Sunday, December 15, 2013

THAS: The Art of the Exquisite Visual Dialectic, aka Patterning and Matrix-Making

The Exquisite Visual Dialectic
"Without breaking from the scene's rigorous pattern of singles (Eaten Alive a film about isolated spheres of different personages, Hooper's cinema in general about dialectic - the explicit contrasting between things, such that ideas and suggestions are created), the entrance of Buck is signaled simply, eloquently by Marilyn Burns's turn of the head toward the sound of a car radio playing another wistful country tune, the car belonging to Buck, a new player in her and the film's fleeting, interconnected, serious drama of life." - From THAS: Eaten Alive 2 post.
Hooper's rigorous patterns.  The visual nature of the camera set steadfastly in a hardened matrix of contrasting subjects and opposing - or simply different, yet adjacent - frames.  Hooper's thick and lulling as molasses willingness to stick to the low-excitement, but high-mannerist, routine of aesthetically demonstrative frames, caught in a grid of interplay, used in emboldened repetition.  It is not naturalism.  It is a dodgy (in the most complimentary sense of the word) and jolting mannerism, that when held over to commercial filmmaking can be confused for a soporific deficiency of inspiration, or a "failure" to attain that overbearingly butter-smooth, persuadable New Hollywood naturalism.

That Hooperian tone of heightened theoretical expression and ideated visual performative -- it is created through this constant creation of mannerist frames, without recompense but to jut into each other in anticipated interplay, and harmonize alongside each other in Hooper's (undiscerning of naturalism) sequence of alarmingly beautiful and theoretical frames.  The willingness for repetition of his theoretical frames is what creates the sense of pattern (patterning within scenes the most straightforward cinema analogue to poetry's meter, in their creation of rhythm and accentuation within a sense of internal structure)...
 
Hooper creates drama through the aesthetical aspect of the drama.  Naturalism is sacrificed when the frame is so clearly felt, the image's performative communication so clear, the tranquilized and matrixed patterns of repeating the same old frames so willingly sustained.  Gained, of course, is meaningful aesthetics.
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Night Terrors (1993)
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper

Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
be Hooper Tobe Hooper
be Hooper
Tobe Hooper

The Heisters (1964)
Tobe Hoope
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hoope
Hooper's dialectical "matrix-making" is all over The Heisters, which is conceived with the visual economy of scrappy early cinema (that time when the performative visual was the common tool to the telling of those silent, archetypical tales).
The visual separation here of the three archetypes of heisters is fundamentally clear.
 Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
 Tobe Hooper  


The Heisters (1964)
One need not put The Heisters's sophistication of visual dialectic or of moral aptitude into question when we see how sharply it demonstrates that dialectic need not simply remain between persons and persons... that the bold, mannerist matrix-making can be expanded to include communicating the chasm that exists between people and their very own - effective or rather ineffective, as we see below - extremities...
(Accountable or mostly unaccountable extremities, with regards to the caped heister, who, in this scene, places a look of conciliation on his face all while his off-screen hands continue to pocket the largest jewels...)

Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
obe Hooper

Poltergeist (1982)
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hoope           r
Tobe Hooper
Tobe Hooper
  be Hooper
Tobe Hoop   er
    be ooper
Tobe Hoop   e r
  be oper
A scene of ambiguous singles... enmeshed in a scenic web, in a "matrix" of interplay, placed together they effectively create a functional scene via mannerist images.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, beautiful lamps...

http://vimeo.com/77350280

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http://vimeo.com/71011854

JR said...

Divine! Regarding that first short piece. Lamp light and snow light, snow albedo. I will get to that feature length work soon enough. (That Vimeo channel is a goldmine.)

I've already posted this here somewhere, but this scene from Godard's Nouvelle Vague.

Anonymous said...

Yes, i remember when you posted that. Amazing.

Mmm, i also remember a very beautiful (and "ominous") lamp in "The Mangler", in Robert Englund´s office. Like a "sinister" moon.

JR said...

La vallée close is staring at the quotidian void. A film about looking at looking, or waiting on waiting, where tourists staring into blackness, or a man waiting for the sun to shine in just the right way, is the same way the viewer takes in the film's image, creating that infinite mirror effect between our everyday and this French mountain town.

Eggshells-like car ride through the city... Rousseau apparently structuring the film after the poetic verse structure of a Sestina...

Anonymous said...

And how do you edit TIME itself?. There is an extremely complex sense of internal rhythm in that film.

I haven´t seen Egghells yet!!

JR said...

"And how do you edit TIME itself?"

Provocador! :)

Anonymous said...

Hehehe!!