Word: dreamed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Streetchoir lyrics and instrumentals could conceivably serve as an andidote to the dream effects Hunter has created with his camera. The scenes themselves contain very little physical action; the music provides a sense of internal movement. The lack of dialogue and the actors' ambivalent expressions are deliberately difficult to interpret; the music cuts in to establish a definite mood. It's good music, hard rock, a soupcon of jazz, a settling of the blues, harmonia from soul to ironic smaltz. It's good music, scene-stealing music, and that's the danger. Hunter runs the risk of losing his movie...
...introduce another helpful metaphor to capture Desire's demon trick, time, the medium as message. You know what a dream looks like? Disjointed, jarring, a succession of pictures in queer sequence. Think about dreams, then try to take a close look at this movie. It's impossible. Desire unfolds at a curious distance as if its people and actions were washed in the gideon colors of Dream. The salient elements of Dream are speed and deliberation. Desire approximates both. The plot careens arrogantly through a disequence of scenes, no connections provided: the junkyard; Twelvetrees in a hallway, in a bathroom...
...deliberation. Although the dream hurdles past transitions, the dreamer himself indulges in sensuous appraisal of detail within each scene, a process which his heavy mind associates with long periods of time. This juxtaposition of speed and deliberation gives the dream that jagged pace which we recall in first waking moments. Desire, I have argued, has speed. Within each scene, however, Hunter achieves slowness by letting the camera, as if two joints high, revel in the immediate, fix joyfully on shapes, colors, a green stick of incense, a miniature toy horse on wheels, the rise of bubbles in near boiling water...
Through this peculiar twisting of sight and time, cuts sound--dialogue and music--clear, straight-forward. But sound too serves the ambiance of Dream which Desire seeks to recreate. The six bits of dialogue don't untangle the plot or deepen the characters. After all, the vocabulary of the subconscious does not use any known alphabet, although one suspects that music is our best approximation. No, this dialogue merely suggests the too easily forgotten gap between what a person says and what he is. Nothing Anastasia could say would do credit to her presence; thankfully, she says nothing...
...camera on exciting prospects -- Twelvetrees loping down the street toward Blaine--as the dialogue runs. (Unfortunately he didn't shoot the junkyard encounter between the two in the same way; we must suffer through a long silent discussion.) Enough of mechanics, however. The unsynchronized dialogue adds to Dream. Words when we don't expect them, silence when we do--it slips another strange note into Desire's distortion...