Friday, September 14, 2007
adopting a metaphor
i've been watching Antonioni's The Passenger and going through the readings - i haven't decided on the metaphor yet, but my thoughts on it are around the ideas of experiencing an existential outsideness, placelessness and psychic isolation and observing shadows. gravity of shadows, shadows of detachment, shadows of the gaze (viewpoints, subjective/objective). i will post more on this sometime soon.
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6 comments:
"Maria Schneider plays a girl who sees something in Locke’s dissolute aimlessness that appeals. She attends his life as a 'shadow' spirit who has been assigned the duty of guiding him through his final acts on earth. Schneider is the subject of the continuous seven minute sequence at the end of the film that is a ballet of death; Antonioni’s cinematic homage to the final giving up of all things worldly. This final sequence is one of the classic works in modern cinema and the embodiment of the director’s Neorealism. It is his final summation of the lust and despair of the physical world and the smallness of human identity in the face of fate. The name of her character is simply “Girl.” That is beautiful."
from a review
marc u mentioned that you have a lot of readings on shadows - much appreciated if you could give me some suggestions, references - in addition to Piaget's, i've read Pallasmaa's short read on significance of the shadow in "The Eyes of the Skin," - in THE PASSENGER, i'm looking at particular scenes that use shadows very purposefully - and how shadows can be thought of symbolically. of course this investigation is as much about shadows as it is about light in a way, but the more i can think of shadows abstractly through the readings, it'd be great.
'in praise of shadows'...i loaned my copy and its gone...
quick read.
In Praise of Shadows (Paperback)
by Junichiro Tanizaki (Author)
thanks marc
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