The audition scene, occurring forty minutes into the 1976 cut, consists of two movements, each marked by a somber Bo Harwood song.
1st movement
Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara) and the cocktail waitress make preparations — music, costuming, makeup. Cosmo selects the music with care, settling on a piano ballad, and when he emerges from backstage and comes to [...]
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“Try to remember that alpha is another word for passive.
Visualize sitting in an empty theater, in front of a blank screen.”
The question that cuts across each of Cassavetes’s films and stage productions, eloquently posed and explored by George Kouvaros in his book-length study of the director: “Where does it happen?”
Where does the scene begin, end, gain momentum, fizzle out, lurch in a new direction? Where do its stakes become apparent, slip away, alter, reemerge? Where [...]
Notice (you can’t miss it) how, after the second set of murders, the horizon becomes so prominent, so active, visually and conceptually.
The more the film opens out into wide spaces, the more it also closes in (and not just in terms of the plot, the ill-fated lovers, the law on their heels).
Several late compositions [...]
Le Fonde de l’air est rouge opens with a virtuosic montage combining archival footage of upheavals around the globe in the 1960s with citations from Battleship Potemkin (1925). Aside from showcasing Marker’s unparalleled skills as a montagist, and aside from intermingling “fact” and “fiction,” the sequence conveys a profound sense of failure, of doomed [...]
Painted lines on asphalt, trajectory in pure form.
Something to get you from A to B, in shorter time.
Frequent complications of direction and “destiny” by way of chance:
hitchhikers, challenges, chases, brushes with the law, fuel stops, accidents, affairs, half-intimate exchanges and gestures.
Hoped-for trajectories. Imagined pasts, futures, voiced by GTO (Warren Oates): test-pilot, TV producer, location [...]
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Looking, cutting, pulsing, cutting, not pulsing, cutting, not looking, not cutting.
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The camera settles in slow, cautious exhalation. A sigh.
Affection, affinity.
The film is driven by its overbearing Journey.
But Almendros’s long lens is at its best in moments of rest, in pockets.
In these eddies, shape, color, and movement determine connection, no matter temporal or conceptual progression.
For the moment they sit, Nicky (Cassavetes) and Mikey (Falk). There may or may not be a contract on Nicky’s life. But for now, at least, he sits, nursing his stomach ulcer with milk and beer. Smoking, laughing, relatively calm, the both of them.
But somewhere in the midst of this exchange of [...]
The film’s work to position Marlowe among the downtrodden, against aggressors, crystallizes early in ink on glass.
But the camera’s perpetual repositioning, especially in relation to light, unmoors its figure to float across empty and cluttered environments, between human contact and isolation.
A drift enveloped in painted light, as institutional as it is artisanal, or organic.
Recede/protrude; contract/expand; collect/disperse.
A separate, convulsive rhythm to each plane:
movement within movement, generated from stasis,
traced by light, shadow, and color on reflective surface.
The desire to push forward, to move on, to get out — to [...]
Glacial, billowing convolution ∴ digressive, meandering contemplation.
But the speed and terrible mathematics of that initial circle
stun and interrupt with every iteration.
Finally, after an interminable (time) and indeterminate (space) horizon, an empty ship, radioactive, is a shapely revelation of
drift, direction
Herzog’s speedboat (likely aluminum, propelled by a combustion engine, invisible) rushes forth to contain any reverberant significance with a circle.
Aguirre’s raft: extricated from jungle-material with purpose, intelligent design. Now useless, obscenely skeletal, approaching formlessness, severed from its source.
The ripples of the speedboat’s muted wake might reach the ground again, belatedly, bearing implications and memories that [...]
Exquisite orchestrations of insect movement inevitably give way to graceless human absorption.
Spatial compression: only flimsy screens divide two worlds.
The appeal of long lenses for capturing animals in their environments.
Few films superimpose like Erice’s first feature.
1940, a small Castilian village. Civil war just ended.
A makeshift cinema at the town hall.
A six-year-old girl, bewitched by Whale’s Frankenstein.
To her friend, also transfixed: “Why did he kill her?”
The father, a beekeeper, a smoker, a writer, a mushroom picker.
(Don’t pick the ones with dark gills).
A gold chiming pocketwatch.
The [...]