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In the 'Gangs of Heaven'/'Far From New York' discussion, I'm still weighing Jonathan Rosenbaum's take on 'Gangs': "Critics and the public alike have discouraged Scorsese from growing up--applauding relatively adolescent slugfests like Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas while showing less enthusiasm for his more adult fare..." [He places 'Gangs' with the slugfests]. David Walsh's piece (below) roasts Scorsese for falsifying history and falsifying psychological reality: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jan2003/gang-j16.shtml Whether or not one agrees, Walsh works out a viewpoint that's stimulating and reasonably persuasive. **Ross Macleay wrote: > I am not sure that Scorcese is quite nostalgic for the lively confusion or > chaos of that tribal cruelty, but he had me fascinated, and/so/but I was > almost relieved (and fascinated by my own reaction) when the navy started > that good old 'unnatural violence' of shelling. Emphasizing the violent past of New York City might count as somewhat radical (as in the cartoon history of the United States in 'Bowling For Columbine'), but showing that corrupt pols ran Tammany Hall seems only slightly more progressive than the easy cynicism of 'Chicago'. The above tribal interpretation, on the other hand, seems basically conservative to me: at the film's end, it's all too possible to think, "Thank goodness we've overcome those tribal divisions, which allowed us to create this great city. But now the WTC has been destroyed by a new invasion of tribalists on our shores. Let's wipe out those retrograde tribes everywhere!" What seems missing is any connective tissue between the violent past and the contemporary present. <snip> > > > Meanwhile to Robert (Ke), thanks for pointing me to your FFH piece. Your > final comment - 'It's all history now and seems like a different world, but > how will our own illusions and prejudices and styles look half a century > from now' - spoke to my interest in the problem of how this film takes up > cultural material and film-cultural-styles that are so sort of safely in the > past. All the aesthetic, dramatic, political and ethical ground seems to be > so thoroughly worked, formed and encapsulated by so much quotation and > knowingness that you are tempted to say that the film is all just too easy > and given and shucks. The aesthetic certainly seemed overly studied: what bothered me especially were the heroine's elaborate outfits in every scene (wouldn't she now and then wear a worn-out bathrobe or modest housedress?), but realism was not the target, of course, given the glossy artificiality of the film's models. > But affectively it's not - certainly not in the way > that a lot of period films of books are. I suspect it is precisely the > function of melodrama to be able to do this overdone thing without overdoing > it, to rescue passion from its artistically highly ornamented preserved > historical forms. I am not quite sure exactly how this is done, but I was > impressed by the way Haynes et al did it. To me, the emotional core of the story is timeless. This drama could take place in any male-dominated society or era (which means, of course, pretty much all of them). But despite the final "healing" image of blossoms in the snow, the heroine's situation strikes me as singularly bleak: she's been left financially impoverished by her divorce (responsible for her children, and very pointedly shown struggling with writing checks); she has been rejected by the only other man who is sympathetic; her fantasy of romantic love and her model of shallow social position have been destroyed. This seems decidedly dark compared to the romantic fulfilment at the end of 'Magnificent Obsession' or indeed 'All That Heaven Allows'. The heroines of 'Letter From an Unknown Woman' and 'Stella Dallas' had achieved some measure of emotional satisfaction at the end, and even the deaths of the heroines of 'Madame X' and 'Only Yesterday' triggered emotional reconciliation among the survivors. The Julianne Moore character, however, has little to show but new responsibilities that she is hardly prepared to face. In terms of bittersweet resolutions, her closest sister might be Barbara Stanwyck's career woman in Sirk's 'There's Always Tomorrow', where her attempt to rescue Fred MacMurray fails, so she must return to her lonely life. Not exactly a crowd-pleaser of an ending! > Your comment made me think about > how the quality of our use of the past may depend upon our sense of how the > future is likely to use us, and that an almost anachronistic or ahistorical > thing like melodrama is vertigonously historical. (This reminds me of a > sense I had in one scene when a reflection of a 2002 jet flies across a 1957 > car window). How much more interesting it would have been with a reflection of the unicorn footage! --Robert Keser