I decided to take a look at the heights of American cinema. People are often baffled to hear that I do not participate in the consumption of American productions and despite living here that I am completely bereft of any knowledge on who-is-who in the mainstream contemporary culture; actors, rappers, celebrities, etc. fucking ‘ell give me a break. The whole lot are rotten, just as I would not keep one them wankers in my company, I have no interest in knowing what they produce. Have you randomly found yourself in seventy five lives at the same time, got time to waddle? Caramba!
Obviously, I connect with the independents of this country and their representation interests me as much as their personality which cuts through their work like a razor.
The rest could fuck off to the pits of hell and the swill of subconscious who regard the Hollywood shit as something substantial to look at. My tolerance to Terence Malick was 5 minutes long.
The name has been deposited to my attention by a few mates. Therefore, “I decided to take a look at the heights of American cinema.”
I did not see The Thin Red Line, his most praised work. I refuse to see a fucking war picture. Any combination of the colour green, guns and men, man’s dilemma under arms and armour will get nothing but my arse’s applause. When I say I am a pacifist, I do now allow the existence of the military, as a whole, that includes everything to do with its industry. Fictional or real. So, shove it up your cracks those who try to distill morality out of setting stories in that nightmarish, conflictual world. You are worse than those morons who glamourises explosions and macho bodies destined to be blown off to pieces.. It’s a cope out!
My banter is like a snare roll before the execution, I know. However, I am consistent as a rebel flag. La regle du jeu. Only a beautiful woman could corrupt me. Alora…
In that mind numbingly posey 5 minutes of Tree of Life of a Tree, my impression is this:
The cinematographer should be caned for wielding the camera like a sandbag attached to the dolly. All I could see on the screen was the weight on the machine, a cameraman who is trying to milk a bull. The movement is off. I see the hydraulics of the crane on the screen. The editor did his job as told by the director, artistic cuts in a mainstream motion picture, a few good side effects from the TV culture. I shall go on no further than slipping the noose on this geezer and kicking his stand based on one fundamental flaw:
Who can explain this better than Robert Bresson, Bresson, Bresson!
“Cinematography is a writing with images in movement and with sounds. The most ordinary word (and sounds) when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.”
Malik’s images shine no more than a catalogue for Crate and Barrel, only pushed further into that printed isolation by the use of that divine element which should come to the rescue of those sterile images; the sound.
Awful. The words, the score and the diegetic noise whack on an artificial quality — something deeply offensive to me — the most bastardised and wrongly used term in history along with ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’, ‘God’, the quality of being cinematic. O, crapper!
So in this invalid ‘cinematic’ swill there is a ‘dreamy’ atmosphere being conjured up by deploying conventions, the pacing of the whispery voice, eliptical sentences, phrases from various mouths flying in as if they are butterflies on their last breath.
The scenes that convey information about the loss of the son, what I term as the negative drama, negative in the sense of inversion and metonym, awkwardly composed of shots and cuts that doesn’t flow is the core of Malick’s style. It’s clear that this bloke has shot too many commercials, or rather watched too many.
Antidote: A dreamy world that is created by cinematographic writing of images, sounds and words through mise-en-scene and montage. Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah.
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