What beautiful fragments the gods leave from their unfinished visions. Orson Welles was cursed with having entered the arena of the cinema by immediately reaching its peak. In 1941 he made Citizen Kane, that grand work of cinematic biography- taking the story of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and transforming it into a reverie of immortal imagery. Welles was merely 24 at the time and it would be his fate to fall while leaving beautiful trails behind. He would direct titles like Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, all butchered by the studio system, yet all considered masterful. His 1948 Macbeth is one of the great underappreciated Shakespeare adaptations, a work of brimstone and gothic poetry. [Read more…]
The Importance Of Bruce Conner To 20th Century Cinema
In seeking the magic of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Robin Scher speaks of Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray as not only shaking “the very bedrock of pop culture” but essentially becoming the first music video through harnessing the full power of rock ‘n roll in support of his imagery.
In the video below, Dennis Hopper, David James, Bruce Jenkins, Michael Kohn, Gerald Casale and others consider the importance of Bruce Conner in 20th century cinema. Dennis Hopper, in fact, calls Bruce Conner the most important artist of the 20th Century. Bruce Jenkins, more fundamentally, says Conner was “first and foremost a visual artist, somebody who was always drawing, who really understood the world through a visual lens [and] understood the power of the scale of cinema.” Michael Kohn sees “a great spirituality” in Conner’s work, a “sense of mysticism [that] is not going to be made clear for you but is going to be made manifest for you through his work.” See the interview and snippets of Conner’s work in the video below:
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now (1979)
directed by Francis Coppola
This spectacular film, long delayed and said to be 17 million dollars over its budget, ends in a welter of bathos that has to be seen to be believed, and that weighs down the whole work with its mournful freight of clutching, unappeasable ambition. But the film holds together well enough until it reaches its final muddle, and it has scenes and moments unequaled in recent European or American movies. Indeed, it has one long sequence so right and so powerful that it actually causes the confusion of the end, since it leaves Coppola with nothing to say. He cannot discover the promised “heart of darkness” in the murk of his conclusion, because he stumbled across it much earlier—earlier in the finished film and in the shooting—on a bright, noisy beach strewn with soldiers and helicopters, sheets of flame lighting up the background, as a plausible imitation of napalm devoured the jungle. He went on looking—writing, directing, editing—for the horror he had already found. [Read more…]