Scene from '2001: A Space Odyssey'

I feel it is often restraint and stylistic severity - such as is productive to a holistic expressive vision, and conjointly neutralizing of such habits of story-telling as stylization and the most conventional dramatic involvement (I'll come out with it, essentially the fun in cinema) - that most effectively activates the "art dimension" in the medium. Why is a film not a painting? Because it entertains you.

Out in the world of cinema, there exists those films that can be deemed "anti-roller coasters." It is not that they are stylistically inert, it is just that these films are intent only to entertain as far as the extent and motivations of their thesis, and, ideally, theses are not "fun." Ideally, they are severe, bracing, ironic, deconstructive; deep in dimensions and low in surface pleasures. In fact, sometimes it is achieving of the opposite of fun, or the antagonizing of style, that makes some works as pointedly communicative and truly demonstrative as they are. There are many great filmmakers who make communicative films in their own special way, but there are "anti-roller coasters" in the specific sense of a seemingly utmost devotion to "anti-fun." Or, at least, there is a particular inclination away from being resolutely fashionable, pleasurable, or stylistically showy.

Some possible examples: Godard's often painfully impenetrable output; Chantal Akerman's awkwardly mimetic Jeanne Dielman; the vague thrillers, blatant theses of Michael Haneke; less at home in my argument, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's snail's-pace Edenic tales and Bela Tarr's elegant noir beauties - while wonderful films and fine examples of that newly-minted critical label "slow cinema," I feel Tarr and Weerasethakul are too stylistically, cosmetically, or sentimentally-driven of stylists to fit into this category of rigid masters.

As for Tobe Hooper, he does have a heightened genre style, but I feel it is mostly ironic and deconstructive, never simply elegant or picturesque, and results in style that is not simply narrative-serving, entertainment-serving, or audience-effect-serving. It may not seem like it, but in the deeply embedded, mostly inadvertent way of his, he often gives service to this artistic philosophy of formal rigidity and idea-prioritizing, anti-escapist severity.

Scene from '2001: A Space Odyssey'

A perfectly a-lovely scene that sparkles with slackness, shimmers with un-skill, undulates uneventful; is luminously lumbering, winningly wooden, radiates its repetitiveness and glistens in its gawking -- ardent in its all thumbs, rings ebullient of its bore. Kubrick's cold, mysterious future is first all conference room formality, Man cool and perfectly in control of Man's destiny. Kubrick's camera observes like a surveillance camera.

The first shot sings the praises of the stiltedly. What is a painting? A stilted movie.

The master shot: a stiff, almost-but-not-quite-encompassing shot of the conference room that has to swivel awkwardly left and right in order to get the whole of the room, doing so with the very unpretentious motivation of keeping track of all bodies in action, despite such actions being hardly important (like the man walking away from, and then all the way back to, his seat).

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Hooper

Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper

Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Hooper

Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper

And a repeating stream of angles:

- A1











- B1









- C1









- D1











- E1












- A2












- B2









- C2

(A breakage)

- D2

(Another breakage.)

- A3

A return to the awkward, back-of-the-room, swiveling camera. The scene's close burns of brusque, shines its succinct. It (alongside that stiffly attentive camera-eye, the lock-step shot sequence) maddens the notions of gloss and over-production, placating finesse and movie-making flash.

A sharp, interrupting cut to the next scene: