxi Driver of course. But I think of earlier "classic"
Scorsese (I use that term very advisedly) Mean Streets, in which
Schrader was not involved, is much the best. Formally, it may not
exactly give Ford or Dreyer anything to worry about, but it's an
honest movie, and not "just plain dumb."

As for Herrmann, my admiration for his film scoring gifts won't ever
entice me back to Taxi Driver. After all, he did so many films I
love or at least like--six Hitchcocks, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,
On Dangerous Ground, Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Naked and the Dead,
Magnificent Ambersons, Citizen Kane and even White White Doctor,
Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, just
to name a few.

Blake
24469
From: ptonguette@...
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 4:17pm
Subject: Re: Re: Paul Schrader (was: Off with their heads!) peter_tonguette

The one Schrader-directed film I find inarguably great (though it's
practically unknown since it was denied a theatrical release in the United States) is
his 1999 melodrama "Forever Mine." It's not like anything else he's done,
really, and yet it feels profoundly personal. He tried to get it made for a
decade before it eventually happened. I prefer it to "Far From Heaven."

Peter

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24470
From: "peterhenne"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:43pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) peterhenne
Online Now Send IM

In the film (I haven't read the book), Halloran explains to Danny
that people who have the shining can communicate with each other.
Jack is in some way at the center of otherworldy events, but that
doesn't mean he himself has the power to shine. That's a partial
explanation for why Halloran walks into Jack lying in wait--Halloran
can't read off Jack's thoughts like he can Danny's.

The conversation between Halloran and Danny over ice cream makes
pretty clear that the power of shining does not grant you
omniscience. It provides pieces of a puzzle. If Halloran should have
been able to foresee Jack blindsiding him, why stop there and say
that at first sight of Jack he should have foretold everything.

As for Halloran's murder, I think Richard has made a strong point
about undercutting the "Magic Negro" device.

Peter Henne

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Matt Armstrong"
wrote:
>
>
I am still sympathetic to concerns that
> Halloran's murder may have been mere convenience on Kubrick's
part.
> He needed an actual killing at some point to satisfy horror
> conventions, and truly shock us. And the cliche of the expendable
> black man was not popularly discussed yet, so perhaps he didn't
see
> how lame it might appear.
>
> My biggest problem with the sequence is that Halloran's behavior
> seems impossibly dumb. A man with psychic powers senses distress,
> goes to great trouble to arrive at the hotel and then quite
> literally walks down a dark corridor into a swinging axe! It's
> either an act of martyrdom or a foolish attempt at heroism by
> someone who considers himself invincible.
>
24471
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 10:08pm
Subject: LOLITA - Kubrick vs Nabokov (Was Re: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Modiano"
wrote:

>
> "Not by chance did Hitchcock, one-time employer of Thronton Wilder
> and Raymond Chandler, telephone Nabokov from London during the winter
> of 1970..

Hitchcock told Truffaut (in a cutr part of theinetrv iew) that there were 2 kinds
of writers - technicians who adapt existing work and creative writers who can
comne up w. story, characters etc. If you put what he said about Evan Hunter
in the context of this explanation, BTW, it was highly complimentary, because
he was explaining that Hunter was in the 2nd group.

AH liked to work with novelists: Chandler was a flop but Wilder was a dream,
as was Sally Benson, who did additional scenes for Shadow, whom he knew
from her Junior Miss stories in The New Yorker; Jay Presson Allen, then a
young novelist and playwright, wrote Marnie and Mary Rose; V. S. Pritchett
wrote a scene of The Birds (infuriating Hunter further); Maxwell Anderson, The
Wrong Man (and a first botched draft of Vertigo) and so on. Hitchcock's
favorite professional screenwriters were novelists too - Lehman, Hecht. The
only strictly pro screenwriters I can think of were Angus MacPhail and John
Michael Hayes.

The Cockrells, who wrote most of his tv shows, were technicians, but Stirling
Silliphant, who wrote The Crystal Trench, was an original.

So Nabokov and Hitchcock would have been like ham and eggs. If you look at
all the references to doubling in Shadow or, even more, Strangers on a Train,
it's clear they were kin. You'll notice if you look at the scene in the record shop
that the clock shows 9:30, the time on Bruno's watch when he looks at it
before entering the fairgrounds. Michael Friend, based on his research with
Stephen Mamber, tells me he doubts that there is any clock or watch visible in
a Hitchcock film where the hour shown doesn't have a precise significance.
The famous Hitchcock cameos are another Nabokovian device.
24472
From: "Gabe Klinger"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 10:33pm
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda gcklinger

Peter, I won't fight against your reaction though I do find it baffling that you would talk
about the aspect ratios of Woody Allen films since I see this as a detour in tackling the
moral aspects of his work.

I'm confused, even a little taken aback, that you would talk
about any material aspect of Woody Allen films when there's so much going on in this
absolutely wretched man's head that he's expressing on the screen with these characters.

Yes, we're all allowed to be moved by just the material aspects of cinema. This is how I
feel with Rohmer in his last two films. This is how I feel about Godard when I am not fully
into the actual emotional content of the work.

But, I'm sorry, your emphasis on a slow dolly shot as Rahda Mitchell delivers a mediocre
sub-sub-sub-Bergman monologue tells me you were paying more attention to the shot
than to what she was actually saying.

It's not good writing, I'm sorry; it may be good direction, but it's NOT good writing. It's
lazy, it's out of step with reality and real emotion, possibly because Woody Allen, as a
human being, just doesn't give a rat's ass anymore.

My opinion, but whatever. It's no feat, either, to hire a great cinematographer like Vilmos
Zsigmond. It just takes a little bit of good taste. And that we know Woody Allen has. But
where's the rest?

Gabe

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> I thought "Melinda and Melinda" was great; along with "Anything Else," the
> two films constitute a return to a more serious side of Allen (following the
> minor, though charming, run of comedies which began with 2000's "Small Time
> Crooks"). The major quality of "Anything Else" which was barely written or talked
> about was that it represented Allen's return to 'Scope for the first time
> since "Manhattan."
>
> "Melinda and Melinda" has Allen working in 1.85 again, but the film is not
> without formal interest. I thought the long, slow dolly-in to Melinda as she
> was delivering that long monologue to Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller was
> brilliant. The way he visualized the three friends - Melinda, Sevigny, and Brooke
> Smith - was interesting, too; I think of the scene of the three of them on the
> bridge, with Sevigny and Smith together in a two-shot and troubled Melinda in a
> close-up by herself.
>
> Bill, you're the second person I know to evidently find the comic sequences
> stronger than the dramatic, but I felt just the opposite: I thought that the
> aforementioned monologue is as fine a piece of dramatic writing and direction as
> Allen has ever done. That's not to say that Ferrell wasn't funny, or those
> scenes weren't well staged, just that I felt Allen was more invested in the
> other parts.
>
> I'm in the middle of writing a review of the film which I'll post when it's
> published in The Film Journal in a few weeks.
>
> Peter
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24473
From: samadams@...
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 10:41pm
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda arglebargle31

Brooke Smith has been wonderful in a number of small roles -- my
favorite was Sonya in Vanya on 42nd St., though she's probably best
known as Buffalo Bill's would-be victim in Silence of the Lambs (or
more recently as the lesbian art teacher on Six Feet Under). Her
mother is big-time publicist Lois Smith.

Re: Melinda. A reasonably interesting idea, though I could have done
without the pedantic, explain-everything-we're-about-to-do prologue.
But I don't feel like the interplay between the comic and tragic
"versions", which are really entirely different stories with a few
overlapping bits, produced any fruitful frisson. It's not as
screamingly misogynist as most of Allen's recent movies, which is a
start, but the lack of any noticable difference in style between the
"comedy" and "tragedy" pretty much saps any formalist tension the
movie might hope to create. The most interesting observation comes in
the first minute, which is never a good sign, although I do like that
fact that Wallace Shawn's comedian is convinced that the essence of
life is tragic, while his tragedian friend is convinced that life is
an absurd comedy.

Sam
24474
From: "Gabe Klinger"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 10:46pm
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda gcklinger

> People who have been asking where all of Manhattan's
> African-American inhabitants went should be pleased with this one.

Yeah, but now that they're here they're off-beat charmers who take our women away.

Gabe
24475
From: ptonguette@...
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 5:55pm
Subject: Re: Re: Melinda and Melinda peter_tonguette

Gabe, when you write that I was "paying more attention to the shot than to
what she was actually saying," I can only reply that you're right - I was.
Without turning this thread into a mirror of the interesting exchange Fred, Zach,
Yoel, and others are presently having about similar issues, I'd only say that
I find the "material aspects" of Allen's work usually so thoroughly ignored
that I feel I must emphasize them above his writing (which has been lauded, or
derided, for decades).

