I dreamed one of the local theaters was running a series of films by one particular rediscovered studio, all pre-Codes with the flashlights-and-cardboard feel of Edgar G. Ulmer's Poverty Row productions. I watched three or four of them; I don't think the longest exceeded seventy minutes. I remember wartime settings, female protagonists, a lot of black comedy. A lot of women behind the scenes, too—writers, editors, directors. A couple of character actors who don't exist, but I'd pay a lot of attention to them if they did. I feel my unconscious Hollywood is getting more ambitious, but that does me no good when it comes to showing it to anyone else.
I watched the first two parts of Errol Morris' Wormwood (2017) last night with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks; so far it is a brilliantly executed documentary in that it provides enough information for the audience to ask the second- and third-order questions without prompting and a brilliantly executed conspiracy theory in that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what you should hope or worry is true, what you should really be afraid of, where pattern recognition leaves off and apophenia comes in. The dramatic sequences are being performed by actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, and Tim Blake Nelson in a beautiful sheen of Time Life hallucinations; the main interviewee, Eric Olson, with his photocollages and his allusions to Hamlet, would be an ideal Morris subject even if he weren't bound into the heart of a real-life paranoid thriller that has consumed him since 1953. It's a visual and narrative mosaic with terrible lacunae and I can't tell if some of them are ever going to be filled in or if they will just grow vaster and more inescapable, a slow event horizon of American unknowing. It's not that the truth isn't out there. It might just be damaged, irrecoverable, something you never reach. We will watch the rest and maybe we'll find out.
This is worth reading on all fronts: "The Evolution of Identity Politics: An Interview with Eric Ward."
I hope to do something complicated with my computer tonight that it will survive. [edit] Bertie Owen has a new keyboard! I can continue communicating with the outside world!
I watched the first two parts of Errol Morris' Wormwood (2017) last night with
rushthatspeaks; so far it is a brilliantly executed documentary in that it provides enough information for the audience to ask the second- and third-order questions without prompting and a brilliantly executed conspiracy theory in that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what you should hope or worry is true, what you should really be afraid of, where pattern recognition leaves off and apophenia comes in. The dramatic sequences are being performed by actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, and Tim Blake Nelson in a beautiful sheen of Time Life hallucinations; the main interviewee, Eric Olson, with his photocollages and his allusions to Hamlet, would be an ideal Morris subject even if he weren't bound into the heart of a real-life paranoid thriller that has consumed him since 1953. It's a visual and narrative mosaic with terrible lacunae and I can't tell if some of them are ever going to be filled in or if they will just grow vaster and more inescapable, a slow event horizon of American unknowing. It's not that the truth isn't out there. It might just be damaged, irrecoverable, something you never reach. We will watch the rest and maybe we'll find out.This is worth reading on all fronts: "The Evolution of Identity Politics: An Interview with Eric Ward."
I hope to do something complicated with my computer tonight that it will survive. [edit] Bertie Owen has a new keyboard! I can continue communicating with the outside world!
