Film: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Wood

Author:Michael Wood [Wood, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192803535
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Broodthaers’ Rain is one of the most haunting of short films. A man, seen from various angles, is sitting in front of a piece of paper spread out on a wooden crate. He has a bottle of ink, dips his pen into it, writes. As he writes, water falls on the page, dilutes the ink, turns the writing into a fluid ink drawing. The man keeps writing; the water keeps falling. Finally, himself soaked, the man gives up. The film lasts a little over two minutes. Its subtitle is ‘Project for a text’, and its cryptic apparent story suggests failure or poor planning – writing, let’s say, is best done indoors, or weather is not kind to script. Its other story, though, the one it enacts rather than tells, is more cheerful: bad timing, writing outdoors when it’s raining, gives birth to two new artworks, the inkwashes on the paper and this elegant movie. The first story might be a parable about how easy it can be to defeat chance; and the second story would suggest how little we should want to. There is also a parable about writing and cinema lurking here too, but I’m not sure which way it goes.

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.