I love Jarmuschs work but missed Broken Flowers. This happens with me. I rent many more videos than I go to see movies in the theatre and sometimes will let one slide that I would like to see by never quite getting around to it. I greatly enjoyed Lost in Translation. Broken Flowers is a movie I should make it a point to see. Everyone edits and revises their own past to create an explanation of how they became who they think they are. One thing this means is that when you look up old girlfriends, you will probably find that, even if you are as important in her story as she is in yours, her story is not your story even though both stories are about the two of you.
One of my favorite movies is Memento. This film is built around the trick of reversing the sequence of two moments by showing the moment that occurs later before the moment that occurs before. The central character of this film has suffered brain damage that makes it impossible to create new long-term memories. He thus has his past up until the moment of traumatic injury and the last two minutes forever with nothing in between. Reversing the chronology of moments is a wonderful way of capturing the reality of his world. Moments he does not remember are moments we have yet to see and, often, our confusion parallels his. Another interesting film is Timecode. The screen is divided into four frames where four stories unfold with characters that overlap. Not every character appears in all four frames and it is not possible to identify each frame with any one characters perspective. I cant watch Timecode without imagining a similar movie. In Frame1, we see a man and a woman, but never both together, talking to a therapist who is never seen or heard. We would know the setting from clues in the clients discourse. In Frame2, we see the man and the woman together. In Frame3, we see the woman interacting with various others, always in the mans absence. In Frame4, we see the man interacting with various others, always in the womans absence. Both often mention the other and their relationship in their absence. The man defines himself as a memory which acts. How can a memory ever be false?: is his constant question. The woman wants to know what really happened. She repeats constantly that she cannot know who she is until she knows what really happened. We never find out if they are seeing the same therapist or different therapists. Sometimes in Frame1, we also see a middle aged man but never see him with the man or the woman but always delivering a paper titled The persistence of memory and the continuity of identity across episodes in lives that are experienced as episodic: resources for revision. He takes questions from the audience that make it clear that his presentation has been based on two very detailed clinical case studies of clients whose sense of the relationship of memory to identity are diametrically opposed and, perhaps, painfully flawed in opposite extremes. His presentation could be a commentary on what we are seeing in the other three frames and the questions could be attempts to understand the story that would emerge if all three frames could merge into one narrative. The framing is temporal rather than spatial A single screen jumps from one frame to the next in fixed sequence one through four every five minutes without worrying a bit about continuity. Each temporal frame would be five snapshots of five minutes length not contiguous and not necessarily presented in chronological order within frames or between frames. The last five minute section and the first should both be in Frame1. The ending should be the first five minutes of the presentation and the beginning should be the five minutes immediately following. TMike In so far as literature turns back on itself and examines parodies or treats ironically its own signifying procedures, it becomes the most complex account of signification we possess. John Deely __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
