So to be taken seriously you paint a world where everyone is confused and no one knows their self and repression is rampant and you shatter the last taboo on earth by...
capturing every last bodily fluid excreting out of every last orifice-- ultimately it’s by mixing ear wax, finger grease and one slightly curled ear-hair caught under a blackened fingernail and filmed in close up that makes absolutely everyone admit they can’t believe how much you’ve seen of them and you keep it to yourself that you’ve known all along that you knew just a little bit more about everyone than they knew about themselves because you know if you mention it the jig will be up and it will be clear to all that you raided the picayunes for subject matter - that you did so mercilessly - that you did it not as you said: to free the repressed neurotic from his tangled web by holding up a mirror, but rather, for the vanity of your own art and the rush of an authentic superiority complex. Still there’s a secret you’re keeping, and you know if it ever got out just like that the whole festival circuit would disown you and someone would make a pun using the word ‘secret’ and ‘secretion’ that would cause those around you to see ‘metaphor’ where there had previously been snot, and this stigmatization of your work would cast you out of vogue with the post-indie Zeitgeist and next thing you know you’re looking at a nasty piece of graffiti on your latest movie poster that reads: Repressed young girl + bodily fluids oozing from orifice = 'thinking-man’s artist'.
Posted by ÿ at September 17, 2002 08:14 PMwhat filmmaker pissed you off so much, man?
and if someone shoots a film showing corpses and bodily fluids and does achieve a liberation of its audience's subconscious, what does it matter if the filmmaker was doing it for the sake of his own art?
Posted by: mutant on September 25, 2002 12:03 PM .You're right to call me on the horseshit Mutante-- truth is I have no idea what I was talking about. I think at the time we had just seen "The Piano Teacher" and of course, I had seen "Storytelling" and I was thinking about how so often the cutting edge artist creates a repressed character and carefully gets the audience to identify with them absolutely, and then creates this real contrast between the central personality of their film and the personality of the filmmaker, who is oh so unrepressed and uninhibited that he's willing to offer us a close up of jism clinging to a balcony railing or what have you. You talk about this in the context of liberating the subconscious and it's funny because after seeing the film you made about corpses I can see what you're talking about and I think it's healthy-- not something that merits shitting on, or pissing on, for that matter.
But I guess I was thinking about how at the narrative end of things there really is a formula at play, and, perhaps because I was writing quickly without thinking that day, I thought I would look ahead to the time when it started to lose its cache as it inevitably will one day. Probably there is also something about how cynically detached some of the people who are employing this technique seem to be, but I wouldn't be faulting Hanake or Solondz in any hurry for this. I think they both show respect for their characters, Hanake more than Solondz, but that's a given, as Hanake is older and wiser all around. If anything, I was probably calling myself on this-- you've read my script, so you can probably guess why.
Really, what fascinates me even more now is the technique employed in films like Rushmore and Flirting-- creating a story line around an adolescent who already has an adult's sense of reason but who must contend with people in this most awkward stage of their development. I guess this enables a viewer to feel like they are re-visiting highschool, but doing so somehow with their adult sensibilities fully intact. I would say this is at the opposite end of the spectrum, because instead of honing in on how repressed people are about their 'inner-feelings', these films focus on how much we knew before we were even capable of giving voice to our thoughts.
Hey man, how's Europe? Where are you today?
Posted by: ÿ on September 25, 2002 04:04 PM .For perfect happiness, remember two things:
(1) Be content with what you've got.
(2) Be sure you've got plenty.
It is better to kiss an avocado than to get in a fight with an aardvark
It is illegal to drive more than two thousand sheep down Hollywood
Boulevard at one time.
Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.
-- Ronald Reagan, famous movie star
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems
theory.
Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001,
Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of
the pages state only This page intentionally left blank, and 20%
of the definitions are of the form A ...... consists of sequences
of non-blank characters separated by blanks.