An outbreak of apophenia! The cinetrix has ended up reading a lot about 1980s film stuff this past week. To whit:
At the AV Club, Mike D'Angelo considers The Purple Rose of Cairo [a long-time personal favorite about which I wrote in an M.A. thesis in another life] and gets at what makes it tick.
...[T]he scene in which Tom Baxter—poet, adventurer, explorer, of the Chicago Baxters—can’t help but abandon his narrative for the sake of one sad, lonely woman in the audience remains one of the most electrifying moments in cinema, precisely and paradoxically because it encapsulates the one thing cinema can’t actually do, however fervently we wish it could.
<snip>
...[T]hat first instant when Tom breaks character and looks down at Cecilia (in a near-perfect duplication of a shot we’ve seen previously) never fails to wallop me. Part of it, I think, is just the eyeline, believe it or not. Movie characters have been breaking the fourth wall practically since the medium was invented, but when they do, they almost always look directly into the camera lens, at everybody watching. Allen, on the other hand, makes a point of showing us where Cecilia is sitting, and he shoots the key moment from well back in the theater, with her and other patrons visible in the foreground. Tom does not look at the camera. He looks at her. (I actually wonder how much time was spent working out precisely where Jeff Daniels needed to look to make it work.) And that’s somehow far more arresting than your standard wall-break. Presumably because it plays into our hope that we’d be singled out, not just part of the masses.
Over at The Believer, Geoff Dyer takes on Roland Barthes' 1980 collection Camera Lucida, a book, he claims, "bound up in [Barthes'] grief over [his mother's] death."
Barthes had long been fascinated by photographs, but his exploration of “the phenomenon of photography in its absolute novelty in world history” had its specific origin in a request from Les Cahiers du Cinéma to write something about film. The idea did not appeal. As he told friends, “I’ve got nothing to say about film, but photography on the other hand….” Having agreed to write a short piece for Les Cahiers, Barthes’s reflections on photography (photography “against film”) grew into a book...
In A.O. Scott's Telluride report for the Times, he cites Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast as an example of how the "drama of human beings confronting the elemental power of nature figures" in that director's work. Which got me yearning for more Martha Plimpton onscreen [always] but also remembering just how divisive the critical response was when the adaptation [by Paul Schrader!] of Paul Theroux's book was released in 1986. Perhaps on the eve of its 25th anniversary it's time for a reappraisal, especially given how nicely it would nestle into more recent formulations like the Global South?
Finally, Jonathan Rosenbaum recently posted his Reader review of Pump Up the Volume, which he rated a masterpiece. It's an insightful, hilarious read. The lede:
It’s hard to talk seriously about the 60s today, because TV and a lot of assholes have almost ruined it. When I taught film courses in southern California in the mid-80s, I was appalled to discover that college students thought of the 60s as a traumatic, troubled period — a time characterized by young people losing their way, freaking out on bad acid trips, denouncing their parents, getting killed in Vietnam, and protesting the way American society was being run and abjectly failing at it. For students of the 80s, the golden age was the repressive, bland, stultifying 50s, when staunch family and property values were both firmly in place — the mythical past that Uncle Ronnie and all his furry friends comfortingly evoked.
Then there's the nut graf:
From the moment Christian Slater’s precredits, offscreen monologue is heard, over a sustained guitar chord while a slow pan sweeps across an aerial night view of a suburban tract-house subdivision, Pump Up the Volume promises to be something special, and it’s a promise that’s kept. Conceivably the first genuinely radical youth movie since Over the Edge (1979), it differs from that worthy predecessor by being exhilarating rather than disturbing — it’s an upper, not a downer, and a good deal closer to farce than to tragedy (although it has room enough for both). Without wanting to go overboard, I can testify that it has given me more pleasure than any other new movie I’ve seen this summer — providing the kind of energizing, sexy elation I used to go to American movies in the hopes of finding.
Well. Eat me beat me, as the young people say. And, yes, I know that Pump Up the Volume was released in 1990, but I am taking a "long eighteenth century" approach to the notion of the Eighties, thankyouverymuch.
[Now, this, this is the Nineties.]