Everything else you write may very well be true (though the monologue in
question actually struck me as pretty good and very well delivered by Mitchell,
who is superb in the picture), but that doesn't discount the qualities I want to
draw attention to either. Similarly, I'd never deny that "Anything Else" is
a hugely angry movie...

Peter

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24476
From: "Matt Armstrong"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:03pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) matt_c_armst...

> omniscience. It provides pieces of a puzzle. If Halloran should
have
> been able to foresee Jack blindsiding him, why stop there and say
> that at first sight of Jack he should have foretold everything.

His psychic powers were not only one reason I think Halloran should
have used caution. The other reason is a standard gripe with bad
horror movie illogic: a character suspects something amiss, walks
into a dark space without protection of any kind and begins
announcing his presence loudly. This is why I think the scene sticks
out. It's like when those idiots keep looking for the missing cat
in "Alien." I'm not against horror movie illogic per se. "The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre" is a great example of how illogic (or rather
nightmare logic) can create almost unbearable tension. Not so,
with "The Shining" as this instance takes one out of the movie.

> As for Halloran's murder, I think Richard has made a strong point
> about undercutting the "Magic Negro" device.

I'm not sure how it undercuts the device. The "magic negro" wasn't a
well-discussed trope in 1980, to my knowledge. And the "magic negro"
often dies so that others (white protagonists) may live. Halloran
seems like a fairly standard issue magical negro.
24477
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:19pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING'S only special effect (Was: ELEPHANT & THE SHINING) f_verissimo

> Can anyone tell me how the high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the
> miniature maze was made?

Answer from the Kubrick FAQ:

16/ How did Kubrick do the shot where Jack looks down at a model maze to see
Wendy and Danny walking in it?
Stephen Pickard who worked as one of the assistant editors on the film
wrote.
"When Ray Lovejoy, the editor, first introduced me to Stanley he was
shooting the insert on the hedge maze. It was a large miniature which stood
upright and the live action of Wendy and Danny was a VistaVision plate. The
35mm 4-perf camera shutter speed was synchronised with the VV projector
shutter, similar to a traditional rear-projection set-up."

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/html/shining/shining.html

fv
24478
From: "Matt Armstrong"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:18pm
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda matt_c_armst...

>
> Everything else you write may very well be true (though the
monologue in
> question actually struck me as pretty good and very well delivered
by Mitchell,
> who is superb in the picture), but that doesn't discount the
qualities I want to
> draw attention to either. Similarly, I'd never deny
that "Anything Else" is
> a hugely angry movie...

It didn't strike me as angry, so much as deeply cynical. And, in its
portrait of the Ricci character, deeply misogynist. I spent more
time cringing than laughing. David Edelstein mentions in his review
today of "Melinda and Melinda" that Allen claimed he'd never watched
Jason Biggs in "American Pie" before casting him in "Anything Else."
Said the film didn't sound "sophisticated" enough. It's a shame,
because the "American Pie" movies are actually funny and quite warm
while Allen's comedy is increasingly shrill and bitter.
24479
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:35pm
Subject: Re: THE SHINING'S only special effect (Was: ELEPHANT & THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Fernando Verissimo"
wrote:
> > Can anyone tell me how the high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the
> > miniature maze was made?
>
> Answer from the Kubrick FAQ:
>
> 16/ How did Kubrick do the shot where Jack looks down at a model maze to
see
> Wendy and Danny walking in it?
> Stephen Pickard who worked as one of the assistant editors on the film
> wrote.
> "When Ray Lovejoy, the editor, first introduced me to Stanley he was
> shooting the insert on the hedge maze. It was a large miniature which stood
> upright and the live action of Wendy and Danny was a VistaVision plate.
The
> 35mm 4-perf camera shutter speed was synchronised with the VV projector
> shutter, similar to a traditional rear-projection set-up."

Thanks. It's my favorite moment. It includes a zoom or dolly-in, and at first you
aren't sure the figures are moving - as it gets closer it becomes evident that
they are. Jack's expression is the first total giveaway that he's mad, but I don't
read it unambiguously as stalking his prey. He could simply be delighted by
the feeling of godlike superiority in seeing them from on high, and the
delightful intricacy and strangeness of the image, as we are. (The image of a
giant looking delightedly at miniature people in some elaborate layout strikes
a very distant chord in my head, as if it recalled some old image.) Finally,
there is no explanation for it. I love it!
>
>
> http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/html/shining/shining.html
>
> fv
24480
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri Mar 18, 2005 11:40pm
Subject: Re: The new colorization? hotlove666

A comment from Joe Dante:

Yeah, this sounds like The Pulfrich Effect---same technology they used for
years on the Rose Bowl Parade telecasts. Works okay, but only when the
camera is moving. All efforts to adapt it to movie use have failed.
24481
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 0:19am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) tharpa2002

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Matt Armstrong"
wrote:

"I'm not sure how it undercuts the device. The 'magic negro' wasn't a
well-discussed trope in 1980, to my knowledge. And the 'magic negro'
often dies so that others (white protagonists) may live. Halloran
seems like a fairly standard issue magical negro."

