![]() ![]() All DoIT content is filtered through Google Translate which may result in unexpected and unpredictable degradation of portions of text, images and the general appearance on translated pages. Because Google Translate is an external website, DoIT does not control the quality or accuracy of translated content. Harrelson doesn't, but that's the point with Keck.The Maryland Department of Information Technology (“DoIT”) offers translations of the content through Google Translate. He truly understands presenting many dimensions simultaneously. That's the 'real' Welsh, and the film's image only an abstraction. But he places his character offscreen in the abstract voiceovers. He moves in the action, as an actor must. Penn knew exactly what he was doing here. It must have been educational to work on this film, which is why every intelligent actor (or an actor with an intelligent agent) wanted to participate: one can see direct influence in Penn's 'The Pledge' and Cusack's 'High Fidelity,' both highly abstract. That they are played by familiar actors (Travolta, Clooney) oddly emphasizes the point. No story, no formula, so Malick brackets with the transport to and from the island, by the aging of the southern rookie, and by the exit from and re-entry to a world of unfamiliar characters. When you stick to a formula like Spielberg, you just turn the crank and the climax lifts and comes down, and the story finishes. An opportunity is that the film can have many centers: the meditator in the midst of the attack on the camp the squabble of the villagers the transport of the ship the need to look at our own dogtags. Having no story opens new possibilities and creates unfamiliar problems. The relationship of the rhythm within the shots to the rhythm of the shots is very bluesy. That editing is much like Van Morrison's music: it establishes the rhythm only as a reference to dance around, peeking in and out. The editing (and particularly of the sound) is unusual, so transports us beyond the strangeness of tropics, war, history. I wonder what the six-hour version is like. It is why Malick can never 'explain' his films. This is exactly the reverse of Spielberg, which is why there cannot be any comparison to 'Private Ryan,' or any other film that is 'about' something. The images are attached to the sounds, which are derived from abstractions. The device is to build the film around the sounds: narrative voiceovers (current and remembered), natural sounds, haunting music. In fact, the war is only used here as a canvas of motion, abstractions of 'regular' life, colliding and sometimes adhering to souls, sometimes destroying them. One can really see this early MIT exposure in 'Red Line.' We can thankfully forget plot - there is not meant to be any story. But he does seem to be particularly honest and understands some damned good, solid, human ideas compared to other filmmakers. He is not a brilliant man, merely a journalist. So he dove into practical visual semiotics. ![]() But Malick was not a verbal communicator, nor a logician, nor an academic (all sides of the same thing). Chomsky was shaking one world, formal abstraction for computers another. The philosophy establishment was forming a new split (US and Continentals) largely characterized by how to reinvent Wittgenstein's insights but with a more friendly rationale. Malick came in with this pack, concerned with newly emerging ideas about meaning and language. And it was quite a rich stew of ideas for a young person, the most exciting place in the world for the humanities for perhaps five years. So by the end of the 60's they had collected - for a few years only - perhaps the strongest collection of newly emergent thinkers in the humanities. MIT had the decade before gone through a soul-searching re-evaluation of the type of scientist it was producing, and concluded that they could do much better in working toward well-rounded citizens. I met Malick in 68-69 at MIT where I was taking a degree in philosophy. ![]()
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