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The Fountain Repondered
Earlier I blogged about how several of ToastyKen's Project365 photos remind me of The Fountain. I've been thinking about The Fountain again in a spate of post-Oscar film contermplation; Rachel Weisz's champagne satin gown was consistent with the aesthetic of the film (and, presumably, direct Daren Aronofsky who is her partner.) Sometimes it is best to ponder movies and books little while after you have seen or read them, when the first thrill of spectacle and suspense has worn off and you see what really sticks in your brain. TK blogged about the Fountain here and here; I have to agree that it was amazing cinematography and deserving of at least an Oscar nod, though if any film I saw last year I was going to beat it, it would have been Pan's Labyrinth. In retrospect, though, The Fountain is one of the movies from last year I might watch a few more times, because it has significant value apart from the flow of the story. The story was not as tightly woven as Pan's Labyrinth, and so precisely I must say that I feel Pan's Labyrinth's cinematography was more perfectly focused and crafted to serve the story; but in The Fountain you sense how film--moving pictures accompanies by sound--is a real art unto itself; moving image as a kind of poetry. A few years ago I read this essay, this rant, really, by director Peter Greenway in Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, and while I disagreed with much of the extended reasoning the premise struck me as fundamentally true:
The Pillow Book was a film made in 1996 to throw another stone in the pond of my anxiety that we have not seen any cinema yet. We have only seen 105 years of illustrated text. And recorded theater. And theater is primarily a matter of text. In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. (Greenway directed The Pillowbook.) I have been dissatisfied with Aronofsky's previous work (Pi and Requiem for a Dream) because the narrative seemed broken and unworthy of his technique. By sticking to a much simpler, much more visual story, I think he finally freed himself to go beyond illustrating text--to paint directly onto the celluloid. It's still narrative, but since I myself first visualize narrative and then verbalize it, it strikes as possibly the cleanest form of narrative. I'm looking forward to Aronofsky's next project.