The trope wasn't well discussed under the apellation "magic negro"
but that kind of character was described as a descendent of the "male
mammy" (also deployed by King in "The Shawshank Redemption")during
the period in question. And the male mammy is the devolution of
Nigger Jim from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Ishmail Reed
has written something about it in one of his collections of essays.
(I think Fernando mentioned that Frederick Jameson has written about
THE SHINNING, and if that's correct his take on this question should
be very useful.)

Now when the "magic negro" dies as in THE GREEN MILE (book and film)
his death is explicitly set up as a sacrifice. Halloran dosen't get
to die rescueing Danny, which would be more in keeping with the usual
outcome. His death is abrupt and Kubrick dosen't milk it for effect.
Also, Halloran is shown to have some kind of ordinary life in the
shot of him in bed in his apartment under the nude painting; he's not
the saintly negro who'll make a noble victim. This shot of Halloran
in his apartment, brief as it is, speaks volumes.

In any case, Kubrick seems to me to have posessed a finer mind than
King and to be an incomparably greater artist than King.

Richard
24482
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 0:39am
Subject: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) noelbotevera

On the question of who opens the freezer door...how does this sound?
Danny is in telelpathic communication with both Jack and Halloran;
we see this in the scene where Danny sees the argument between Jack
and Wendy, and we see this in the scenes where Danny talks to
Halloran and calls for help.

So if Jack is in contact with Danny...couldn't he, or the hotel
through him, perhaps control Danny while he's in a traumatized
state? Perhaps call him to come down from the apartments (remember,
Wendy is still asleep), and unplug the freezer door lock?

Ah, but you ask, if Danny opens the door, then Jack has Danny;
checkmate, game over, right? But remember Halloran ALSO has contact
with Danny; it's possible that he checks in with Danny, who hasn't
been responding, finds out he's opened the door (and cracked it open
enough that it's too late to push the door closed), takes over
Danny's unconscious body, and guides him swiftly and secretly back
into the apartments (Halloran would have more experience at this
sort of thing, plus he'd know the short cuts), locking the door.
Jack, under the impression that it was Grady who opened the door,
goes in search of an ax.

In effect, Danny during this period was like an RC vehicle under the
influence of two differing radio sets, struggling for control.

Hey, I'd say this was at least as plausible as any of the theories
we've bandied about on the film.
24483
From: Peter Henne
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 0:55am
Subject: Re: Re: THE SHINING (Was: Put Another Ax Murder on the Barbie) peterhenne
Online Now Send IM

Matt,

I understand your objection, but I don't have a problem with Halloran's motivation. As an employee of the Overlook with large responsibilities, he is confident he can handle the "complete assholes" who are fouling up. No doubt his awareness of the hotel's past, acquired through his shining, makes him feel a strong connection to the place. I get the sense that he's been working there a long time. His ease with his employer and his surroundings telegraph that he's an old-timer. Quite possibly Halloran, with his psychic and practical knowledge of the hotel, imagines he is the only person who understands the danger and can extricate the victims. When he walks down the hallway, I feel what he is really doing is calling Jack out to confront him (like in a Western). He simply doesn't reckon that he will be broadsided. Added to this I think Kubrick is deliberately perverting horror conventions here, by quickly killing off the would-be hero. Together those are my reasons for going with the
plot turn.

Peter Henne

Matt Armstrong wrote:
a character suspects something amiss, walks
into a dark space without protection of any kind and begins
announcing his presence loudly. This is why I think the scene sticks
out. It's like when those idiots keep looking for the missing cat
in "Alien."

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
24484
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:05am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera" wrote:
>
> On the question of who opens the freezer door...how does this sound?
> Danny is in telelpathic communication with both Jack and Halloran;
> we see this in the scene where Danny sees the argument between Jack
> and Wendy, and we see this in the scenes where Danny talks to
> Halloran and calls for help.
>
> So if Jack is in contact with Danny...couldn't he, or the hotel
> through him, perhaps control Danny while he's in a traumatized
> state? Perhaps call him to come down from the apartments (remember,
> Wendy is still asleep), and unplug the freezer door lock?

