Robert Altman's Film Adaptation of Raymond Carver's Short Cuts
The characters in Robert Altman's film adaptation of the Raymond Carver anthology Short Cuts think they're islands entire of themselves. They suspect their lives and their worlds of isolation, alienation, separation, in multiple senses of the words. They fail to see, or perhaps purposely ignore, connections between themselves and those around them, between their actions and the ramifications of those actions. And while a typical director of a slice-of-life work might be content to show all these people in their ignorance of connections, what makes Altman's final product so marvelous is the way he toys with them, and the comments he makes about them.
The obvious route to take when turning an anthology into a single, (more or less) cohesive piece is to show that "it's a small world, after all," that everyone's life is intertwined with everyone else's. In the particular case of Short Cuts, this task is relatively easy, since Carver's characters generally live in similar geographical regions and come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Altman does not fail to take advantage of this opportunity. It shows in his camera work, in the way that so many scenes begin and end with the camera zooming, panning or tilting towards or away from the focal characters. The scene in which Casey gets hit by Doreen's car ends by panning off to a street sign warning drivers to watch for pedestrians; the film itself ends with a pan across the Wymans' patio, then across the city itself (reminding us, perhaps, that any whole can only be viewed from a perspective). Pans back and forth within scenes reinforce this effect; frequently the camera seems to be shaking its head, following ch...
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Raskin, Richard. "Five Parameters for Story Design in the Short Fiction Film." Available online: http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_05/section_4/artc3A.html , Oct. 24, 2000.
Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992.)
Stewart, Robert. "Reimagining Raymond Carver on Film: A Talk With Robert Altman and Tess Gallagher," from The New York Times, September 12, 1993. Available online: http://www.uvsq.fr/lab/sudam/Shortcut.htm or http://afea.univ-savoie.fr/Carver1.html , Oct. 24, 2000.
Various authors (Internet Movie Database). "IMDb user comments for Short Cuts." Available online: http://us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?108122 , Oct. 24, 2000.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
Carver tells the story in first person of a narrator married to his wife. Problems occur when she wants a friend of hers, an old blind man, to visit for a while because his wife has died. The narrator's wife used to work for the blind man in Seattle when the couple was financial insecure and needed extra money. The setting here is important, because Seattle is associated with rain, and rain symbolically represents a cleansing or change. This alludes to the drastic change in the narrator in the end of the story. The wife and blind man kept in touch over the years by sending each other tape recordings of their voices which the narrator refers it to being his wife's "chief means or recreation" (pg 581).
In The Pathos of Failure, Thomas Elsaesser explains the emergence of a new ideology within American filmmaking, which reflects a “fading confidence in being able to tell a story” (280) and the dissolution of psychologically relatable, goal-oriented characters. He elaborates that these unmotivated characters impede the “the affirmative-consequential model of narrative [which] is gradually being replaced by another, whose precise shape is yet to crystallize” (281). Christian Keathley outlined this shape in more detail in Trapped in the Affection Image, where he argued that shifting cultural attitudes resulted in skepticism of the usefulness of action (Keathley). In Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, this crisis of action is a key element of the main characters’ failure, because it stifles the execution of classical narrative and stylistic genre conventions.
Into the Wild, a 2007 nonfiction film based on New York Times bestseller book written
TELOTTE, J. P. (1989). Voices in the dark: the narrative patterns of film noir. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
Arnheim’s body of theory suggests that the necessity of human intervention to implement plot, tropes, and culturally legible symbols raises a film to a higher level than a mere copy of reality, and that this interpretation and expression of meaning is “a question of feeling” or intuition on the part of the filmmaker. (“Film Theory and Criticism” 283) One consequence of effective directorial intervention is that differences in speed, stops and starts, and what would otherwise be jarring gaps in continuity can be accepted by viewers, because if the essentials of reality are present, th...
Bordwell David and Thompson, Kristen. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Perhaps an even stronger testament to the deepness of cinema is Darren Aronofsky’s stark, somber Requiem for a Dream. Centering on the drug-induced debasement of four individuals searching for the abstract concept known as happiness, Requiem for a Dream brims with verisimilitude and intensity. The picture’s harrowing depiction of the characters’ precipitous fall into the abyss has, in turn, fascinated and appalled, yet its frank, uncompromising approach leaves an indelible imprint in the minds of young and old alike.
With concern over global warming growing, people are starting to turn a more serious eye toward cleaner sources of energy. Instead of solar power making a comeback as the ideal form, we are seeing a growth in the use of wind power. Wind farms are beginning to crop up all around the country. This new trend has gathered significant attention. Questions are being raised concerning the effects wind farms may have, from critics and supporters alike. Michelle Nijhuis, in the article “Selling the Wind” discusses the arguments on behalf of and in opposition to the increasing use of wind power, addressing what the consequences may be on the United States.
Ebert, Roger. Rev. of Almost Famous, dir. Cameron Crowe. Rogerebert.com. Chicago Sun-Times, 15 Sept. 2000. Web. 29 March 2011.
To understand the subjective ideation of film scripting, one has to consider the various possibilities of changing a section of a scene. There are innumerable po...
Short fiction stories are short stories that are not real. These stories are made up in the minds of the writers of the stories. Each story will have literary devices throughout it to enhance the story. These enhance literature because without them in the story, the reader would not be able to visualize the story and understand it as well as the author would like for the reader to. Strong short stories should have several literary devices throughout them to help the reader completely grasp what the writer is trying to unveil. Dynamic character makes the story in Anton Checkov’s story “The Bear.” The setting is important in Shirley Jackson’s “Lottery” and theme is important in Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace”.
In the Hughes’ text, Women in World History: Volume 1, the chapter on Middle Eastern women focuses on how Islam affected their lives. Almost immediately, the authors wisely observe that “Muslim women’s rights have varied significantly with time, by region, and by class” (152). They continue with the warning that “there is far too much diversity to be adequately described in a few pages.” However, I argue that there is essential information and insight on said topic that the authors have failed to include, as well as areas of discussion with incomplete analyses. I will use Leila Ahmed’s book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, as well as her essay entitled “Early Islam and the Position of Women: The Problem of Interpretation,” to cite the shortcomings of the text.
Our solar system, as we see it today, originally formed from the collapse of a very cold and low-density cloud of gas. The mass of this cloud was composed of 98% hydrogen and helium, 1.4% hydrogen compounds, .4% rock, and .2% metal. The nebula was thought to be a few light years across and was roughly spherical in shape. The cloud was in a state of balance, it was neither contracting or expanding, until a cataclysmic event, most likely a supernova, created a shock wave through the nebula, resulting in an area of higher mass. Once this area became more massive than the rest of the nebula it begin to collapse with the area of hig...
In Wim Wenders’ 1984 film, Paris, Texas, we find its theme of loneliness harboured in Travis Henderson, but very much so in the film’s imagery, eloquently captured by Dutch cinematographer, Robby Müller, “When I choose to work on a film, the most important thing to me is that it is about human feelings. I try to work with directors who want their films to touch the audience.” And his imagery does just that in Paris, Texas.