Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

25 August 2003

Reaction to Friday Night

Having been disappointed by the reaction to Claire Denis's Friday Night from the David Denbys and Stephen Holdens of the world, I was glad to stumble onto a great piece on the movie by Matthew Plouffe in a film journal called Reverse Shot. (I found the journal through a link on Cinecultist which, by the way, has been kind enough to provide a link to Errata.)

Denis is incredibly subtle, as I mentioned in my own capsule, but she's using film grammar that was codified nearly a century ago so I'd expect film critics to pick up on more than the most obvious plot points.

Plouffe draws a line between those who saw the movie at the New York Film Festival and those who saw it at a cineplex, but I'll counter with my own anecdote from the San Francisco Film Festival: afterward, the women behind me said, "That's it? There wasn't much to it," which I could have predicted via sealed envelope, but then one of them said, "It's the fantasy of some young director, I guess." I didn't bother to tell them that Denis is older than all of them.

Here's my favorite bit of Plouffe's review:

Many know that the literary source on which the film is based advances through Laure?s internalized perspective, and you need not be a cinephile to recognize that in translation to the screen, that often begets voiceover. But it?s safe to say that Denis?s Friday Night — entirely free of that convention — would be just as effective as a silent film; not only has she made this magical night in Paris her own, but Denis has applied her medium with such consideration for its unique properties of elucidation through image and montage, that one wonders how it could ever have been progeny of the page.

I couldn't agree more.

Posted by davis | Link

Reader Comments

August 29, 2003, 10:16 PM

karen

Glad you're liking Reverse Shot, Rob. I also think their writing across the board is quite good. I loved Friday Night as well, and I saw it in the theater (although granted in a tiny West Village theater called the Quad where the clientele is there for that kind of thing). SF Film Festival and NYFF are two completely different beasts, and I have to say as the hoopla gears up here for our festival, I miss the misguided but earnest comments of San Franciscan movie watchers. Denis is doing something not many other directors would dare to do, being less rather than more, and most viewers don't quite know what to do with that.

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