The web site Fernando sent me to re: the labyrinth quotes one of SK's
collaborators as saying that it was deliberate obfuscation when we just HEAR
the bolt being pulled back - it could be Jack's hallucination, and variouys
hypotheses could explain how he got out, including Noel's. This contradicts
SK's more straightforward statement that when that happens, ambiguity about
whether it's all in Jack's mind comes to a screeching halt.
24485
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:05am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera" wrote:
>
> On the question of who opens the freezer door...how does this sound?
> Danny is in telelpathic communication with both Jack and Halloran;
> we see this in the scene where Danny sees the argument between Jack
> and Wendy, and we see this in the scenes where Danny talks to
> Halloran and calls for help.
>
> So if Jack is in contact with Danny...couldn't he, or the hotel
> through him, perhaps control Danny while he's in a traumatized
> state? Perhaps call him to come down from the apartments (remember,
> Wendy is still asleep), and unplug the freezer door lock?

The web site Fernando sent me to re: the labyrinth quotes one of SK's
collaborators as saying that it was deliberate obfuscation when we just HEAR
the bolt being pulled back - it could be Jack's hallucination, and variouys
hypotheses could explain how he got out, including Noel's. This contradicts
SK's more straightforward statement that when that happens, ambiguity about
whether it's all in Jack's mind comes to a screeching halt.
24486
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:11am
Subject: Re: The new colorization? samfilms2003

> A comment from Joe Dante:
> Yeah, this sounds like The Pulfrich Effect---same technology they used for
> years on the Rose Bowl Parade telecasts. Works okay, but only when the
> camera is moving. All efforts to adapt it to movie use have failed.

Joe Dante, meet Ken Jacobs ;-)

(ok you do need relative motion....)

-Sam
24487
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:16am
Subject: Writing panthen (was THE SHINING ) noelbotevera

On Paul Schrader's script for Last Temptation of Christ--Bill, you
read Kazantzakis' novel? I can't defend the script too much, it has
flaws sure (tho I do like the final movie, at least), but I thought
he did an admirable job of clearing away a lot of the mysticism,
symbolism, purploid prose and just plain dead wood to come up with a
reasonably coherent novel--or as reasonable and coherent as can be
made out of a life of Christ.

On King vs. Burgess:

I don't know. Interesting statement--a good shake on the
literary 'pantheon' so to speak, but I'd agree with the earlier
observation that King is more J.K. Rowling than a pop artist of real
stature.

He is I think a good observer of American slang, and of adolescent
lives...in fact, I'd say some of his best moments are when he's
bringing some misunderstood adolescent to a fair semblance of life.
But his horror effects are crude, to put it kindly; he's no Henry
James and his attempts at psychological horror are very detailed and
perhaps go further than anyone including James may go, have an
honesty and sincerity that I don't doubt, but the artistry just
doesn't seem there. At a certain point you got to have some subtlety
and psychological sophistication to achieve art.

As for Burgess...he's on record as saying he considers A Clockwork
Orange too didactic, too much showing-off of effects for the sake of
showing off...but what effects! Joycean wordplay with borrowings
from Russian and onomatopeaic words...the sense of a dystopic
nightmare world brought to life by the brutal syntax, the callously
colorful way Alex describes his crimes.

I can't agree that the novel of The Shining is better than
Clockwork...I can't even agree that The Shining is any good as a
novel. The most interesting thing about it was I thought the
family's disintegration, and the horror setpieces (the maze animals,
the references to Poe, the cheap mirror effects) just get in the way.

Kubrick's adaptation also brings up another sore spot--he left off
the original ending (which the American, not the British, publishers
lopped off, if I remember right), and it was more than just, as I
remember Kubrick describing it as cutting off something unnecessary
and unconvincing. Burgess had written about how cutting the last
chapter interfered with the structure of the American edition (the
novel had twenty-one chapters, a number divisible by seven and
three); more to the point, how it changed the story from fiction to
allegory, where the characters aren't really characters but figures
meant to instruct, not to have a life all their own. He claimed that
Kubrick in leaving out that final scene (a strange scene of
redemption that's actually more complex than one might think) was
playing to the easy cynicism of the time. I'm thinking Kubrick
probably thought the possibility of redemption would have been too
complex, too messy for his precisely constructed scheme. I'd agree,
but I wouldn't agree that a little messiness wouldn't have improved
his film.
24488
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 1:19am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) noelbotevera

