If that were done, the film would be in a different genre entirely, one with different rules and expectations. An omniscient camera eye would shortcut or subvert the narrative: if the camera were free to go anywhere and watch anybody doing anything, then the director would have no good reason not to let the audience in on the secrets much earlier. “Jake” Gittes in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and, with one notable brief exception (6), Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). It is why Gene Hackman’s Harry Moseby is in every scene in Night Moves, just as are Jack Nicholson’s J. That limited point of view is the detective genre’s defining visual trope. The camera in detective films is almost always looking at the detective, what he’s looking at, or what people looking at him are seeing. That is what real-life detectives (and physicians, scientists and journalists) try to do all the time. It is an action of distinguishing information from noise, a process that leaves no loose ends. The basic action of nearly all detective fiction and film is one in which the detective figures out the story-the structure-into which otherwise disparate or inchoate or hidden facts fit perfectly. We learn who has been doing these things at the exact same moment Harry Moseby learns it: by looking through the glass–bottomed boat.” (5) It was a crazy period, and I thought we should tell this detective story in a way that could only be understood by what we see, not by what we are told. It was a terrible period, and I felt we were wandering around in a kind of blindness unaware of what we were doing to ourselves. “This was a period,” he said in 1994, “when we’d had all those assassinations in America. Penn has several times said that the mood of the film was a consequence of the Kennedy assassinations in 19 (he worked for both John and Robert) (3) and the killing of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (which he witnessed) (4). The film’s central character, Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private detective, a man whose job is to gather for other people apparently unrelated facts and make sense of them, but Harry is also a man who misses or misreads the facts that are all around him and therefore understands nothing of importance until it is too late for that understanding to be of any use to anyone he understands neither the case that falls in on him nor his own life. (2) That is in large part because the difficulty or impossibility of figuring things out is its subject. Roger Ebert writes that Night Moves is difficult to figure out on one viewing, which is true. And Night Moves (1975) is a detective film in which the caper that keeps the protagonist occupied isn’t the one he’s really in the middle of, and neither the caper he thinks he’s in nor the caper he’s actually in is what the film is about. Little Big Man (1970) is a picaresque western based on Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel in which all the usual western tropes are upside down and inside out: the white women are whores, the soldiers are bloody savages, the “hero” George Armstrong Custer is a homicidal fruitcake, and only the Indians are consistent, ethical, and occasionally close to rational. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was a love story about two vicious killers that ended with the female protagonist, Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) in a hip-flopping parody of sex while she was pounded and perforated by a barrage of. In three successive films over an eight-year period Arthur Penn redefined the borders of three major film genres.
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