(no subject)
Jan. 5th, 2012 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception2. Shoot the Piano Player
3. A Zed and Two Noughts
I'd forgotten almost everything about the first one - everything except there was a gunfight in the snow. Made me think of the Kierkegaard comment about walking away from any relationship the second you fall in love. It also had me thinking of Calvino's lightness essay, as did the fact I'd forgotten so much of it. He turned the knob up on the French bluffness of his actors to make everything seem okay, until even death in the snow is strangely light. Playing drama like comedy, that was big in the early New Wave films, now I think about it, I guess as an antidote to '50s segregation of seriousness and escapism or perhaps some rediscovery of the otherworldliness of cinema. The effect is strange now - I wonder how it was taken back then? I could watch any Truffaut movie any number of times but doubt this one's aged very well, aside from some of its surface entertainments - some of the things he's trying here he does better at the other end of the '60s in Mississippi Mermaid.
The Greenaway was baffling, not in what it was trying to do but that anyone would try to do it. I think in the end I may only like Belly of an Architect, of his, watchable as some of the others have been. Especially annoying was the dialogue, which relentlessly treated itself as clever and witty despite producing no laughter or admiration. Perhaps he was attempting light too but comparatively sucking at it? He seemed to mean a lot to people in the late '80s, early '90s, and did let you see many things you didn't elsewhere in movies. Maybe that's become cheapened by how much of everything we see all the time now. I'm not saying he's a narcissist, or even diagnosably OCD, but it feels like he gets something out of making these movies that's not very closely related to what a viewer does. I got his point - all there is for us here in the end is to flee from or study our own decay, and both enterprises finally fail because our decay doesn't. I just don't really care, as presented.
Maybe in both cases the filmmakers leave off from talking to audiences and just talk to their obsessions and I merely happen to share all of Truffaut's, very few of Greenaway's.
3. A Zed and Two Noughts
I'd forgotten almost everything about the first one - everything except there was a gunfight in the snow. Made me think of the Kierkegaard comment about walking away from any relationship the second you fall in love. It also had me thinking of Calvino's lightness essay, as did the fact I'd forgotten so much of it. He turned the knob up on the French bluffness of his actors to make everything seem okay, until even death in the snow is strangely light. Playing drama like comedy, that was big in the early New Wave films, now I think about it, I guess as an antidote to '50s segregation of seriousness and escapism or perhaps some rediscovery of the otherworldliness of cinema. The effect is strange now - I wonder how it was taken back then? I could watch any Truffaut movie any number of times but doubt this one's aged very well, aside from some of its surface entertainments - some of the things he's trying here he does better at the other end of the '60s in Mississippi Mermaid.
The Greenaway was baffling, not in what it was trying to do but that anyone would try to do it. I think in the end I may only like Belly of an Architect, of his, watchable as some of the others have been. Especially annoying was the dialogue, which relentlessly treated itself as clever and witty despite producing no laughter or admiration. Perhaps he was attempting light too but comparatively sucking at it? He seemed to mean a lot to people in the late '80s, early '90s, and did let you see many things you didn't elsewhere in movies. Maybe that's become cheapened by how much of everything we see all the time now. I'm not saying he's a narcissist, or even diagnosably OCD, but it feels like he gets something out of making these movies that's not very closely related to what a viewer does. I got his point - all there is for us here in the end is to flee from or study our own decay, and both enterprises finally fail because our decay doesn't. I just don't really care, as presented.
Maybe in both cases the filmmakers leave off from talking to audiences and just talk to their obsessions and I merely happen to share all of Truffaut's, very few of Greenaway's.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 03:18 am (UTC)One thing I'm remembering now: Greenaway has a shot at something more emotionally immediate, more human, but he kind of fumbles it away. The starting point of the movie is the deaths of the wives, and the motivation Oscar's and Oswald's grief. It's about obsessional grief, trying to master or understand death, and failing, the heartbreak of that. But when Alba says so, accusing them of "obsessional grief," it sounds completely out of left field. He does it intentionally, but I don't see why that opportunity has to be passed up. Synecdoche manages it. Maybe he's just not into it. Or maybe it's a principled disavowal of identification.
Maybe I just love those extra-slow Greenaway tracking shots.