These will come in in batches of three, to foster the gallery effect of surveying comprehensively an artist's work. Three an exhibition. An exhibition a time. In an ever accumulating testament to our most subtle, delicate aesthetician.
(#1)
Description: Our architectural surroundings as a sort of physical, coeval representation of (implied is its - our external world's - having a distinctly causal lineage, existing now as present corollaries, with) our noumenal, itself-representational beings and distinct places (geographical and symbolical) of being. Our existences (as part of a long history) are what make the architecture around us, and the architectures (or simply the materials of our structures) thus, with involuntary naturalness, brace the backs of Hooper's figures.
* I would like to leave these "Exhibitions" to as much of the images themselves as possible. So I'll withhold the explication for now, and look for the further musings on these images in independent posts that will be made for each individual film.
#2
The visual exhibition. Liken to as if in a museum (to see an image
or two), which is what the internet will be... For our purposes. A
spare image wall, emphasizing the sheer degree to which Hooper works on a
level of the delicate, meaningful image.
Description: The Seating poignancy. The form-fitting landscape of surroundings and the camera frame forming around humans in the conscripted arrangement of seating, emboldened by scales, sizes, and every now and then the majestic commonality of our upholstery (furniture and otherwise).
The poignantly seated comes perennially in slants. Slants of forms that convey pressing diagonals of engagement.
Who is the engaging party in the Spontaneous Combustion images above? Unlike the party being harangued in Eaten Alive, the parents being consoled in Poltergeist, or the unconscious boy being caressed in The Funhouse, here, the level of engagement between parties is about even, and so a strange new "car door configuration" is conceived. In the film, Sam Outside-the-Car is previously the put-upon party, yet the tables seem to turn (or the seats seem to switch) in this moment of seating engagement, in which Sam the Oppressed is now suddenly the looming presence. He is now in a position of both holding up the car and making squirm his icy ex-wife, and congenially putting time in for his infirm former foster guardian (his ex-wife's grandfather) - bridging the gap of estrangement in this evening out dynamic of engagement-dominance. It's a strikingly lovely reconfiguring of the seated dynamic, not quite an over-the-shoulder - i.e. a straight-forward one party distinct from another opposite-facing party - since the two parties lie on the same plane. A beautiful variation on Hooper's seating engagements. It is in keeping with the more obscure, more profoundly unusual dynamic being played out here, in which all characters here become alternately powerful/sympathetic/suspect/vulnerable.
Meanwhile, in The Funhouse, the suspect man keen with young boys must but only beam glowingly as he dips down to bedside-level, must but keep a distance before he does, indeed, venture a touch (the young boy's parents safely watching over them).
The poignantly seated comes perennially in slants. Slants of forms that convey pressing diagonals of engagement.
Who is the engaging party in the Spontaneous Combustion images above? Unlike the party being harangued in Eaten Alive, the parents being consoled in Poltergeist, or the unconscious boy being caressed in The Funhouse, here, the level of engagement between parties is about even, and so a strange new "car door configuration" is conceived. In the film, Sam Outside-the-Car is previously the put-upon party, yet the tables seem to turn (or the seats seem to switch) in this moment of seating engagement, in which Sam the Oppressed is now suddenly the looming presence. He is now in a position of both holding up the car and making squirm his icy ex-wife, and congenially putting time in for his infirm former foster guardian (his ex-wife's grandfather) - bridging the gap of estrangement in this evening out dynamic of engagement-dominance. It's a strikingly lovely reconfiguring of the seated dynamic, not quite an over-the-shoulder - i.e. a straight-forward one party distinct from another opposite-facing party - since the two parties lie on the same plane. A beautiful variation on Hooper's seating engagements. It is in keeping with the more obscure, more profoundly unusual dynamic being played out here, in which all characters here become alternately powerful/sympathetic/suspect/vulnerable.
Meanwhile, in The Funhouse, the suspect man keen with young boys must but only beam glowingly as he dips down to bedside-level, must but keep a distance before he does, indeed, venture a touch (the young boy's parents safely watching over them).
#3
Description: Slightly askew are the proportions. Almost meaningless is the purpose behind the almost-defiances of gravity, in which floating outliers of the predominant subjects and established scale seem to weigh the frame into a whole new egalitarian direction, where the miniscule diversity of the arrangement - the range of the distances to the camera, the intangible weight given over to the figures of the outliers - adds up to an elegance in an anti-parallelism, an off-balance painterly harmony.
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