...I hope I'm doing this right...
In the movie My Effortless Brilliance the two manly men characters chopping wood remind me of the time I tried to chop wood at my cabin in Red Lodge, Montana. My nearly 60 year old mother is able to do it, so I should be able to do it as well...right?...wrong. After a few miserable attempts I gave up and decided to carry the wood inside and begin starting the fire. My brother continuously brings this fact up whenever I am in town during the winter, thus making me feel inadequate whenever I see someone successfully chopping wood. I could certainly feel for the guy with the glasses when he was unable to exert his manliness through the decimation of stumps (though I do think that he should have at least tried to do it).
Also, the plaid shirt that is worn by the guy who owned the cabin, was his name Dylan? I think so, is very similar to a plaid shirt that I own and love. I've had it since I was in high school and just recently I ripped a huge hole in the back of it. However I still wear it quite often despite the rip. Actually the worn in quality of the shirt makes me love it all the more. Whenever I see a plaid shirt I think woodsy comfort and it reminds me of the many shenanigans I committed during my surly youth. I particularly remember wearing the shirt to a punk show I went to at the FOE. The floor was sticky with beer and the band, Tattoos and Scars, was so drunk that they couldn't tune their guitars.
I love both the objects you're working with here, for different reasons. With respect to the wood-chopping motif I'll assume the axe (or maul, as the case may be) would be the object. (It's important to specify tangible elements in this process.) And one of the things I like about this choice is that it not only links Shelton's film to a piece of your own past, but it allows a very nice little expression of the film's intrinsic tensions (for instance, the moment where the Sean Nelson character holds up the ridiculous little hatchet--or alternately, the beautifully shot/edited sequence at the film's end, where we cut from outdoors to indoors).
ReplyDeleteThe shirt is an equally nice choice (for different reasons, as I say). For one thing a flannel shirt affects multiple senses (tactile and visual, at the very least). And for another, while this particular object repeats from your past to Shelton's film, there's a productive difference between these two contexts (woodsy cabin versus smoky bar). That difference is as important to us as the object's repetition (for reasons that will become clear down the road).
In the current rush assignment you'll want to commit to one or the other of these objects--and you'll likely need to employ one of the "advanced" moves that I discuss in the rush assignment description. As you do so, focus on a particular scene/frame/shot from within Truffaut's film (a shot which can in some way be said to contain your repeated object, whatever that may be).
Don't worry about the gap between this scene and your own story--we want some separation at this point.
100/100
CS