Michel Chion, November 2004
1844570444 £8.99
The Thin Red Line (1998) is only the third film to have been directed by Terrence Malick, the maverick genius of American cinema, in a thirty-year career. Set during the savage World War II battle for Gaudalcanal, it boasts a stellar cast-including George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn and John Travolta-but otherwise goes entirely against the grain of conventional Hollywood film-making. Action, narrative and patriotism are subordinated to sometimes cryptic interior monologues and exquisite images of animals and nature which many viewers found perplexing and disconcerting.
How to make sense of this extraordinary film? Michel Chion traces the connections to Malick's earlier work: a complicated sense of 'paradise on earth', an intensely questioning sensibility, characters whose disembodied voices yearn for new knowledge and truth. He links The Thin Red Line not only to James Jones's novel on which it is loosely based, but also to a tradition of American thought (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman). More than that, Chion pays minute attention to the substance of the film itself-the images, sounds, faces, landscapes and words which combine to create a magnificent reflection on the beauty, inexplicability and tragedy of people's co-existence with each other and with the world.
Michel Chion is the author of many books on the cinema, among them Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey (BFI Publishing 2001) and a monograph on Eyes Wide Shut, also published in the BFI Modern Classics series.
Other titles in the series .. ' Three Colours' Trilogy, The
Amores Perros
Blade Runner
Caravaggio
City of Sadness, A
Crash
Crying Game, The
Dead Man
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
Do the Right Thing
Don't Look Now
Eyes Wide Shut
Groundhog Day
Heat
Idiots, The
Jaws
L'Argent
L.A. Confidential
Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht
Pulp Fiction
Right Stuff, The
Salò or The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
Seven
Silence of the Lambs, The
Terminator, The
The Exorcist (Revised 2nd Edition)
The Matrix
The Shawshank Redemption
Thelma and Louise
Titanic
Trainspotting
Unforgiven
Usual Suspects, The
Wings of the Dove, The
Withnail and I
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
WR - Mysteries of the Organism
|
