The Blue Velvet DVD I mentioned here was a part of a package of 4 DVD's I had taken out as a part of a new experience from moving into home theatre. However, I'd neglected to view the other three films during the week. They were due back to the video shop this morning. So I was obliged to look at them last night.

3 films in one night. Just like the old days of going to film festivals. So I sat down with a good bottle of wine and plunged into the home cinematic experience in a postindustrial world.

The first was Krzysztof Kieslowski's film Three Colours White

I had seen Three Colours Blue in the mid 1990s when I was still going to films at the cinema looking for solutions to my life's problems. My memory was that Blue was an excellent European film and that it had been part of a trilogy.

I watched Three Colours White for 45 minutes or so and then took it off. It was facile---a black comedy? It was very much part of the film as literature school, with its unfolding narrative and realist conventions.

I realised, as the narrative was unfolding through time, that it was films such as this that caused me to give up going to the cinema. They were marketed as art, but I found them so boring and tedious---just like reading novels.

Three Colours White was barely cinematic: a filmed moral tale about a particular Polish character who had been jilted that we observe thrrough a camera that pretends to be a window. I was so bored despite the use of colour. It was a thoroughly unremarkable form of cinema. The film as literature people would love it. It is a form of cinema dependent on movement and action; characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them.

Three Colours White did not do much in the way of cinematic difference. Nor did its affects and intensities scramble my faculties not disrupt or short circuit the normal way I pattern meanings in my everyday life of stable objects and relationships.

Give me David Lynch any day. He understands that cinema is different to literature.

The second film was one by Curtis Hanson called LA Confidential. Very stylistic.
This was a film of a James Ellroy novel of the same name.

Yet it was closer to cinema than the tedious Three Colours White, even though it was period film of the sleazy and corrupt Fifties LA, killings crooked cops. the allure of Hollywood and the mass media as represented in the American crime novel.

It was much more visual and self-conscious with its references to the black and white images of film noir.

Such a far cry from the costume and setting of the standard BBC naturalism of English novels, that is much loved by ABC audiences on Sunday nights.

The third DVD was Michael Mann's low budget film Manhunter, the first in the Hannibal Lector series. I had not clicked to Mann's Miami Vice series on television in the 1980s. It was all surface gloss but I do remember that its look-- the music, the clothes and attitude---captured the ethos of Reaganite/Republican America.

My companions had violently rejected watching it because of Silence of the Lambs. It deeply offended their humanist sensibility. Their humanism could not be questioned. Their subjectivity did not have pathological roots and so human monsters are definitely the other. Only mad and crazy people or criminals are like that----eg. the bodies-in the-barrels case.

My companions understand themselves to be nice, caring understanding people living in a comfortable suburban world grounded in the flow of time. Hence the denial followed by shutdown to the Snowtown murders. There is no discussion about the callous depravity. Adelaide is an easy going and pleasant place. I recall there was a bit of sociological discussion of unemployment and depravity in causing alienation, isolation, indifference to social norms, and dysfunctional and disastrous behavior in post-industrial society.

But little it was all very careful. It did not move onto confronting the sort of practical and moral world that we are creating or the way that our resentments our effecting our subjectivity. That was all too dark---best to move on. Who wants to look at the beast in the face and see themselves reflected?

It is best to move quickly. The judgement is that psychoanalysis is shit. And as for Nietzsche, Bataille and the French postmodernists; well, the less said about them the better. Who cares about that stuff?

I started watching Manhunter in the early hours of the morning. I was tired and was barely able to stay with the flow of images. I remember it was far more visual than the other films:a film rather than literature, even though it was based on Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon. I recall that I responded strongly to the visual aesthetic--eg., the clean white modernist lines of hospital/prison where Lecktor is incarcerated.

It was the visual language that stayed in my mind. This was a director who understood the effect of images and was breaking with film conventions of say Law and Order or Dragnet or Stingers.

An interview with Michael Mann is here.

The film's movement image made it the most impressive of the three films I watched. I sensed the effect of the images as disrupting my conception of the self and the way that I lived time as a series of "nows". Our living time (what Deleuze calls durations) is more a movement backwards and forwards through the flow of time. I vaguely remember the movement image of Manhunter being connected to this different flow of time. The time image is different because it breaks with the conception of time determined by movement in Three Colours White.

I will have to return to Manhunter.