Silk - Soie

Love, my folded readers, love as a carefully folded letter.

Ted G

The story here sneaks up on you. Almost nothing is predictable. It starts slowly, and then bam. It goes off in an unexpected direction. The interesting narrative device here is that we follow her and discover things as she does. But she knows things, many things, that we do not. She does get surprised as we do, but not always so. At the end, she is allowed to write the future, for her lover at any rate.

TedG

Altman is a sort of Moses in this environment, trying every escape he can imagine.

TedG: Noir, No Country...

McCarthy's writing style comes after the Clancy/Ludlum model where things are diced into parallel episodes but unified in a grand arc driven by the cosmic principle that good triumphs and the bad guys get punished. This has become the cinematic norm, so whenever we pass through a scene-story, we know how it fits in a universe powered by a machine of justice.....

The other cinematic notion that McCarthy uses is noir, and I am certain that it is what attracted the Coens. They've spent their entire careers surrounding this notion, probing it from all directions. In absolute terms, what defines noir is the notion that the machinery of the universe is arbitrary and linked to the act of viewing. That "viewing" piece has stickiness, because it involves us in what happens to the characters in the world we witness. McCarthy makes us explicitly complicit in the unraveling of ordinary, even expected justice.

Ted Goransson making a point on "Bara no soretsu"

But then the better parts of me just enjoy the experience, part of which is wonder why the Japanese make the best French films. I think there's a discussion in there about cultural assertiveness and military failure seen as societal spaghettithinking.

Film: Bara No Soretsu
Dir: Toshio Matsumoto
(currently unavailable at Netflix)

Zen thought of the day...

Everything in life eventually goes away, lost in time forever. (Let it be with dignity and grace.)

That's a trivial thing, i.e., stating the obvious. What Zen is all about is to stress the unlearning aspect of the thought. To know something so deeply is to be able to discard it easily. [courtesy TedG on Guy Maddin's film]

Quote: TedG FilmsFolded.com

And yet we like it because it is so economical. Its bare, honest, true. So we like it, just like we gravitate to an open person regardless of whether she is dumb. I appreciate Bresson for this, his economy which blesses the viewer with a mind that necessarily filters what we see. But Bresson goes too far and presses into the impress of abstraction. Malle is real because it is overtly untheatrical.

Quoting TedG - FilmsFolded

"Its like relaxing into love with perfect trust."

Quoting TedG (from FilmsFolded.com)

"Some time ago, I had the opportunity to attend an Ichibana lecture and demonstration. It was given by those close to emperor and was tailored for westerners. That meant that there were plenty slides that contrasted western flower arranging with this highest Japanese art. The western values all had to do with perfect symmetry, balance, coherent, simple shapes. Each element should be beautiful by itself. Harmonies were all within this lovely melody of perfect pace. Bach.

Contrasted with this was the Ichibana we saw constructed before us. Dissymmetries, tension, motion and peace. Some elements were dead, even damaged. The base or container was as likely to be misshapen, even ugly. Where the western arrangements were music, this was life. It had soul, katachi. The whole thing was quite an experience for me and was my most visceral introduction to a corner of Japan that I have since enfolded into my own life and eye. At the root of this is dissymmetry (which is different from asymmetry), the presence of items that have sibling states which are not expressed. It gives a tension that springs, the pumps blood and makes real beauty because it provides space for the definition of beauty."

TedG commenting on Jane Eyre

"But before that we had these three sisters, working exclusively on individuals. There are only two humans in this story: all else aren't people in the same sense: they're conditions only, conditions that affect and constrain these two lives that bind to each other. And why not? They're the only humans.

Reading such a thing comes easily enough. But dramatizing it presents challenges. It is primarily an internal dialog that the title character has about her situation. The book isn't centered on that situation narratively, but on her observation of it, and on her soulmate."