New Mannerism
Posted by ben on 08 May 2007 at 11:03 am | Tagged as: essays, video/film
Via Andrew Sullivan, I ran across this interesting post at 3quarksdaily defending the films of Sophia Coppola and Wes Anderson as “New Mannerism“:
Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.
The whole movie breaks open with a scene in which Sophia seems to mock her audience while reinforcing the fact that she has money and she is just making movies that she loves whether or not they make sense/delve deeper/ or abide by linear timelines. Marie Antoinette orders custom made shoes but somehow manages to keep her Converse chucks tucked near her bedside. anachronism emerges from new mannerism. whatever. there’s bubblegum music, why can’t there be bubblegum movies?? she blew it with the beheading missing in action though…
Matthew Barney integrates a similar character development approach with his episodes of the Cremaster. I’ve been reading the Nancy Spector essay and there were some exemplary quotes that I wanted to share:
In character development, characters are “brought to the point where potentially they could be developed one step further and become actual characters, but there is a conscious effort to stop at that point, allow them to be states or fields that aren’t really capable of that kind of agency.” -Romney p. 91
“It’s like a game of add-on. The pieces have become more about story telling. character zones are created for a given project and as they reach their limit of development [ or lack thereof] the remaining unarticulated aspects of that zone become the outline for the next set of characters. – “Travels in Hypertrophia”
Of course, this is all in the context of landscape and characters as metaphorical equivalents of ambivalence for an embryo on the cusp of gender determinacy. or even better, waiting for the ball[s] to drop. happy new year.