>Date:  Thu, 2 Dec 1999 02:42:27 -1000
>From:  William Stoneking <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Montage and Reading the Cantos
 
>I have not seen THE LIMEY, I confess, but I am sure it
>is not any more fugue-like than many many films I could
>call your attention to... Schpesi's Devil's Playground comes
>to mind. But there is no need to compile lists... what
>we are really talking about is an articulate subtext of
>images... the saying through the unsaid... the creation
>of the work of art as if it is happening NOW in the eye,
>ear, mind of the beholder - the essential meaning of the
>idea "Make It New" - through a kind of creative hiding.
>It seems to me that this is the lesson of Modernism,
>if one must speak in terms of lessons.
 
Well, I must admit that I don't feel enough of an expert on
modernism to comment on this.  It's certainly different
from anything I've learned so far.
 
I went back to see THE LIMEY again, catching it on the last
day before it left Honolulu.  I will acknowledge that there
were two Hitchcockian sequences, which I thought were very
well done, and at least one scene with the mood of a
European art film.  Maybe Antonioni, although it's been
a long time since I've seen one of Antonioni's films and
I don't remember them that well; I never especially cared
for them.  Or maybe I'm even thinking of some Bergman
films.
 
But that's incidental, especially on this list.  The point
is that once again, most especially during the first half of
the movie, I got the strong feeling that this was very much
like the Cantos, and that if someone were just beginning to
learn how to read the Cantos, this would be a good film for
him to study.
 
I wish I could explain this better.  But it has to do with
the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated very brief images
and scenes in a non-linear fashion.
 
As to the fugue-like quality, certainly there are many movies
and novels (and undoubtedly poems) to which that label can
be accurately applied.  But the ones I can think of don't
quite do it in the same way the Cantos do.  And it seems to
me that THE LIMEY goes a step further in that direction,
although I'm not so certain on this point as on the
previous one.
 
Once again, I wish I could figure out how to explain this
better.  It's hard to discuss a movie with someone who hasn't
seen it.  So if you are in principle opposed to watching
the film, I guess there's not much more that can be said.
 
--Lee Lady
----------
It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire.
 --- Anais Nin
 
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