#WORDISH MOVIE SERIES#

She met him in the summer of 1970 at the Center for the Blind.вЂ™ Then the narrative skips back in time, following this new strand, though the effect is more of an avalanche of backstory than a deepening of context: вЂMany years before Jelly called Jack, before she had begun phoning men for love (not work), and before she had recovered her sight, she had fallen in love with Oz. An intricate conjoining, it was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.вЂ™ This seems to be a stunt of a different order, a confidence trick. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited another to complete the sentence. вЂ rarely used вЂњuhвЂќ, but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. This was the mid-1980s, early days for the sort of on-the-fly filmmaking, done solo, that can now be taken for granted, but was then still far from cheap.Д«efore any account of the formative period in Gloversville, when with CarrieвЂ™s help Meadow experimented with fantasy reconstructions of lost films, there is an unconnected section in which a woman establishes intimacy with an influential man over the phone. In fact the вЂlieвЂ™ about filmmaking in upstate New York is close to what really happened, though there wasnвЂ™t a collective, just Meadow inviting her old friend Carrie Wexler on a visit to see the footage of trains she had shot with equipment paid for by her father.

Learning that you have a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator on your hands вЂ“ вЂI have always liked stunts (and also, as you may have guessed, pranks, hoaxes, games)вЂ™ вЂ“ is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. ItвЂ™s left to the reader to decide whether this tall tale is simply a hoax (WellesвЂ™s last serious film was F for Fake) or some sort of allegory of influence. After graduating in film studies Mori supposedly wrote to an obese ex-wunderkind of the screen, now reduced to voiceovers and chat show appearances (someone who can only be Orson Welles), before going on to interview him and eventually becoming his companion and lover, while telling her parents she was joining a filmmaking collective in upstate New York.

#WORDISH MOVIE SERIES#

The central figure of the book is Meadow Mori, who is introduced to the reader by way of an internet essay, part of a series entitled вЂHow I BeganвЂ™ on a site devoted to Women and Film.

Dana SpiottaвЂ™s Innocents and Others is very different, an examination of a filmmaker whose sensibility is open to any number of influences and has only a minimal interest in a marketplace. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for fiction, tends to focus on headline-grabbing aspects of the industry: narcissistic stars, autocratic directors, clashes of ego. Anne HathawayвЂ™s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane AustenвЂ™s blurry features вЂ“ a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Bestsellers achieve special ontological status on the screen, and the classics get retrospective plastic surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. L ong beforeвЂ‹ electronic media came up with the phrase, literature had been relegated to the status of preferred вЂcontent providerвЂ™ for films.

Wordish movie