POST-AESTHETIC

There is a misconception about cinema. I mean, one that resides at the very core of the elite who profess to create or to understand the art. Extreme confusion governs their judgments and their works. A lack of openness inclines some to consider cinema a minor entertainment, readily discarded to get back down to serious things, such as literature. A lack of high standards leads others to fill their fifty-year pantheon with a hundred great talents and discover an…

Truth is discovered when compared to lies. A total reinvention of the topography of the western from Dwan, with its primary dialectical motif being that of exteriors viewed internally between curtains or through open windows; in the sudden ruptures of doors swinging open to gunshots, then slamming shut in a panic. The constant conflict between the internal moral struggle and the chaos just beyond. By the time the famous tracking shot occurs Dwan has already mapped out the formal landscape…

A cinema of the stranger, and in this way it is akin to Ray, but this is unmistakably a Henry King film through and through. King, whose work, it is well-known, placed great importance on the Church as means of establishing (or fracturing) community, intercuts the church sequence with the escape of the eponymous Bravados to cultivate a sense of conflict and emotional tension which is reflected in the Peck character’s confliction within, both in his mind and of his…

There is one moment in particular that I believe contains the key to understanding Erika.

It comes when she is talking with the mother of the girl who’s hand was brutally sabotaged and who can no longer play in the concert (or in any venue for a long while) forthcoming, thereby in effect ruining or otherwise severely hampering her young, promising career before it even had the chance to take off as it seemed so certainly poised to do.

During…