“Ontology! I’m just
telling you a story
about this projector, that’s all.”
Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II
The Big Combo (Joseph Lewis, 1955)
Parsing's never easy. What matters,
Alton’s black & white. Not what
you light...it's what you don't.
Hard-edged, as ever. Arrived,
Hollywood, 1937. A painter,
writing the book, literally. Not
plot but images, not ideas but
things, black and white as colours.
In-between non-manichaean
shades framing low-budget fatalism,
so we might see in the dark.
Alton’s black & white. Not what
you light...it's what you don't.
Hard-edged, as ever. Arrived,
Hollywood, 1937. A painter,
writing the book, literally. Not
plot but images, not ideas but
things, black and white as colours.
In-between non-manichaean
shades framing low-budget fatalism,
so we might see in the dark.
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
Shocking, only if suburbia can
be paradise. Unexpected violence
and post-war fissures. Leave it
to those German emigrés to expose
wounds, commodity fetishism and
middle-class angst. At the heart
the heat: innocent home-keeper,
vulnerable, tarnished. Contrast
with the hoodlum’s moll. Bought
and sold, at the bidding of their
crime-sponging superiors. Home
can’t be where the heart is,
blabbing about Freud and child-
rearing. Yawn. No wonder their
world is blown apart, a case of
guilt by conventionality. Coffee-
scarred Gloria in post-war hell,
copped from Raw Deal five years
earlier, damaged goods but a ticket
out of drudgery. Her wound glowing
nuclear, waiting in the dark for
daddy to arrive. Sleazy hotel,
where the big heat clings, quiet
street props to Hoodlums Inc.,
without whom we would be little
more than rootless cosmopolitans.
be paradise. Unexpected violence
and post-war fissures. Leave it
to those German emigrés to expose
wounds, commodity fetishism and
middle-class angst. At the heart
the heat: innocent home-keeper,
vulnerable, tarnished. Contrast
with the hoodlum’s moll. Bought
and sold, at the bidding of their
crime-sponging superiors. Home
can’t be where the heart is,
blabbing about Freud and child-
rearing. Yawn. No wonder their
world is blown apart, a case of
guilt by conventionality. Coffee-
scarred Gloria in post-war hell,
copped from Raw Deal five years
earlier, damaged goods but a ticket
out of drudgery. Her wound glowing
nuclear, waiting in the dark for
daddy to arrive. Sleazy hotel,
where the big heat clings, quiet
street props to Hoodlums Inc.,
without whom we would be little
more than rootless cosmopolitans.
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