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July 17, 2005
Next word on Last Days: Gus van Sant
Scott Foundas has the best interview I've read yet with Gus van Sant on his latest minimalist movie: "Like Van Sant’s two other recent films — Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) — Last Days... is the product of a rigorous stylistic formalism that sees time elongated, dialogue and plot employed sparingly, and actors used less to inhabit characters than as representative figures in some vast, untenable landscape. “With the type of movies I’d made up until Gerry... you’re constantly leaning over the editing bench going, ‘Gotta cut away from that or you’re gonna lose the audience.’ And you say stuff like that all day long. It’s all about getting the next scene up there and moving things along. You don’t want to lose the beat, you don’t want to let the audience stray, you want to grab them and hold them all the way through for an hour and a half. Whereas these last three movies are about trying to forget that kind of hyperconcept and hoping that people don’t need to be grabbed and held or strapped in their seats.” ... Rooted in the work of such European directors as Miklós Janscó, Chantal Akerman and Béla Tarr... Last Days is the one part of Van Sant’s minimalist trilogy in which the movie’s formal daring seems symbiotic with... its content.... For Van Sant, whose 1998 remake of Psycho lives on in contemporary movie infamy, it’s another of Hitchcock’s films, Rope, that now seems a guiding influence. “The close-up/medium shot/wide shot model is a certain process where you’re on the set gathering shots to use later in editing... Even though it works — Orson Welles would combine a shot taken in Greece in 1952 with one from Rome in 1958 — our minds, I think, recognize that as a particular type of cinema. And with this type of cinema, there’s just another vibe to me — organic, almost unseen, almost like the medium itself is different.”
Posted by at July 17, 2005 05:57 PM
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