... silence ... and then, Three Colours: Kubrick
Padraig L Henry
nomadic, and existential meditation on death and transcendence, having
seen his film for the first time the night before, when I heard the
... news ... the poignant fading of a distant presence.
A private matter:
...... what we cannot speak about we may now witness in s i l e n c e.
The EWS clip is truly incredible, with a mise-en-scene straight out of
The Shining`s world of reflecting mirrors, an image system - red,
yellow, blue - which aspires to new levels of symbolic and cinematic
coherence. There is even that deceptive elliptical cut (intercut with
the colour coded intertitles of Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick) with Kidman`s
glasses removed to reveal her unnerving unease and alienation in the
midst of physical intimacy ... and did you see those paintings? Or
Cruise`s uncanny cue from Kidman`s reflection? Who wants narrative
when you`ve got all this? :-)
Padraig
and always at the >right< time ... 2 (p.m. CET?) 3 (March) 7 (Sunday)
... <=== :-(
Gensu 2000
A private matter:
Where did you see the complete version? The version I saw (which I taped) just
had the part that comes directly before the titles come up. It's still very
impressive, and I've already seen it way too much.
Tobasco
>On Sunday afternoon I was composing a post about Malick`s elliptical,
>nomadic, and existential meditation on death and transcendence, having
>seen his film for the first time the night before,
...hack & slash...
wb Padraig
>The EWS clip is truly incredible, with a mise-en-scene straight out of
>The Shining`s world of reflecting mirrors, an image system - red,
>yellow, blue - which aspires to new levels of symbolic and cinematic
>coherence.
The golden glowy atmosphere was the first thing I noticed. I haven't been
able to freeze-frame the clip and I wonder what painting is on the wall. Is
the mirror baroque or roccoco?
I'm already getting wrapped into this as one can see.
> There is even that deceptive elliptical cut (intercut with
>the colour coded intertitles of Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick) with Kidman`s
>glasses removed to reveal her unnerving unease and alienation in the
>midst of physical intimacy ... and did you see those paintings? Or
>Cruise`s uncanny cue from Kidman`s reflection? Who wants narrative
>when you`ve got all this? :-)
>
You use "elliptical" twice in your post. Not sure if you mean cryptic or
economic in form, or allusory, or...
Are you inferring the same meaning in both sentences?
Interested in your further views of TTRL. Rod, Bilge and Gordon have posted
some initial forays, but I'm not so sure that any of us can deal with this
film in depth without getting into Heidegger and Kafka in some (lesser)
depth. It's my understanding that Malick taught both when at MIT.
Sprinkling
Tobasco
"But then he returned to his work as if nothing had happened." That is a
saying which sounds familiar to us from an indefinte number of old tales,
though in fact it perhaps occurs in none.
Kafka
Michael Gebert
Henry) wrote:
> >Interested in your further views of TTRL. Rod, Bilge and Gordon have posted
> >some initial forays, but I'm not so sure that any of us can deal with this
> >film in depth without getting into Heidegger and Kafka in some (lesser)
> >depth. It's my understanding that Malick taught both when at MIT.
>
> Jaspers and Husserl, to Heidegger and beyond, provides terms of
> reference. So too does a humanistic confrontation with puritanical
> Darwinism ... ( though I wasn`t too enamoured by those hippy-dippy
> soft-focus flashbacks of Bell`s wife :-( ).
Though to me the key work seems to be Malick's favorite Japanese film,
Sansho the Bailiff. What distinguishes it so much from other American war
movies-- seems like I saw another one recently, can't think of its name,
Private somebody-- is that sort of extreme macro view of war as being just
a sort of natural disaster that sweeps over the land from time to time,
its reasons as inconsequential as the reasons behind a fight between two
ant colonies.
That's something like the way some of the Japanese films view war, at
least it's as completely removed from the passions of one side or the
other and as attuned to the individuals caught up in it. But in some ways
it also seems that the only other film that seems to take such a faraway
perspective toward war, and be so completely disinterested in the issues
underlying a particular conflict, is our own Kubrick's 2001.
AV
Padraig L Henry wrote in message <36edb308...@news.iol.ie>...
>>The golden glowy atmosphere was the first thing I noticed. I haven't been
>>able to freeze-frame the clip and I wonder what painting is on the wall.
Is
>>the mirror baroque or roccoco?
>
>Nobody appears to have responded in this or any other thread
>concerning the provenance of the production/set design/construction,
>so I`ll have a (speculatively, madly, tentative) go.
