Word: camera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been a while since Lewis last hammed it up in a French film, but he obviously still thinks his behavior appropriate and funny. He even gets to call his new bride, Minnie (Paulina Porizkova), his "polish cupcake." The cast cannot muffle their laughs. They practically wink at the camera to show they are having a good time...
Between moments of moralizing and philosophizing, narrated by Levy, the film's footage (much of it archival) presents vivid glimpses of the war. The awful clarity of these moments--as when a man, off-camera, screams to his father who attempts, unsuccessfully, to dodge the bullets of an unseen sniper--demands a response from the viewer...
...promo begins with the swell of Coplandesque melodies. The camera pans over spacious skies, over purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of...tobacco. We hear the voice-over of a man, a simple farmer; we'll call him Merle: "Some things jes git better with time..." (more Copelandesque strains) Merle goes on to describe the painstaking process by which the "tobacco smooth enough to be Select" is cultivated and packaged. We follow the camera through Merle's tobacco fields to his barn, where another man cuts and dries the tobacco leaves. The crop will become Wintson Select's "Perfectly Aged...
When viewed through a Feminist/ Decontructionist lens, the advertisement betrays a multiplicity of hidden messages. The image of the cigarette/ phallus remains central, perhaps suggesting Merle's own doubts about his manhood. As Merle stands, patriachal, yet despairing amidst the rolling fields of tobacco, the camera shifts once again to an image of sexual negation. The Barn is a Keatsian cave of forlorn despair and homosexual repression, suggesting void on both a sexual and an ontological level. The only hint of resolution comes in the form of conversion. All seems resolved as the tobacco is mysteriously rendered into phallic triumph...
...combined with my general penchant for photographs, I asked Him if He wouldn't mind having a photo taken of us. He smiled and replied, "Certainly!" and that was that. In a striking display of immodesty (I would later be out-done), we posed in front of a camera and snapped the shot you see here. Bill Clinton and JFK. Me and Keanu. It was a start...