Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bulkington (A) on November 15, 2004 at 12:13:40

In Reply to: So... if you will... posted by Victor Khomenko on November 15, 2004 at 11:25:00:

Esp. with the Gallipoli reference, but I think there's something about the sanitization of violence in film--a problem I think in a lot of ways retroactively exposed by the first twenty minutes of SPR--is a real problem, specifically in cases in which, as a matter of content, violence can't be avoided. For example: the storming of Omaha Beach. I think most film deaths elide something essential to the experience of loss by almost always letting us somehow say our goodbyes. When a hero or even just some minor character or friend or foil is killed, there's always some kind of looking into the camera, a conscious recognition of impending death on the actor's face, some kind of communion between the departing and the soon-to-be-berieved. Rarely dead and that's it. No goodbyes. The shock of authentic-looking violence in SPR--of violence done to the human body, the destruction often so complete that, if there's anything left to say goodbye to, it's still been mangled and distorted beyond recognition--I think comes closer, above and beyond the gore, to presenting the reel sensory violence of loss than any other war film I've seen, Gallipoli included (though Gallipoli is far and away the superior film--again, I'm talking specifically about how Spielberg rendered the storming of Omaha Beach).

But in other scenarios, delicacy is best. The murder of the son in In the Bedroom, for example. You're with the girlfriend when she hear's the gunshot, not with the victim when he receives it, which is exactly the right move, as the victim's experience, given that he's killed, isn't a viable perspective through which to present that scene, as the dead don't live with experience and have nothing to say to us about how they died. As a movie about loss, it must be done from the perpective of the berieved, and the horror of that gunshot and the site of his lifeless body on the kitchen floor after, deformed and deprived of goodbyes, is powerfully affecting, and not the kind of move I'd ever expect from Spielberg, that's for sure.