...the squeaking of Mme. Arpel's shoes is amusing at first, and almost maddening by the end. It's not just that Tati uses gags and keeps striking the same chord. His aesthetic position and insane logic lead to a totally deformed and obsessive world view. The closer he seeks to get to life, the farther away he moves, because life is not logical (in real life, we get so used to noises we don't hear them). In the end he creates a mad, nightmarish, overly concentrated universe which paralyzes laughter rather than engendering it. Francois TruffautI heard it suggested yesterday that film is an unconservative medium because it is necessarily fake, i.e. if I were to show you a film that had been made documentary-style by one guy with a handicam and another film made in a professional studio, the latter would seem more realistic than the former.
Hitchcock says something like this in Hitchcock/Truffaut:
They [Cary Grant & Ingrid Bergman] felt terribly uncomfortable at the way in which they had to cling to each other. I said, "I don't care how you feel; the only thing that matters is the way it's going to look on the screen... Some directors will place their actors in the decor and then they'll set the camera at a distance, which depends simply on whether the actor happens to be seating, standing, or lying down. That, to me, semes to be pretty woolly thinking. It's never precise and it certainly doesn't express anything.Housemate Dara suggests that this inverse relation between reality and realism is one reason why voyeurism is appealing: very artificial and tightly manipulated films look realistic, and raw footage looks unrealistic, which means that if you want your life to seem unrealistic and stylized, all you have to do is put it on film.
Film trades in superficiality more than other media? Maybe. But does this really make it unconservative? It was John Ford who said "Print the legend," after all.
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