>
>The mirror: Octagonal, gilded, bevelled, golden (?): might just as
>easily be Art Deco as anything else (particularly if the film, as
>believed, is set in New York), and considering the other furnishings
>we can make out, and the approximate (original) period setting of
>Schnitzler`s novella. We cannot >really< know from the clip what
>period it ( the clip) might be set in given especially that the
>protagonists are textile-free, though Kidman`s glasses have a distinct
>designer-90s minimalism :-). Though glasses like that were popular way
>back, although not for women.
>
>Golden, glowy? The lamp and its reflection, and positioning, accounts
>for most of that. Along with all that flesh.
>
>I noticed five "pictures" (as Barry Larry might say), four paintings
>and one photo. But two of the paintings were too off-camera/frame to
>ascertain their particulars (one to the left of the mirror, and the
>other in the mirror reflection). The other two paintings (duality
>again) were distinguishable: the most prominent, to the right of the
>mirror, combines neo-Romanesque (those damn aquaducts - with their
>curvaceous geometry - are visible in the background) with
>neo-impressionism (the tacky Van Gogh golden Sunflower in the
>foreground, and some unidentifiable blue flower below it). Italian,
>perhaps, for the tourist market. What`s interesting here is that the
>painting is illuminated from below by a series of five red lights (in
>the shape of candles) forming another - tacky - candelabra. This
>primary colour combination is repeated to the left of the candelabra,
>where we see a womb-shaped glass vase (empty) similarly colour-coded.
>
>The second distinguishable painting is seen in the mirror - a
>semi-figurative landscape which at first seems like the rough shape of
>an hour-glass - more sexual imagery: copulation? - but is also a
>representation of a track/road/river with two circular green patches
>on either side. Another poster suggested this was a representation of
>a "volcanic eruption", in the sexual sense, but I believe it`s
>significance won`t really become clear until we see the entire film.
>If even then.
>
>The photograph, a close-up portrait of a middle-aged man, is anyone`s
>guess at this stage (Kidman`s father? Mentor?).
>
>> I'm already getting wrapped into this as one can see.
>
>Pause, F-Fwd, Stop, Play, Pause, Slo-mo, Rew, Stop, Play ...
>
>Padraig
my goodness. all that from a 90 second clip. just think how much rewinding
and pausing you can do when the real film comes out.
av
Padraig L Henry
>Padraig L Henry wrote:
>
>>On Sunday afternoon I was composing a post about Malick`s elliptical,
>>nomadic, and existential meditation on death and transcendence, having
>>seen his film for the first time the night before,
>
>...hack & slash...
With pen or sword (or lenses and filters)?
>
>wb Padraig
warner brothers, brother?
>
>>The EWS clip is truly incredible, with a mise-en-scene straight out of
>>The Shining`s world of reflecting mirrors, an image system - red,
>>yellow, blue - which aspires to new levels of symbolic and cinematic
>>coherence.
>
>> There is even that deceptive elliptical cut (intercut with
>>the colour coded intertitles of Cruise, Kidman, Kubrick) with Kidman`s
>>glasses removed to reveal her unnerving unease and alienation in the
>>midst of physical intimacy ... and did you see those paintings? Or
>>Cruise`s uncanny cue from Kidman`s reflection? Who wants narrative
>>when you`ve got all this? :-)
>
>You use "elliptical" twice in your post. Not sure if you mean cryptic or
>economic in form, or allusory, or...
>Are you inferring the same meaning in both sentences?
Have a fondness for that word :-). Was it >just< twice :-( ?
Etymology.
But no, not cryptic nor economic - as such.
In the first usage (for TTRL) its at three levels - firstly, the
character "jumping" - particular soldiers suddenly appearing or
disappearing from the story - well, it is Heidegger et al :-)), then,
the abrupt cuts throughout the film to the quotidian preoccupations of
the local ecology - well, it is Darwin, or rather, a critique of
Darwin et al :-), and finally, well, thats not so easy: crocodile
entering the realm to sprouting coconut?
In the second usage (EWS), its more to do with Kubrick`s explicit
objective of paring down the form (including narrative,
characterisation etc) to its bare essentials (the unintended pun is
cringe-inducing), but in the instance cited its simply that Kubrick
does not allow the intertitles to "interrupt" the progress of the
real-time action in spite of doing so visually.
>Interested in your further views of TTRL. Rod, Bilge and Gordon have posted
>some initial forays, but I'm not so sure that any of us can deal with this
>film in depth without getting into Heidegger and Kafka in some (lesser)
>depth. It's my understanding that Malick taught both when at MIT.
Yep. And existentialism, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, through
Jaspers and Husserl, to Heidegger and beyond, provides terms of
reference. So too does a humanistic confrontation with puritanical
Darwinism ... ( though I wasn`t too enamoured by those hippy-dippy
soft-focus flashbacks of Bell`s wife :-( ).
