GR the Movie

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

On Fri, 15 Sep 1995, Oliver Xymoron wrote:

> What I think this calls for is collaboration. Various passages directed
> and filmed by folks like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Almodovar, van
> Sant, Copolla, Spike Lee, Kurosawa... the final product would be a five or
> six hour long visual documentary put together in montage format with
> various elapse-time sequences ala Koyaanisqatsi, drug sequences and rocket
> flight imagery engineered by ILM and EBM, and stock WWII era footage (not
> to mention King Kong). No dialogue, narration (readings actually) by
> Boroughs, Crispin Glover, Michael Jackson, Dennis Hopper, Steven Wright, 
> James Earl Jones, Connie Chung, Emo Philips, et al. Slothrop never 
> actually appears because the movie is filmed from his point of view. The 
> soundtrack is a collection of scratchy 78s, big band, blues, early jazz, 
> swing, break-beat techno, acid house, and ambient. The title is again 
> "Mindless Pleasures" and is given a thumbs up by Siskel who says "Thumbs 
> up! I thought Christina Ricci was wonderful as Bianca!" and Ebert won't 
> admit he watched it. 

You say "no dialogue", and obviously with good reason. I know only one
film (which is in my view the best of films) where there is "dialogue", 
really. No, it's neither by Altman (who has, admittedly, impressive 
soundtracks), nor by any of your (our?) Europeans. The film is, of 
course, Welles' _Touch of Evil_, which shows that it is, after all,
quite artificial to speak about distinct "syntagmatic" and "paradigmatic" 
levels in narratives. The universe is *both* intensely thick *and* 
unbelievably mobile. This all reminds me of a novel that I've read
a couple of times...    

Heikki