hahahahaha.
now that’s a really good comment. and it asks for a bad-ass argument. In a way, this is a spin-off from the thread that Nathan started ‘what is cinema?’ I’m guessing that what you are driving at is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way in which we receive cinema, talk about, dwell upon it. I agree that there is often something insidiously empty about any discussion of the seventh art.
From an academic pov, of course, there’s an impasse. We are working largely within schools of ideology, and ultimately limitations of this kind extend all the way to the actual language we can use (ineffective) to explore the medium. Everyone needs to spend a lengthy amount of time defining a position (one room) before walking the corridor (a question) to enter another room (someone else’s position) and opening a dialectic. And it leads to a feeling of soundbite in the corridors, zeitgeist in the vents.
END’s point is a very good visual image of what actually happens in the industries themselves. Hollywood, for example, is really exactly just that. A wasted breath of 30,000 words and ideas per second. There’s an undercurrent of people doing, but the overall action of the industry manifest is really just ‘people walking around, going into rooms and saying things…’ (and doing coke).
It’s a very depressing swizzle stick
“A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.” — Michael Haneke
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
-Jean-Luc Godard
“A day is 24 hours a day.”
i felt exactly like that when i recently saw bresson’s the devil probably. i really like that film tho.
I think you’re talking about L’avventura specifically.
…just people walking around, going into rooms and saying things? It’s all a big swizzle.
Just finish watching Woody Allen’s “Interiors”?
Or a Bergman film? ;)
What is the condition of these rooms? What is it that’s being said? What is the physical expression of those walking? You answer those questions with imagination and intelligence, and I’m your audience.
Re.: “I think you’re talking about L’avventura specifically.”
As T. S. Eliot said, “In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”
Actually, most of Antonioni’s films MINIMIZE dialogue, as opposed to the talkathon Hollywood cinema. His moods and meanings are conveyed on other “wires” than plot and dialogue: subtle acting gestures, camera movements, sound effects, editing, etc. Furthermore, many of the most famous Antonioni scenes do not take place in rooms; they occur OUTDOORS: the entire island search scene in L’AVVENTURA, the yacht trip, the ink-spilling scene, the rooftop sequence in Noto when Sandro proposes marriage to Claudia, the “ghost town” sequence in Calisetta, the locomotive interruptus scene, along with the famous last shot.
See Nic Roeg’s Insignificance if you’d like to put to the test that quip about rooms, talking and walking. Roeg discovers different connotations for “room”. A room can become a universe.
@Josh S. Same thing?
And that Insignificance has one of the killer endings in all cinema; right up End’s street, I’ll wager.
Doinel: No. ’Cause yours is in English. ;)
But seriously I know it’s Bergmanesque, I just haven’t seen it yet.
All I ask of a movie is for it to have characters that go places where things happen to them.
End
…just people walking around, going into rooms and saying things? It’s all a big swizzle.