As thriller plots have lost their moorings in the real world of causes and effects, something valuable has been lost. When actions become arbitrary, stories lose their power to help us make sense of the world and they become strictly formal patterns. Thus many of us now turn to documentaries for the emotional knowledge we once found in fiction films.Andersen qualifies this - "[y]et these formal patterns can still be of some use: they can describe a world, more or less adequately, and they can make it strange" - but his original point is still worth mulling over. Violent Saturday feels very different from many of the post-Jean-Pierre Melville crime pictures - like Michael Mann's Collateral or Johnnie To's Exiled - because the crime is taking place within a recognizable social setting. It's economically built and perhaps not that deep, but it has a genuine breadth. The actions of the criminals aren't measured according to an abstract code, but rather by how they upset the existing web of compromise and failed hopes that make up the movie's small town America.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Grounding
I thought about this line from Thom Andersen while watching Richard Fleishcer's Violent Saturday last night:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You know, I would never say "Violent Saturday" is quite a lost masterpiece (though I think it is underrated), but I think you peg exactly what makes it a rewarding film. The robbery scheme is fascinating on its own, but it is so much more effective by putting people we've become interested in up against it. That moment when the camera shows the robbers walking by Boyd and Linda gives some real punch to the melodrama. Whatever choice people make, it might be wiped away by whatever those violent men do.
ReplyDelete