Content aside, I guess I was thinking about the way story was cut into temporal sections, then reassembled in a way that leaned one temporal section against another to good effect. For example, we have a scene where the moll to the gansgter goes out for the night with the gangsters employee. During that scene, we get a lot of info about here--her character, her habits, her desires, and her distress. We see her in an epic life and death struggle, and know that she barely survives, but survives. Later, when the gangster is in the boxer's dressing room, his moll stands as just a figure in the doorway. As she should. But that stereotypical figure in the doorway is made rich by what we know of her. Rich, cumulative knowledge is loaded into a figure as a result of putting the emphasis on meaning rather than on temporality, and by arranging those meaning bits to optimal effect.  I think there is a lot of this sort of thing going on in Pulp Fiction.
   People may have liked the violence, but twenty years ago, if you tried to make a movie as temporally chopped up as was this one, even violence could not have made it popular. As it happened, many people still simply did not understand how a movie could have someone die in a scene, then have them alive in the next.   
 
>>> Jay Anania <[log in to unmask]> 08/31 7:58 AM >>>
In a message dated 8/31/99 2:27:53 AM, you wrote:
 
<<For all that, the movie Pulp Fiction, for example, worked in a kind of
simple prismic or ideogrammic way. I tend to think it would not have been
produced as it was without Pound or his Cantos coming first. And lots of
people liked that movie. Maybe the modern world is slowly becoming more
Poundian. But the emphasis is on slowly.>>
 
I think that people liked PULP FICTION because it was silly and violent, a
combination that seemed to appeal to many (not me).  It is not more Poundian
than any other narrative film, EACH of which is constructed, by convention, 
in a  'prismic or ideogrammic way'.  I would add that what this viewer
experienced as the sophomoric tone of PULP FICTION was not especially
Pound-like.
Best,
Jay Anania