Edward Copeland's Tangents

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had — a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire

The Bad and the Beautiful, Kiss Me Deadly, Hell on Frisco Bay, King Creole, Opening Night, Revenge of the Pink Panther, S.O.B.

"Someday, someone will have to explain the motive of a newspaper to me. First, you scream, 'Find the bastards.' Till we do find 'em, you want to get us fired. When we find 'em, you accuse us of brutality. Before we go into court, you give them a trial in the newspaper, When we finally get a conviction, you want to save 'em by proving they were really crazy in the first place. All of which adds up to one thing — you've got the killers,"

DICK: Perry's the only one talking against capital punishment.
JENSEN: Don't tell me you're for it.
DICK: Hell, hangin' only getting revenge. What's wrong with revenge? I've been revenging myself all my life.

"The joke is that no one wanted to buy Marienbad! The producer decided that the film would never be shown, that it insulted and mocked the public, that it meant nothing. I was in a particularly awkward position, since I was “the bad Alain Robbe-Grillet” who had corrupted “the good Alain Resnais.” So for a year the film lay fallow. By chance, the Venice Film Festival saved it, and the absurd, idiotic film became a roaring success overnight."

"Inevitably, the authors were pressed to disclose the 'meaning' of the film. Among the possible solutions suggested have been the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis (Giorgio Albertazzi as doctor pushing patient Delphine Seyrig to go deeper); Albertazzi as Death; or the whole as a kind of stream of consciousness of a single mind, presumably the woman’s, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized what-ifs, all taking place within a few seconds of 'real time’…(As if to illustrate the general ambiguity, at one point in the film a prominent statuary group elicits three different, equally convincing, interpretations.) To this day, the authors have studiously avoided endorsing any single interpretation."

"Be prepared for an experience such as you've never had from watching a film when you sit down to look at Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a truly extraordinary French film, which opened at the Carnegie Hall Cinema last night. It may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, it may leave your mind and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. But this we can reasonably promise: when you stagger away from it, you will feel you have delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience. And that, it appears, is precisely what M. Resnais means you to feel — the extreme and abnormal stimulation of a complete cinematic experience. For this is no usual movie drama that he is dishing up from a script of radical construction by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This is no lucid exposition of human behavior in terms of conventional dramatic situation, motivation and plot. This is an eye-opening example of the use of the cinema device — the machinery of visual image-making, conjoined with musical sounds and the contrapuntal assistance of vocalized images and ideas — to excite the imagination as it might be excited by a lyrical poem, or, better, by the tonal colorations and rhythms of a fine symphony."

"The mood of the protagonists, if we can call them that, is lassitude; there is almost no conflict, only a bit of struggling — perhaps squirming is more accurate — amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat.…It's easy enough to say ‘They are alienated; therefore, they exist,’ but unless we know what they are alienated from, their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose. And that is just what alienation is in these films — an empty pose; the figures are cardboard intellectuals — the middle-class view of sterile artists. Steiner's party from La Dolce Vita is still going on in La Notte, just as the gathering of bored aristocrats in La Dolce Vita is still going on in Marienbad."

"Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Spira’s last companion, found the lost work hidden in the back of a basement and gave it to Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had written Marienbad’s original screenplay. A few weeks before he died [in 2008], Robbe-Grillet passed it on to Olivier Corpet’s Institut Mémoires de l’édition Contemporaine, with the rest of his archives, and Corpet, in turn, gave it to me to broadcast on the website of my review, La Règle du Jeu."

“Look at Marienbad honestly. What is it? It’s just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork. There is nothing clever about confusion.”

"Yes, it's easy to smile at Alain Resnais' 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning — even though the director claimed it had none. I hadn't seen Marienbad in years, and when I saw the new digitized video disc edition in a video store, I reached out automatically: I wanted to see it again, to see if it was silly or profound, and perhaps even to recapture an earlier self — a 19-year-old who hoped Truth could be found in Art.
"Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of Marienbad, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.
…
"'I'll explain it all for you,' promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the U. of I. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of Hoop Dreams.) 'It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn't, that they met before, that they didn't, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn't, that he killed her, that he didn't. Any questions?'"

“The chief difference between Marienbad in 1962 and Marienbad in 2008 may be how many people are willing to tolerate that distress and walk into the theater in the first place. To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or ‘relatable,’ but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their defiant contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing.
By March 1962, when Last Year at Marienbad opened, the pump had been primed; New Yorkers were ready, even eager to wrestle with pictures from abroad that tested their ability to ‘read’ a film. In the preceding 12 months moviegoers had had their first encounters with L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s story of a young woman’s disappearance that seemingly abandoned its own interest in her halfway through; with La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s more user-friendly take on sexually charged European ennui; and with Ingmar Bergman’s stern, uningratiating spiritual meditation Through a Glass Darkly.”

"found myself entertaining the idea for a story in which Manhattan has turned into a sinister collectivity where everyone is spying on everyone else, everyone being tracked by the person at the other end of his or her phone, even though, incessantly dialing one another from wherever they like in the great out of doors, the telephoners believe themselves to be experiencing the maximum freedom."