Pall -
I've just watched this all the way through, and I think it's fantastic. It
ought to be put on permanent display somewhere. It's got such a sense of
history to it - not just the history of America and American politics, but the
history of American art too - that really painterly quality which you've
managed to catch. There are times when you can almost feel the pigment being
pushed around with a pallette-knife, and the colours - those reddish browns,
blacks and blues - have got a tremendous richness to them. The slowness of the
action seems to bring out the patrician, studies aspect of the ceremony. From
this side of the Atlantic, it seems to capture a real sense of the complexity
of American politics: the intensely aspirational quality, the feeling that
individuals can make a difference, that the human spirit is inherently noble,
and that the world can be made a better place if we just make a sufficient
effort - along with the intense theatricality, the self-regard, the sense that
these gestures are being made with the whole world for an audience, and that if
you can just get the gestures right it almost doesn't matter what you actually
do.
Two passages in particular struck me, and made me wonder how much you'd
readjusted your original to emphasise certain aspects. The whole Aretha
Franklin passage is wonderful, but it seems to me that there's a contrast
between her black face and the whiteness of the Capitol which is really
symbolic of something or other. And at about the forty-minute mark we get a
glimpse of George W, and instead of being reddish-brown like all the others his
face is grey, the colour of lead. Did you do that on purpose or did it just
come out that way?
- Edward Picot
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
