For some time after Tony Scott tragically, mysteriously took his life earlier this year we tried to think of some way to honor his work and explore it on the Notebook. A proper response was found by filmmaker, editor and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli, who suggested a kind of critical exquisite corpse, and in this manner forge a way—or an attempt—to fit the forms of Tony Scott's oeuvre to the content critics would contribute.
The project was simple in practice though a bit complicated in explanation: each participant would be restricted to a one week time limit in which he or she would pick a scene from a single Tony Scott film and write an analysis of it before passing that analysis anonymously to the next person in the project. The recipient would be tasked to "respond" to that analysis with a different scene from a different movie, before passing on that response to the next person, and so on. The end results, then, would be individual pieces on the work of Tony Scott that have a strange but very present connective tissue—no larger scheme or cohesion, just moments connecting from one piece to the next.
We had so many people respond to our invitation to participate, however, that we decided to split the roster into two "movements" of conversation and analysis. As chance would have it, the two opening pieces in each movement ended up being on Crimson Tide, so one can follow how the critical paths diverged from this identical starting position.
—Daniel Kasman & Gina Telaroli
***
Tony Scott: A Moving Target is being presented in conjunction with a small retrospective of Scott's films at the 92YTribeca in New York—The Great Scott—programmed by Gina and myself and running December 7 - 8, 2012. To see the program's lineup and notes, see our announcement.
***
- Three Dimensional Threat Space (Crimson Tide) by Daniel Kasman
- Heading into Twilight (Taking of Pelham 1 2 3) by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- Start Me Up (Domino) by Adrian Martin
- Black Hole Cinema (The Last Boy Scout) by Christoph Hochhäusler
- The Two Tonys (One of the Missing) by Christopher Small
- Men, Fire (Enemy of the State) by Adam Cook
- Explosions in the Sky (Domino) by Boris Nelepo
- Ashes of Time (Man on Fire) by C. Mason Wells
- I Was Born, But... (True Romance) by Joe McCulloch
- The Whirled View (Unstoppable) by Phil Coldiron
- Crimson Tide by Ryland Walker Knight
- Enemy of the State by Ben Simington
- Domino by Robert Koehler
- Déjà Vu by Steven Shaviro
- Man on Fire by Christoph Huber
- TonyScottDeathSong (Spy Game) by Uncas Blythe
- Another Green World (Unstoppable) by Kurt Walker
- With Each Touch, I Risk My Life (Domino) by Otie Wheeler
- Standard Op (Enemy of the State) by David Phelps
- Sp(eye) Gam3z (Spy Game) by Gina Telaroli