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> The web site Fernando sent me to re: the labyrinth quotes one of
SK's
> collaborators as saying that it was deliberate obfuscation when we
just HEAR
> the bolt being pulled back - it could be Jack's hallucination

Sonofabitch! The rest of the movie could be taking place inside
Jack's head, and Jack's freezing to death could have happened in the
freezer (with the hedge maze around him as a kind of dream setting
to explain his subzero core temperature)! That's brilliant!
24489
From: "Zach Campbell"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 2:08am
Subject: Cassavetes' Faces (was Re: Off with their heads!) rashomon82

Dan:
> This perception gets in the way of my appreciating Cassavetes: I
> feel as if the director and actors are taking a private pleasure
> while I'm suffering.

I think there's a certain opacity to Cassavetes, but other than
that, maybe, I'm not sure we can find much common ground on this
point.

> It's the "restructuring" part I need help with. I can see the
> breaking-down part.

Well I think that restructuring is concomitant with breaking down.
In Cassavetes' case I think this means throwing attention on the
minutiae of body movements, posturing, physiognomy; foregrounding
the timbre of voices to initiate a pattern to suggest when a
character (not an actor) is consciously acting (usually to evade a
subject or change an uncomfortable tone); moving a viewer's presumed
comprehension of emotion as causal into almost trancelike immediacy;
opening up (really: creating) interesting spaces by keeping the
camera often claustrophobically linked to the actors until a swift
spatial epiphany (e.g., Rowlands' place in OPENING NIGHT; Cassel's
rooftop escape in FACES). Acting and space in a Cassavetes film are
quite different acting and space in almost any other film, I think.

> Once, while watching A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, I had the sudden
> realization that Cassavetes was emulating the decoupage of live
> TV:

That's an interesting observation.

--Zach
24490
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 3:07am
Subject: Mannerism in Paiting and Hollywood Film (was: Paul Schrader) fredcamper

BklynMagus wrote:

>
> Mannerist films, like Mannerist paintings, always seem to
> me to want to escape the confines of their frames. But
> El Greco et. al., did not have the technical tools to
> do what filmmakers can do. Filmmakers today can
> destabilize the frame, creating what Fred calls "visual
> soup."

What I meant by "visual soup" in "Taxi Driver" was images which seem to
me to be visually inarticulate, in which characters and objects swim
about in an incoherent haze, with no filmmaker defining them through
framing.

ne difference emblematic of the difference between visually defined and
visually soupy films is that between camera movements and zooms. There
are great films with great zooms, of course, but when the camera moves
through space isolating objects (cf. the endings of "Detour" or "The
Mortal Storm") or moves in on or around characters, as in Hitchcock,
space is being articulated and made expressive, and objects are placed
in relation to each other. Zooms used poorly deny all sense of space.

El Greco is an unbelievably great painter and every part of his best
paintings exists in a profoundly expressive tension in relationship to
every other part. His uncanny sense of light imbues the whole painting
with a spiritual glow, but the compositions of "The Burial of Count
Orgaz" (in Toledo. Spain) or "View of Toledo" (in New York, at the Met)
or "Laocoon" (in Washington at the National Gallery) are profoundly
articulated and incredibly beautiful.

Earlier mannerists such as Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino are also great.
Their imagery may be unbalanced and they often flatten space and
obliterate the background but they make beautiful compositions.

I didn't see any of those in "Taxi Driver."

I'm not saying that analogies to mannerist paintings might not be
useful, and I've long observed a split between the great "founders" of
the classical Hollywood style (Ford and Walsh) and their relatively
stable sense of space and the more subjective spaces of Fuller and Ray.
But the "high renaissance" is complicated. Some Raphael paintings are
exquisitely balanced, but not all. And while in a general way I supposed
the less stable space of later filmmakers might be analogous to the less
stable space of mannerism, I'm not sure how much specific insight the
analogy has to offer.

I would point out, though, that mannerism was the beginning of a long
decline in Italian paintings. There were great painters in the
post-mannerist centuries, but fewer in the 17th than in the 16th and
fewer in the 18th than in the 17th and very few in the 19th.

Fred Camper
24491
From: "Fernando Verissimo"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 3:21am
Subject: Re: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) f_verissimo

> Sonofabitch! The rest of the movie could be taking place inside
> Jack's head, and Jack's freezing to death could have happened in the
> freezer (with the hedge maze around him as a kind of dream setting
> to explain his subzero core temperature)! That's brilliant!

