That's the problem with today's "auteurs": They are mannerists, who only know other films.The movie starts with a neat defeat of modernist expectation by being divided into “chapters” (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard and his 1964 film Bande à Part, or Band of Outsiders, after which Tarantino named his own production company). Chapter One begins, in print, “Once upon a time. . .” (more homage, this time to the master of the spaghetti western, director Sergio Leone, and his Once Upon a Time in the West).
Sunday, October 11, 2009
A terrific review ...
... of an apparently Inglourious Movie.
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Mannerists who only know other films. . . .
ReplyDeleteExactly. I wonder if this is in part a result of a couple of generations of "auteurs" having come from film school rather than the independents, at this point. The academization of film and its derivatives.
Though I think it wouldn't quite matter where Tarantino came from. His character being roughly what it is, it's doubtful he'd produce anything other than technically accomplished inanity. He's simply not a profound, deep-feeling person - an "artist", and on the broader scale it's doubtful how much film that can be called art is really made in America or West in general. As a homogenous culture "the West" is intrinsically inimical to art, conflicting as art does with philosophical materialism in the form of consumerism.
ReplyDeleteThe living moment is a foreign element to the West's unreality, and so its filmic art almost invariably not art at all. Functional, arid, means and ends, while for example the Iranian director Majid Majidi has the living moment as his natural element, as in his superb humane "Colours of Paradise".
And in compass with this inimicality(?) the great relatively aberration to America's devotion to consumerism in the 1960s resulted in the fine films of the 1970s. As that wave of inner freedom got swamped by the machine of mindlessness American filmic art began to more or less die. And as a result there's hardly a single US film of the last 25 years to rank with quite a number of the best 70s films.
ReplyDeleteBlaming it all on consumerism might not be any more accurate than blaming it all on pretentiousness. There are always exceptions.
ReplyDeleteSturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of science fiction—heck, of everything—is crap." That's always been true.
"As that wave of inner freedom got swamped by the machine of mindlessness American filmic art began to more or less die."
ReplyDeleteDidn't the machine get all wet? Did it more or less die from drowning?
I think these comments are what makes it worthwhile to have done the original post. What I mean is that bringing this to the attention of smart, insightful people is the value of posting it in the first place. That a comment of mine in relation to the link may have prompted those comments is more or less irrelevant. The comments are where the value lies.
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