On the way movies could have gone but didn't:
The use of long shots showing the mundane, seemingly meaningless dialouge, huge shots of larger-than-life locales. All of these seems to have been the way that American movies didn't go as they grew and developed into their own school of film. We have gone more for scenes that don't show us what happened per se but let us see enough to let us come to a logical conclusion when we see someone start up a staircase, then have an immediate cut to said person at the top of a staircase, turning to go into a room. Whether this is part of our ADHD nature as Americans, or our film-makers realization that people don't need to have EVERY. LITTLE. THING. Hammered into our head in order to know what has happened in a chronologically sequential ordering in a film.
But, did American films truly turn their back on this school?
2001: A Space Oddesey, if anything, is an embracing of this sort of ideology on film, like never seen; however, it is not without it's use of logical deduction to figure out exactly what happened has happened in a few scenes. For example, nearly every scene in the Discovery spacecraft with Frank and Dave traversing its corridors are painstakingly depicted, showing his every step, every door opening, every rotation of the crews' quarters, every launch of the pods. In addition, the remarkable use of silence to convey the feelings and true dialouge of the film also seem to have a sort of "master shot" feeling to them (Most notable about this is that three of the most important scenes, the appearance of the Monolith on Earth, the discussion of shutting down HAL, and the final Star Baby scenes are all done in complete and total silence).
However, the American influence remains. We know it is HAL who kills all the astronauts, even though we never actually see the act done. We know that Dave enters the Monolith in orbit around Jupiter, but we never actually see it. We know that the discovery of the monolith on the moon and the subsequent tripping of it's cosmic alarm leads directly to the Jupiter mission, but we never seen the talks that would have lead to the undertaking of such a monumental task.
So, American film didn't go the way of their theatrical European cousins. Not to say we didn't learn from them, though...
The use of long shots showing the mundane, seemingly meaningless dialouge, huge shots of larger-than-life locales. All of these seems to have been the way that American movies didn't go as they grew and developed into their own school of film. We have gone more for scenes that don't show us what happened per se but let us see enough to let us come to a logical conclusion when we see someone start up a staircase, then have an immediate cut to said person at the top of a staircase, turning to go into a room. Whether this is part of our ADHD nature as Americans, or our film-makers realization that people don't need to have EVERY. LITTLE. THING. Hammered into our head in order to know what has happened in a chronologically sequential ordering in a film.
But, did American films truly turn their back on this school?
2001: A Space Oddesey, if anything, is an embracing of this sort of ideology on film, like never seen; however, it is not without it's use of logical deduction to figure out exactly what happened has happened in a few scenes. For example, nearly every scene in the Discovery spacecraft with Frank and Dave traversing its corridors are painstakingly depicted, showing his every step, every door opening, every rotation of the crews' quarters, every launch of the pods. In addition, the remarkable use of silence to convey the feelings and true dialouge of the film also seem to have a sort of "master shot" feeling to them (Most notable about this is that three of the most important scenes, the appearance of the Monolith on Earth, the discussion of shutting down HAL, and the final Star Baby scenes are all done in complete and total silence).
However, the American influence remains. We know it is HAL who kills all the astronauts, even though we never actually see the act done. We know that Dave enters the Monolith in orbit around Jupiter, but we never actually see it. We know that the discovery of the monolith on the moon and the subsequent tripping of it's cosmic alarm leads directly to the Jupiter mission, but we never seen the talks that would have lead to the undertaking of such a monumental task.
So, American film didn't go the way of their theatrical European cousins. Not to say we didn't learn from them, though...
posted by .venganza. at 9:00 AM
1 Comments:
This is a really interesting connection that you make here. Stroheim and sci-fi. Who wudda thunk it?
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