That's pretty cool if it wasn't for the fact that Jack is not locked in the
freezer but in the pantry...

Anyway, that hypothesis leaves other phenomenons unexplained.
Who throws the ball to Danny? Who opened room 237? Who left those marks on
Danny's neck?
I don't think Jack did those things. I think the ghosts did it.

fv
24492
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 4:29am
Subject: Re: Mannerism in Paiting and Hollywood Film (was: Paul Schrader) cellar47

--- Fred Camper wrote:

> What I meant by "visual soup" in "Taxi Driver" was
> images which seem to
> me to be visually inarticulate, in which characters
> and objects swim
> about in an incoherent haze, with no filmmaker
> defining them through
> framing.
>
Or rather the sort of framing you're used to.

>
> El Greco is an unbelievably great painter and every
> part of his best
> paintings exists in a profoundly expressive tension
> in relationship to
> every other part. His uncanny sense of light imbues
> the whole painting
> with a spiritual glow, but the compositions of "The
> Burial of Count
> Orgaz" (in Toledo. Spain) or "View of Toledo" (in
> New York, at the Met)
> or "Laocoon" (in Washington at the National Gallery)
> are profoundly
> articulated and incredibly beautiful.
>
> Earlier mannerists such as Pontormo and Rosso
> Fiorentino are also great.
> Their imagery may be unbalanced and they often
> flatten space and
> obliterate the background but they make beautiful
> compositions.
>
> I didn't see any of those in "Taxi Driver."
>

No.

What you saw is a lot closer to Rauschenberg.

>
> I would point out, though, that mannerism was the
> beginning of a long
> decline in Italian paintings. There were great
> painters in the
> post-mannerist centuries, but fewer in the 17th than
> in the 16th and
> fewer in the 18th than in the 17th and very few in
> the 19th.
>

The mannerism you're citing can be found in later
Scorsese -- especially "Casino."

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
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24493
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 4:34am
Subject: Re: Cassavetes' Faces (was Re: Off with their heads!) cellar47

--- Zach Campbell wrote:
moving a
> viewer's presumed
> comprehension of emotion as causal into almost
> trancelike immediacy;
> opening up (really: creating) interesting spaces by
> keeping the
> camera often claustrophobically linked to the actors
> until a swift
> spatial epiphany (e.g., Rowlands' place in OPENING
> NIGHT; Cassel's
> rooftop escape in FACES).

This is especially true of Rowland's apartment. It's
MORE of a theatrical space than the theater in whcih
she performs.

Incidentall, "Opening Night" was inspired by "All
About Eve." Cassavetes wanted to create a version for
Rowlands. And what he did was to kill of the Eve
character -- having her return as a ghost. The basic
conflict of "Eve" -- an actress unsettled by the fact
that she's grown older -- remains. But its given new
thematic life by her rejection of the
play-within-the-film because she knows how true it is,
and can't accept it.

__________________________________
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24494
From: "Yoel Meranda"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:12am
Subject: Re: Plasticity (Was: Off with their heads!) ymeranda

Zach,

you wrote:

"In reality, sense and intellect are intertwined, not easy to
separate, and they influence each other. Films would make no sense
if we experienced them only sensually."

I agree that sense and intellect are intertwined. We don't really
know how they meet but they are both parts of the way we experience
the world. When one of them is left without the other, it does not
make sense. So do you agree that: Art would make no sense if we
experienced it only intellectually?

you also wrote:

"What is reading but an intellectual experience?"

and

"It is there, it functions, solely *as image*. It challenges our
perceptions; it reminds us of the "imageness" of the image, its
paradoxical, simultaneous truth and falsity."

So how does the reading make sense if it is "but an intellectual
experience"? And how does the image make sense if it
functions "solely *as image*"? As you say, "sense and
intellect are
intertwined" and for the experience to "make sense" it
has to be
complete.

Also:

"And this all has no dependence on the plasticity of the image: it
works no matter how it is played. Is it purely "intellectual"
though? No, not really. It took me a lot of time and thought to
realize what was happening with that single shot.

The effect of the shot is, itself, sensual: we're looking at an
interesting tattoo around the navel of an attractive woman, editing
according to the seductive, unpredictable rhythms that mark NEW ROSE
HOTEL as a whole."

There are two kind of "sensuality"s here and again, they
intertwine.
One is our biological reaction to an attractive woman. The other one
is the way our nervous system reacts to those "unpredictable
rhythms". Is it enough for you if the experience only has
intellectual content + sexual sensuality and no plasticity? Does
it "make sense"?

