>
>
>Films that are authentically nihilistic, in my view then, are those that
>depict a world in which characters either (1) struggle and strive to realize
>ideals that ultimately come to nothing, or a world in which characters (2)
>acquiesce in the necessary failure that is involved with living in this world. The
>latter response need not be of a sad or depressed sort, it might be completely
>unemotional, or even positive and humorous.
>
John Marmysz
Such views can be very subtly expressed. Some examples from my Meaning
of Life class. In the Nicholas Ray film In a Lonely Place Bogart plays a
disillusioned and violently impulsive has-been screenwriter who has
idealistic aspirations beyond being a popcorn salesman. He has a stab at
redemption through love that us lost through circumstances and his
personality and the last shot shows him wandering off into desolation.
But the central shot of the film occurs at the moment as a phone rings
on what we know will be a devastating phone call that may drive him to
murder. The characters are shown in a two shot and each moves out of the
frame, leaving the screen blank for just a fraction of a second, opening
up a void and suggesting the depth of the collapse. Beautiful shot that
is analogous to the end of the world planetarium scene in Rebel Without
a Cause but much more subtle. Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur seems to
pull a character back from nihilism as he gives up bounty hunting with
its notion that the value of man can be reduced to a sack of money and
wanders off with the girl. Seems like a redemptive ending unless you pay
attention to the blasted landscape they are walking through in the final
shot, very different than anything that we have seen before in a movie
characterized very rigorous use of landscape. The character has had to
face what he is capable of and even though he backs off from that it
lingers in the background. Something similar happens in Mann's Man of
the West where an ex-gang member gets away from his old gang by a
brutality that seemingly does not allow him to het back to his reformed
life.
j
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