10/40/70: Constraint As Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory

Author:Rombes, Nicholas [Rombes, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-139-3
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2014-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

III. 10/40/70 Redux

Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970)

Well, and then there is Soldier Blue. Released in 1970 with an R rating, and re-released in 1974, heavily edited, with a PG rating. The storms of the counterculture and the war in Vietnam had massaged the gene pool and churned up deep and long-dormant sediment and the ancient longing for violence. The ending of Soldier Blue – which is nothing short of a re-enactment of the My Lai massacre set in 1864 – is more gruesome than anything in Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Full Metal Jacket (1987), or Come and See (1985). The violence seeps into the imagination not because the violence is realistic (a decapitation, a woman’s breast sliced off, the mutilation of children) but rather because it feels real. That difference means everything, which is why the torture-porn movies of today (the Saw and Hostel films, for instance) lack the psychological depth-charge to really terrify. The more “realistic” they try to be the more they are removed from reality and become a special sort of obstruction of reality. In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin wrote of the power of a film image “not according to what it adds to reality but to what it reveals of it.”18

The violence in Soldier Blue is not hyper-managed or over controlled; it sloshes and spills around the frame like someone running down a steep hill while carrying two buckets filled to the brim with blood. There’s bound to be a mess. Filmed outside, in the sun, the widescreen violence verges on anarchy, because you have the randomness of reality itself – the weather, the wind, the very forces of nature – competing on the screen for your attention. Soldier Blue reveals reality in its attempt to re-create the reality of the Sand Creek massacre of 1864.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.