Wild nights would be our luxury
Jan. 28th, 2004 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaSnow again tonight. The Empire State Building dissolving in a thick gray cloud: there and not-there.
The city under snow is Draco!New York: white, cold, impossibly silent, inexpressibly beautiful, and an emotional wreck. Ah, I love it.
* * *
Office closed tomorrow, so I think I will take myself back downtown to see The Battle of Algiers again. And after that, I will go to B&N and buy the DVD.
I'm amazed that I remember so many of the individual scenes from years ago.
When the women cut their hair and turn themselves into westerners. The child in the cafe with the ice-cream cone. The marchers pouring down the steps of the casbah, ullulating.
That amazing actor who played Col. Mathieu, heroic and horrible. (And surely the model for Robert Duvall's Col. Killgore in Apocalypse Now.) And of course the guy who played Ali. Damn.
And the faces.
And Morricone's score. And the B&W: the film stock shifting almost randomly from grainy high-contrast to grey and documentary, and back again. And the camera work--that closing scene through the smoke and mist, everyone reduced to shadows.
This time round, because I am so interested just now in how fiction constructs heroes, I was mesmerized by the way the movie keeps giving us passionate portraits of extraordinarily heroic people (on both sides), and then peeling back their valor, their high ideals, to show us the bitter consequences of their idealism.
And we are drawn in by the power of ideas and the exquisite beauty of the story telling, until we find ourselves rooting for the bombers to blow up the cafe, even after we are shown the children in it. We turn our unwilling admiration on the colonel, even though we know he has performed torture,and ordered others to perform torture, and does not believe in his own cause.
It's the pull of myth that persuades us, and--terrible to say--that persuades the terrorists themselves, and the colonialists. The myth of righteousness. The corrupt power of art.
A movie with an irreducible moral center and an unequalled sense of beauty, compassion, and horror. Maybe Goya, maybe Caravaggio, maybe Conrad can match it.
Makes me want to see Fires on the Plain again.
* * *
The Horror! The Horror!
What are these rumors I hear that Nader is thinking of running again?
Tell him not to here.
The city under snow is Draco!New York: white, cold, impossibly silent, inexpressibly beautiful, and an emotional wreck. Ah, I love it.
* * *
Office closed tomorrow, so I think I will take myself back downtown to see The Battle of Algiers again. And after that, I will go to B&N and buy the DVD.
I'm amazed that I remember so many of the individual scenes from years ago.
When the women cut their hair and turn themselves into westerners. The child in the cafe with the ice-cream cone. The marchers pouring down the steps of the casbah, ullulating.
That amazing actor who played Col. Mathieu, heroic and horrible. (And surely the model for Robert Duvall's Col. Killgore in Apocalypse Now.) And of course the guy who played Ali. Damn.
And the faces.
And Morricone's score. And the B&W: the film stock shifting almost randomly from grainy high-contrast to grey and documentary, and back again. And the camera work--that closing scene through the smoke and mist, everyone reduced to shadows.
This time round, because I am so interested just now in how fiction constructs heroes, I was mesmerized by the way the movie keeps giving us passionate portraits of extraordinarily heroic people (on both sides), and then peeling back their valor, their high ideals, to show us the bitter consequences of their idealism.
And we are drawn in by the power of ideas and the exquisite beauty of the story telling, until we find ourselves rooting for the bombers to blow up the cafe, even after we are shown the children in it. We turn our unwilling admiration on the colonel, even though we know he has performed torture,and ordered others to perform torture, and does not believe in his own cause.
It's the pull of myth that persuades us, and--terrible to say--that persuades the terrorists themselves, and the colonialists. The myth of righteousness. The corrupt power of art.
A movie with an irreducible moral center and an unequalled sense of beauty, compassion, and horror. Maybe Goya, maybe Caravaggio, maybe Conrad can match it.
Makes me want to see Fires on the Plain again.
* * *
The Horror! The Horror!
What are these rumors I hear that Nader is thinking of running again?
Tell him not to here.
