Word: screens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Americans managed to hide their identity for many months. In interviewing various polling and focus-group companies before hiring three, they described themselves as representing Americans eager to sell thin-screen televisions in Russia. "That story held for far longer than it ever should have," says Shumate. The Americans carried multiple-entry visas identifying them as working for the "Administration of the President of the Russian Federation," a bit of obviousness that constantly threatened to undermine all the supposed secrecy surrounding their real work...
After all this visual and aural input, the final installation of the series, "The Greeting," is a break-through exploration of the power of a single, wordless gesture. In this video, presented simply in an empty room on a conventional screen, two women are approached by a third who embraces one of the women and whispers something in her ear. A few seconds of film is stretched to twenty times its original length, and every subtle, lovely element of the total motion is exposed to attention our impatient eyes would typically be unable to observe. The piece is simple, monumental...
Director Emmerich gives the movie the solid, confident feel of a good adventure, using his locations to the full, idiosyncratic thrill-value of each. These lead to striking shots of a desert near a military base and several confused urban crowd scenes. In the beginning of other sequences, the screen bursts into white, as July 4th draws nigh. The story, written by director Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, has a handy way of faithfully returning to the bits of exposition and information dropped along the way. The drunken pilot (Randy Quaid) whom we see being teased early...
...film is sensuously shot and soundtracked, with a fevered violence of color and angle. The shots of the yacht on the open sea show the true brutality of blue and white when sea, ship, and sky seem to continually lunge against each other and fight for dominance of the screen. Views of Italy are made to seem as craven and far from redemption as the protagonists themselves. There seems a matter-of-fact weariness even to the children at play in the street, as if to sense that their lives will never lose this frivolous emptiness, that the games will...
Moviemakers don't need to conquer the aliens. They control the screen. And when they do it well, they control us, as cunningly as an ID4 alien running a mind scan on a puny Earthling. Only after the lights come up can we shake off the fear, say, "It's only a movie," and steal an anxious glance at the night...