Silliman's Blog: 8/22/10

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Moi, circa 1980

Bliss vs. Utility

3 hours of RS reading
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Your host is Brian Ang

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“from Revelator”
in the current issue

Labels: Readings

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Friday, August 27, 2010

One of the reasons I’ve never tried to parlay my love for cinema into a full-time reviewing gig – besides the fact that the field is crashing thanks to the implosion of newspapers – is that, as a poet, I relatively seldom watch an entire picture, at least not the way I’d want a genuinely good reviewer to do. I focus instead on those elements that have more-or-less direct analogs in poetry – writing, direction, problems of narrative, the score, the photography, editing. There is, in fact, so much more in film than just those elements that I’m always abashed to read a review that does a good job, for example, with the role of costumes or sets as it always exposes to me just how much of the film I actually missed while sitting there in the dark.

I can – and often do – watch actors with much the same eye as I do dancers, ice skaters or athletes. There are a handful of actors in each generation who seem to raise their craft to a level heretofore unimaginable to us mere mortals. Their bodies, their faces, everything their eyes do & don’t say, the corners of their mouths – all are in play whenever they take the stage. Their nostrils are in character. Many actors are great for a time – Robert De Niro would be an example, as was Marlon Brando – but then opt to get rich or strange rather than better. Some others (Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp) develop cults & thereafter struggle to not simply to play to that. Yet the very best actor, like the very best dancer (think Baryshnikov), can be a revelation at whatever they do, even sitting silent in a chair. In my life, I can think of just four actors who I think achieve that level of luminescence and hold it throughout their careers – Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Cate Blanchett & Julianne Moore. If they were doing Alpo commercials, I’d probably get a dog.

Labels: Film