Written half a blog so far but it’s ending up around the length of yours, heh.

Blog it! Blog it while it’s fresh!

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e225/dovzhenko/mejancso-smaller.jpg

Will attempt a blog entry at some point.

I guess Chabrol’s moves fall into a version of the authorial move, but it’s not just to tell the story but to add emphasis to the emotion of a scene — I might have to expand my definition of Motivation 4.

It’s possible for a filmmaker to confine themself, on the surface, purely to Motivation 1 and still achieve beauty and mystery — Keaton does this, and arguably 90% of Kubrick is just following the subject around. But in some cases the surface motivation may just be a pretext for something else. You could digitally remove the actors from The Shining and much of the film’s value would remain — and you would have the opening of Marienbad.

I play the “spot the motivation” game with students, and one that really stretches it to breaking point is the start of Last Tango, where some of the movement may be sheer joie de vivre, and most of it is in a state of constant morphosis between motivations.

I’ve been thinking about Chabrol lately, and noticing that he sometimes moves the camera without obvious motivation except to impart a sense of moment to the moment. It’s as if the world is so weird that there just has to be something scary at the other end of the dolly tracks.

By the way, the Daisy writer is Zach Campbell, not Zach Gallagher.

From what I’ve seen of Jansco there’s a real flux between following action and exploring space, and probably a bunch of other stuff. Once I’ve had my mind blown by The Round-Up this week (with Jansco interviewed afterwards) I’ll have more to say.

Running alongside it is his use of sound Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Denis Young) by Wilma Schoen is entirely about image/sound dialectics. At its beating heart is Billy Strayhorn’s “Daydream” which is given numerous interpretations along the course of the film’s 5-hour running time.