My poem "The Windfalls" (written for and dedicated to nineweaving) has been accepted by Lone Star Stories for their April issue.
Congratulations.
feverishly beautiful in Technicolor, too immense in its high, cold spaces for the eye to take in comfortably; sensual and profoundly indifferent.
I hear it looks fantastic on a big screen.
"I think there are only two ways of living in this place. Either one must live like Mr. Dean or like the holy man. Either ignore it, or give yourself up to it," and Clodagh's response to her is prophetic: "Neither will do for us."
It really speaks to the pervasive but unselfconscious conqueror role the nuns assert, just by being there. It's no wonder the Catholic Church was so unhappy with the film. In the commentary, Michael Powell mentions not really understanding at the time why the Church found it so disagreeable, but at the time of the commentary's recording (the late 1980s), the reasons seemed rather obvious to him.
The land strands them with themselves,
Exactly--well put.
"Black Narcissus" is not an exotic classical allusion,
I'd say it is, at least as far as Sister Ruth is concerned.
But I never felt wrapped up in the landscape the same way as in "I Know Where I'm Going!" or A Canterbury Tale, and so I believed less, I think, that it would affect the characters so devastatingly.
I felt just the opposite. Maybe because I'm struck more by the style inherent in artificial environments than I am by the implied significance of natural environments--I think it would have actually worked less for me if it'd actually been shot in India.
she's never looked more beautiful as she appears behind Clodagh, bell-ringing on the cliff's edge: and she looks as though she's already dead.
Test audiences were so horrified by Sister Ruth's appearance in that climactic scene that the studio almost ordered the shot of Ruth stepping through the door deleted from the film. I, too, thought she looked beautiful, so it goes to show how audiences have changed. It reminds me of a friend of mine telling me how people were throwing up in the aisles when Night of the Living Dead first premiered.
Sister Ruth's the primary reason I consider Black Narcissus to be a horror movie. From the beginning, before she even goes to India, we already know that being a nun isn't agreeing with Ruth. But when her fantasies she's become mad with, as you put it, turn out to be false, she finds herself utterly without identity and seems to become a sort of animal, darting among the shadows like the creature from Alien. It's the existential crises combined with the physical unpredictability I found to be so effectively menacing.
no subject
Congratulations.
feverishly beautiful in Technicolor, too immense in its high, cold spaces for the eye to take in comfortably; sensual and profoundly indifferent.
I hear it looks fantastic on a big screen.
"I think there are only two ways of living in this place. Either one must live like Mr. Dean or like the holy man. Either ignore it, or give yourself up to it," and Clodagh's response to her is prophetic: "Neither will do for us."
It really speaks to the pervasive but unselfconscious conqueror role the nuns assert, just by being there. It's no wonder the Catholic Church was so unhappy with the film. In the commentary, Michael Powell mentions not really understanding at the time why the Church found it so disagreeable, but at the time of the commentary's recording (the late 1980s), the reasons seemed rather obvious to him.
The land strands them with themselves,
Exactly--well put.
"Black Narcissus" is not an exotic classical allusion,
I'd say it is, at least as far as Sister Ruth is concerned.
But I never felt wrapped up in the landscape the same way as in "I Know Where I'm Going!" or A Canterbury Tale, and so I believed less, I think, that it would affect the characters so devastatingly.
I felt just the opposite. Maybe because I'm struck more by the style inherent in artificial environments than I am by the implied significance of natural environments--I think it would have actually worked less for me if it'd actually been shot in India.
she's never looked more beautiful as she appears behind Clodagh, bell-ringing on the cliff's edge: and she looks as though she's already dead.
Test audiences were so horrified by Sister Ruth's appearance in that climactic scene that the studio almost ordered the shot of Ruth stepping through the door deleted from the film. I, too, thought she looked beautiful, so it goes to show how audiences have changed. It reminds me of a friend of mine telling me how people were throwing up in the aisles when Night of the Living Dead first premiered.
Sister Ruth's the primary reason I consider Black Narcissus to be a horror movie. From the beginning, before she even goes to India, we already know that being a nun isn't agreeing with Ruth. But when her fantasies she's become mad with, as you put it, turn out to be false, she finds herself utterly without identity and seems to become a sort of animal, darting among the shadows like the creature from Alien. It's the existential crises combined with the physical unpredictability I found to be so effectively menacing.