Post by Capo on Jul 22, 2007 23:05:44 GMT
Dear Phone
Peter Greenaway 1976 UK
14 men, each with the initials HC, are caught up in various incidents involving telephone boxes.
Greenaway wishes to make an imagistic cinema, a filmmaker's cinema, as opposed to that wretched or neglectful, or lamentable or reductive usage of the medium: the writer's cinema - he argues that we've only seen 100 years of illustrated text, where the script provides the main bulk of a film, with little use made of what makes it unique. Here, then, he turns that on its head, filming actual text itself, first crudely scribbled writing and then finally moving towards (almost like a final draft of a script) typewriting. All instances involve phoneboxes, and all lead, in some way or another, from one to the next, not so much as a story, but definitely a cohesive narrative (all protagonists have the initials HC). In between, we have shots of that forgotten icon of Britishness: the red phone box. Shot in early mornings, by serene beaches, along rural lanes, popping out above high walls, alone or in pairs, behind obstacles and other geographical contexts, these lonely, almost empty shots, have a decidedly witty and complex air about them, much like the English setting of H is for House, with all the playful rhetoric and verbal repetition of a Calvino novel.
Peter Greenaway 1976 UK
14 men, each with the initials HC, are caught up in various incidents involving telephone boxes.
Greenaway wishes to make an imagistic cinema, a filmmaker's cinema, as opposed to that wretched or neglectful, or lamentable or reductive usage of the medium: the writer's cinema - he argues that we've only seen 100 years of illustrated text, where the script provides the main bulk of a film, with little use made of what makes it unique. Here, then, he turns that on its head, filming actual text itself, first crudely scribbled writing and then finally moving towards (almost like a final draft of a script) typewriting. All instances involve phoneboxes, and all lead, in some way or another, from one to the next, not so much as a story, but definitely a cohesive narrative (all protagonists have the initials HC). In between, we have shots of that forgotten icon of Britishness: the red phone box. Shot in early mornings, by serene beaches, along rural lanes, popping out above high walls, alone or in pairs, behind obstacles and other geographical contexts, these lonely, almost empty shots, have a decidedly witty and complex air about them, much like the English setting of H is for House, with all the playful rhetoric and verbal repetition of a Calvino novel.