Ask Alice
Styles shown in movies reflect the grand diversity of human experience from action to non-action, conversation to silence, excitement to calmness. Films also show expressions of human psychology, sometimes verging on and embracing surrealism, expressionism, subjective viewpoints inaccessible in life to the outside observer looking at someone seized by an interior state explained conventionally as "crazy."
I accept multiple forms of cinema because I view as equally interesting the languid atmosphere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a film taking place mostly in a woman's apartment with conversations throughout, and a recently viewed James Bond film, Skyfall, with its thrilling action scenes and reckless violent protagonist.
What happens inside a film's borders, its rectangle, represents a vision made to happen by any number of people, but the intellectual and emotional content can be attributed to the director, or sometimes, as in David O. Selznick's case in Gone With the Wind, a highly influential producer. A film's "look," too, can be attributed to certain directors with striking styles, like David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and many others.
If I didn't love movies I wouldn't write this blog. My other blog, One Damned Thing After Another, focuses on politics and current events. Screen Screed indulges my longtime passion for movies. I don't like everything I watch--some directors and some films I find objectionable to the extent that I think about them as much as I think about directors and films I enjoy. The curmudgeon in me takes offense at what I deem to be aesthetic missteps, as when a film's characters are served wine but we the viewers don't see them drinking any of it; a false note not reflective of reality, thus untrue to human experience. Getting the details right in a film, adhering to basic practices of daily life, can aid the viewer in accepting even fantastic story developments.
At the beginning of Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking Glass, Alice looks into a mirror, a common enough activity. She begins to wonder about the backwards room reflected on the mirror's surface. Up to this point, there's nothing fantastic to the story. An imaginative girl during an idle moment has an idea about how the familiar room she's standing in looks so different in the mirror. She then enters the mirror world, a flipped place; that's the beginning of fantasy.
The movie screen, though not necessarily showing a flipped universe, is like Alice's mirror world. In it we see the familiar and unfamiliar; it's the job of filmmakers to communicate their visions, their illusions, so that we may connect through our eyes and ears with intellect and emotion through the medium of a mirror screen that's been with us in motion picture form since 1895.
Vic Neptune
Styles shown in movies reflect the grand diversity of human experience from action to non-action, conversation to silence, excitement to calmness. Films also show expressions of human psychology, sometimes verging on and embracing surrealism, expressionism, subjective viewpoints inaccessible in life to the outside observer looking at someone seized by an interior state explained conventionally as "crazy."
I accept multiple forms of cinema because I view as equally interesting the languid atmosphere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a film taking place mostly in a woman's apartment with conversations throughout, and a recently viewed James Bond film, Skyfall, with its thrilling action scenes and reckless violent protagonist.
What happens inside a film's borders, its rectangle, represents a vision made to happen by any number of people, but the intellectual and emotional content can be attributed to the director, or sometimes, as in David O. Selznick's case in Gone With the Wind, a highly influential producer. A film's "look," too, can be attributed to certain directors with striking styles, like David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and many others.
If I didn't love movies I wouldn't write this blog. My other blog, One Damned Thing After Another, focuses on politics and current events. Screen Screed indulges my longtime passion for movies. I don't like everything I watch--some directors and some films I find objectionable to the extent that I think about them as much as I think about directors and films I enjoy. The curmudgeon in me takes offense at what I deem to be aesthetic missteps, as when a film's characters are served wine but we the viewers don't see them drinking any of it; a false note not reflective of reality, thus untrue to human experience. Getting the details right in a film, adhering to basic practices of daily life, can aid the viewer in accepting even fantastic story developments.
At the beginning of Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking Glass, Alice looks into a mirror, a common enough activity. She begins to wonder about the backwards room reflected on the mirror's surface. Up to this point, there's nothing fantastic to the story. An imaginative girl during an idle moment has an idea about how the familiar room she's standing in looks so different in the mirror. She then enters the mirror world, a flipped place; that's the beginning of fantasy.
The movie screen, though not necessarily showing a flipped universe, is like Alice's mirror world. In it we see the familiar and unfamiliar; it's the job of filmmakers to communicate their visions, their illusions, so that we may connect through our eyes and ears with intellect and emotion through the medium of a mirror screen that's been with us in motion picture form since 1895.
Vic Neptune
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