Word: bladed
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Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy. Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are appealingly strange -- different from the American...
...figure painting as tableau is exchanged for that of outright drama: deep, dark backgrounds and narrative light picking out the hierarchy of character; turbulent crowd scenes; an eye for all classes, from cobblers to kings; a vast range of expression in the faces and gestures; moments of shock (the blade grinding into the clumsy giant's eye in The Blinding of Samson ((1636)) has the same appalling impact as the blinding of Lear) alternating with passages of the most lyrical eroticism, reflectiveness, inwardness. Then, too, there are the shifts of language, the rough and the smooth, and the long series...
...standard for urban law enforcement through the '70s and '80s. In the process, it became so muscle- bound and senseless that it was unable to cope rationally with a traffic hazard named Rodney King, let alone with rioters and looters. Here too L.A. takes us into a Blade Runner future...
...Locust, 1939, with its Ensor-like cast of pathological misfits and its painter, Tod Hackett, dreaming of his apocalyptic canvas of the burning of the city -- a vision that would be made real by the 1965 Watts riots. It continues long after the movie Blade Runner, 1982. It is not news; but to qualify as news (at least in a museum), this imagery would need to be embodied in some fairly convincing new works...
...race can be so nerve-racking that less experienced crews sometimes lose their composure and experience "crabs"--the colloquial term used to describe what happens when a rower doesn't push his or her blade out of the moving water behind it quickly enough. (The force of a "crab" is sometimes great enough to eject the hapless person out of the boat...