Modern Black & White Films: Dendrites

[Abishai100]

A handful of truly engaging modern-age black-and-white films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Tim Burton's Ed Wood, and Woody Allen's Celebrity are toasts to a bygone era of 'daydream film-making.'

These films perhaps speak to a capitalism-highway new age fascination/fear about corruption of art aesthetics.

We can therefore use such films to liberally talk about 'profitable circulation' of relaxed values in the modern mob-ruled mercantile media.

 

[Boss]

A couple of my favorites are Nebraska and Paper Moon.
Clerks was also pretty good.

 

[skye]

.....also , "Schindler's List" was amazing!

 

[Abishai100]

The Black-and-White Punch-Head

Leo DiCaprio gave an interview in which he talked about his work on the 1998 black-and-white Woody Allen film Celebrity. In the interview, he stated that even though he portrayed the pseudo-fictional wild American movie star Brandon Darrow with a method-acting approach, the character was in no way like him.

To avoid being type-casted as a "Brandon-esque" real person (which DiCaprio suspected may have been Woody Allen's albeit harmless humorous film comment), DiCaprio sought to make movies that would elucidate how he was in no way like the self-destructive Brandon Darrow.

In his next film, Danny Boyle's provocative isolationism-exposition The Beach, DiCaprio portrayed a brooding American traveller named Richard who experiments mentally with the proverbial 'heart of darkness' on a pseudo-mystical idyllic isolated island near Thailand. Perhaps DiCaprio wanted to work on a film that had nothing to do with 'cosmopolitan vanities.'

In one very pronounced and eerie scene, Richard (DiCaprio) is sitting alone in a shed, crouched in the shadows, brooding about strange philosophies, and when his friend walks in to ask him what the heck he's thinking about, Richard responds (paraphrased): "I'm improving my night vision...[because] I'm thinking about the [maniac] Daffy...I admire his sense of style."

This strange and haunting dialogue suggests that Richard is experimenting with the 'darkside of mysticism' and DiCaprio is obviously experimenting with the strange references to eschewed consciousness.

I personally believe that DiCaprio improvised the scene and does not inference the real character in Boyle's film named Daffy but rather is subliminally invoking ideas about shadows and darkness (not unlike Marlon Brando's inventive darkside soliloquy in Coppola's war-paranoia film Apocalypse Now). Maybe DiCaprio is talking about the Shadow Demon (an eerie 'friend' of the diabolical warlock Venger from the fantasy-and-realm hellraiser Saturday morning kids' cartoon Dungeons & Dragons).

Yikes! All of this from a simple Woody Allen black-and-white film about psycho-sociological deformity...



Venger