i am at mukul’s house and from the window i can see the huge tata steel campus slowly being dismantled for a housing project. it is a similar story in ‘24 city’- jia zhang ke’s most recent meditation on china and globalization; and like all his films they simultaeneously ogle at the spectacle of the transformation and rue the disappearance on an earlier time. i could not but help think of the mill lands and acts of collecting stories as testimonies of a disappearing people. but in this case some of the stories were told by the people themselves and others by actors playing these people. the line between the self and the performer- the real and the enacted. what do we expect from a testimony told directly to camera? the ‘truth’is muddied by the gaze of the camera that creates expectations about the story that the performer thinks she/he should tell.
road, movie did not do anything for me. i could not get into the characters, the plot, the over pretty desert landscapes or believe in the 'magic of cinema'.
in ‘white heat’ james cagney plays the psychotic killer gangleader of a bunch of thieves with a serious mother complex. and he is fantastic. when the double agent from the police get to him, you cant help but feel sorry for the man. the chase sequences in the film make a map of los angeles first mapped over police radio; and the last chase to the huge globes of fuel tanks for the final shoot out occurs over some complicated radar triangulation. i guess that might be the only was to figure out that sprawl.
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