It does not for me because the intellectual content and sexual
sensuality are also intertwined with another crucial part of our
experience. The moment we perceive the images, before the nervous
system starts processing them, they leave an abstract impression. A
film that cannot embody and incite that part of our experience does
not "make sense". This is why I cannot agree with your
broader
definition of aesthetics. And this is why, for me, aesthetics is not
a matter of "either, or, and everything in between". Just as
"films
would make no sense if we experienced them only sensually"
because "sense and intellect are intertwined, not easy to
separate,
and they influence each other"; the films would make no sense if
not
experienced also abstractly because abstract and non-abstract are
intertwined, not easy to separate, and they influence each other.

Yoel
24495
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:13am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) noelbotevera

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Fernando Verissimo" verissimo@u...> wrote:
> That's pretty cool if it wasn't for the fact that Jack is not
locked in the
> freezer but in the pantry...

Maybe he only THOUGHT he was locked in the pantry, but it was really
the freezer.

Anyway, I stand by my earlier, no less absurd theory.

> Anyway, that hypothesis leaves other phenomenons unexplained.
> Who throws the ball to Danny? Who opened room 237? Who left those
marks on
> Danny's neck?
> I don't think Jack did those things. I think the ghosts did it.

Busy little buggerers.
24496
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:18am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) noelbotevera

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Fernando Verissimo" > verissimo@u...> wrote:
> > That's pretty cool if it wasn't for the fact that Jack is not
> locked in the
> > freezer but in the pantry...
>
> Maybe he only THOUGHT he was locked in the pantry, but it was
really
> the freezer.
>
> Anyway, I stand by my earlier, no less absurd theory.

On the other hand, could be that everything after the "unlocking" is
still a hallucination, including his freezing to death. He could be
sitting on a 5-liter can of Libby's peaches, sucking his thumb.

And could be everything after Stewart confronts Novak up in the bell
tower is a hallucination, and he's really being led out the bell
tower in a straitjacket.

Could be.
24497
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:38am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) hotlove666

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
> wrote:
> > The web site Fernando sent me to re: the labyrinth quotes one of
> SK's
> > collaborators as saying that it was deliberate obfuscation when
we
> just HEAR
> > the bolt being pulled back - it could be Jack's hallucination
>
> Sonofabitch! The rest of the movie could be taking place inside
> Jack's head, and Jack's freezing to death could have happened in
the
> freezer (with the hedge maze around him as a kind of dream setting
> to explain his subzero core temperature)! That's brilliant!

Mmmmmmmmm......COULD be!
24498
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 6:54am
Subject: Re: Melinda and Melinda hotlove666

There two moments from Ulmer's The Black Cat in it. Referring back to
the discussion of clips in Shining, this is an example of a director
wanting a specific clip enough to buy it from a different studio.

They're in the audience with people dressed like Frankenstein and
Dracula, and up on the screen is Karloff intoning that mouth-
wateringly solemn dialogue: "Come, Vitus, we are not children..."
just as the comic story prepares to go into high gear with Stacy's
comic suicide attempt. Meanwhile she's sucking at a Coke with a
fiendishly Republican expression on her face, loving every minute of
the sickness up on the screen.

It's funny! Don't know if it has any other significance.
24499
From: "jess_l_amortell"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 7:58am
Subject: Re: THE SHINING jess_l_amortell

> What we do here is
> depth analysis, and one of the deepest levels of that is influence theory. And
> the more you can do that, the more there is there.

I'm not versed in Kubrick studies -- I trust it's been noted (haven't seen it mentioned here) that the casting of Crothers ("For a long time, I thought it was just the two of us that had the shine to us") was presumably in reference to his screen debut in Douglas Sirk's MEET ME AT THE FAIR, in which he sang ... "I Got the Shiniest Mouth in Town."
24500
From: "thebradstevens"
Date: Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:10am
Subject: Re: Who opens the freezer door (was: THE SHINING) thebradstevens

>
> Anyway, that hypothesis leaves other phenomenons unexplained.
> Who throws the ball to Danny? Who opened room 237? Who left those
marks on
> Danny's neck?
> I don't think Jack did those things. I think the ghosts did it.
>

I've got it. Halloran never left the hotel, he just pretended to. He
was actually lurking around throwing balls and opening pantry doors.
Remember, in the now missing epilogue, he's the one who throws the
ball. Perhaps, like Jack, he has always been there.

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