Jeremy - a liked your writing on Peeping Tom and Michael Powell. A couple of
responses though to what were really just passing comments made on other
directors, the kind of comments one makes to keep the momentum of ones theme
going and to stimulate the reader, in passing, to agree or disagree
pleasurably. Lynch, Cronenburg, Loach and Reisz.
Blue Velvet, I suppose, may treat some of the same themes, but I would
prefer to see it as a kind of tender coming of age film (complete with the
dizzying, dreamlike confusions of a coming of age protagonist) by a director
of quite straight stories - and affectively one of the most frightening
films I know. (For fear cf The Night The Hunter)
Much as I like David Cronenburg, I too feel that there is sometimes a
glibness in his films - even in Crash, which I think is a fascinating and
critical look at the sublime empowerment of technology, including technology
for looking, showing and watching, and technology for overcoming nature, and
indeed at the aesthetic of the sublime itself. Given the intellectual
currency of these themes in the recent past - and indeed they have been
persistent themes of aesthetics since at least Kants Critique of Judgement -
Peeping Tom seems to have found a perhaps time-bound intellectual moment to
thrive. Whatever the reception of Peeping Tom there will always be Black
Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where Im Going and The Red
Shoes, The Red Shoes.
Ken Loach I think is one of the best exponents of the peculiar British genre
of miserability - rather than a tendentious socialist-realist filmmaker -
and one of the best exponents of talking cinema. Films like Looks and
Smiles, Riff Raff, Raining Stones, and even his venture into the
miserabilist thriller My Name is Joe. On British miserabilism by the way -
TV is full of bad instances, but recently The Royle Family provided a superb
miserabilist comedy and superb talking television (scripted by Carol
Ahearne?). Sometimes it was like Terrence Davies but smiling. For those who
dont know it, it is set in lounge room around a TV set.
Karel Reisz did at least make Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Ross
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