fronds
but then i saw crouching tiger, hidden dragon, which fuckin blew me away. it's shockingly beautiful and complicated; i love the governess as the supreme bad guy created when the dead good guy would fuck her but not teach her his warrior ways. it takes guts, also, i think, to stage the first fight scene in low-contrast murky darkness, so that you see motion and thrusts but can't tell where or what they're hitting.
(it reminded me of a series of photos that adrian piper took, where she's appearing in varying degrees of dress and undress with the camera held up to a mirror in partial darkness. the contrast is low and you can hardly make out where she melts into the background. i did some photos like this in school too, except mine turned out really grainy and of discrete parts of my body, sometimes with the words "you stand on the shoulders of" projected onto them.)
people running up walls, on tree fronds, jen, the young bad-but-really-good seed delivering a soliloquy tantamount to whitman's song of myself as she's kicking ass of about 30 men in a saloon. michelle yeoh doing these graceful moves and kicks and parries but as soon as her weapon hits something (looking like it's light as a feather), whatever surface it touches is utterly destroyed. gotta see it some more.
posted December 14, 2000 in art, delivery, film, print