Thank you everyone for the bevy of suggestions (and a special thanks
to those who good-naturedly embraced the subject's lumpy
neologism). They're all written down in my pad. It's an odd-looking list.
In my original message I enlisted Karina watching Dreyer in Vivre sa
Vie as something akin to what I was particularly after. One reply was to
sit tight, keep watching til the end, FFWD if needs be ... et voila!
I'll admit the Poe reading scene didn't even occur to me when
originally mulling all this over. Though I'll definitely reinvestigate (if
ever I find a copy of the film - still no DVD yet?) here's why the memory
never stirred: I'm ultimately after pure, private, pared down reading.
Just the reader silent with their book (I picture it as dog-eared
secondhand). No listeners; (ideally) no voiceover; no reading to kill
time; no deadlines or appraisals to be given, someone standing by
expectantly - the reader is reading for their own pleasure. This is why I
think the Dreyer scene is the better paradigm.
Silent reading isn't particularly cinematic: the face at worst all frowning
brows and slack mouth, at best inscrutable blankness. Lavish
weeping is much rarer than it is among cinema-goers. I can imagine
perhaps a Warhol short along these lines (though I don't believe one
actually exists). The Neverending Story doesn't really have this
sparsity I'm looking for (and loses further points for it's extravagantly
wailing theme tune).
I'm still finding it very interesting to leave the net thrown wide. But I just
wanted to make clear my peculiar criteria (though I'm sure a few
replies are already in accordance - I'll look mroe closely tomorrow).
Again, thank you.
Jonathan.
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