Word: counterpoint
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sounds like someone's got an eye for the main chance. If the Harvard population were the American public, then W. Donald Brown '74 of Eliot House would be Sam Goldwyn. Brown wrote, directed, shot, edited, appeared in, even ran the projector for Counterpoint at a showing the other night. But mostly he produced it. Brown got an original loan of $400 from the Eliot House entertainment fund. Then he sold shares in the film to 42 students--sending a prospectus to friends in Cambridge, in Eliot House, in the Hasty Pudding Club--to pay his creditors back. Brown even...
...cinema pedant--far from it, and he doesn't major in Visual Studies. He likes Hitchcock, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Blow-up, nothing fancy. Nothing experimental or avant-garde for him. He makes full-length feature films on commercial subjects and with big-name stars. One purpose of Counterpoint was to supplement applications to the film schools at USC and UCLA, the two major feeders for TV and Hollywood, and partly for this reason the picture is flashy--over 400 special lab effects were used. "I tried to run the gamut," says Brown. Right now he's halfway through...
...Since Counterpoint is by genre a simple old-fashioned thriller, a professional touch could have created a breezy kind of Hollywood entertainment. Professionalism extends beyond the question of equipment--Brown's elaborate use of models and rear-projection, his advertising and the cameo stars, all are conceived in a professional way. But the appeal of a Hollywood picture depends on more than this: it has to make sense...
Donald Brown describes Counterpoint as a film of "hidden meanings." "An imposed, artificial order on the surface" (this is supposed to be symbolized visually by recurring shots of clocks, rows, columns, etc.) hides a world of "chaos underneath" (symbolized by smoke). This is "counterpoint." There is also a set of "misconceptions" and "red herrings" in the plot line which parallel this visual theme...
Unfortunately, though, the "chaos underneath" only gives away a general anarchy in the conception of the film itself. This general chaos surfaces in the first few minutes of Counterpoint and rules with an iron hand for the duration of the film. Both of Brown's worlds--the order and the chaos--are presented with the same frenzied, confused montage which wreaks havoc on the plot. Even the masters of quick-cutting, whom Brown openly imitates, structure their films around sequential thought, building their tricks atop a plot that conveys at least a remote sense of plot or development. Tenuous visual...