>
>Sprinkling
>Tobasco
>
>"But then he returned to his work as if nothing had happened." That is a
>saying which sounds familiar to us from an indefinte number of old tales,
>though in fact it perhaps occurs in none.
>Kafka
Dissociation. Just like Warner Brothers executives :-)
Padraig
Padraig L Henry
<self-censorship, clip, clip, clip>
>my goodness. all that from a 90 second clip. just think how much rewinding
>and pausing you can do when the real film comes out.
... but we`re still only scraping the subterranean point of departure
from the surface of the clipfest, and we`ve many importunate months
imponderably remaining, and my pixel microscope has a fractal
facility I`m only just frantically pausing to suss out, and my
goodness gracious rewinding is magically magnetically degrading, and
I`m at an impecunious loss to know what a real film impeccably has to
do with anything imperceptibly real, and my ninety words have finally
come out ... whatever about the exactitude of all those seconds
=.=.=.=.=...
Padraig
Padraig L Henry
Gebert) wrote:
>In article <36edb308...@news.iol.ie>, path...@iol.ie (Padraig L
>Henry) wrote:
>>
>> Yep. And existentialism, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, through
>> Jaspers and Husserl, to Heidegger and beyond, provides terms of
>> reference. So too does a humanistic confrontation with puritanical
>> Darwinism ... ( though I wasn`t too enamoured by those hippy-dippy
>> soft-focus flashbacks of Bell`s wife :-( ).
>
>Though to me the key work seems to be Malick's favorite Japanese film,
>Sansho the Bailiff. What distinguishes it so much from other American war
>movies-- seems like I saw another one recently, can't think of its name,
>Private somebody-- is that sort of extreme macro view of war as being just
>a sort of natural disaster that sweeps over the land from time to time,
>its reasons as inconsequential as the reasons behind a fight between two
>ant colonies.
I must check out that Sansho film!
Having watched Seven Samurai again the other night I`d have to say
that the generalised, macro view of war or conflict does apply, for
the most part, to Kurosawa - though his existentialism was also nearly
always rationally grounded in political, social, economic, and
cultural sensibilities and realities, just as Malick`s indirectly is.
(In fact, I`d argue that it is mainstream cinema which mainly
decontextualises war for ideological - and entertainment - purposes).
The problem - or perhaps, the challenge - with Malick`s film is that
it isn`t about WW2 specifically nor even about war generally. The war
in TTRL merely provides a clear, immediate and visceral context for
elaborating, and fully realising, his underlying nihilistic
metaphysics - the struggle of life, all life, as properly and
ultimately the preparation for, and the embracing of, death - albeit,
for man, ideally in a morally heroic manner. In terms of the
metaphysical spectrum, this is not all that far removed from Samurai
mythology, Judeo-Christian martyrdom, or the nirvana of Eastern
religions. While I disagree with Malick`s metaphysical vision - he
did, after all, chuck in his career as a philosophy lecturer in order
to become an artist, but he failed to "chuck in" the metaphysical
baggage of German existential fatalism and romanticism - I can still
love his poetic realisation of it on film (if only the puerile
banalities of the Spielbergs of this world could aspire to Malick`s
level of creative honesty and directness) ... existentialists always
make for better artists - but are not so hot as philosophers. And
didn`t Heidegger too retreat into poetry? Wise move :-).
>
>That's something like the way some of the Japanese films view war, at
>least it's as completely removed from the passions of one side or the
>other and as attuned to the individuals caught up in it. But in some ways
>it also seems that the only other film that seems to take such a faraway
>perspective toward war, and be so completely disinterested in the issues
>underlying a particular conflict, is our own Kubrick's 2001.
I don`t know what you mean by war in the context of 2001, unless you
mean man`s "war" with a reductivist science and technology and their
associated pusillanimous, territorial, and dehumanising world-views.
Kubrick`s metaphysic in 2001, his notion of transcendence, is that of
a liberation from a total dependence on instrumentalist materialism
through the humility of a rational, enquiring, and self-critical
humanism ... (with a little assistance from the Absolute Other :-)).
But maybe you meant Full Metal Jacket?
Padraig
"We`ve survived yet again ... we`ve lost yet again."
Padraig L Henry
Gebert) wrote:
>In article <36edb308...@news.iol.ie>, path...@iol.ie (Padraig L
>Henry) wrote:
>>
>> Yep. And existentialism, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, through
>> Jaspers and Husserl, to Heidegger and beyond, provides terms of
>> reference. So too does a humanistic confrontation with puritanical
>> Darwinism ... ( though I wasn`t too enamoured by those hippy-dippy
>> soft-focus flashbacks of Bell`s wife :-( ).
>