When we watch a cut we edit it. The ear knows what to do. The eye knows what to do. We have to not watch the cut but look at what’s looking in the cut and listen to what it is. If we listen and see crying everytime we wonder what that is. What is austerity? What is computation? Let’s assume computation is a listening exercise but in this case listening to the cut.
George Stevens is one of our key spirit animals for film01. And we mean A Place In The Sun especially. It’s absolute. We don’t know any movie that goes that far, except Shoah, which it is of course related to—since Stevens was literally the one who shot the camps in color (as Godard likes to recall). Stevens obviously knew he had to do with a 17 year old Elizabeth Taylor something akin to what he had seen in the camps.
We can note how Stevens gave up comedy after seeing Dachau with his own eyes. Film01 has to be in that mood or it will fail. Film01 is as serious as extinction and all larpers need to get out of the way.
The Montgomery Clift performance is the best thing we have seen. He literally trembles throughout the movie because his whole body must have been attuned to Stevens’ need to express what he had seen and shot in Dachau. Elizabeth Taylor said that she learned to act by ‘listening’ to Clift act, that she had no formal lessons, she just ‘listened’ to his body and his body was shaking. We need to make our angelicism actors shake with the tension of film01, with the extreme expression of tears of a possibly universally final tenderness that otherwise and even so may never quite come into the frame.
We need to cut like listeners to the body of an animal in pain at the sight of eternal death. We need to be footage hunters like George Stevens in Dachau. We need to take life more than seriously one last time.
Share this post