Quote:
Jack’s Dream sees a frightful outside force enter and threaten the domestic space. Jack, the faithful dog, attempts to protect it and its inhabitants by chasing away the intruder. But his progress is blocked or retarded at several points (he views the scene through a window, a treacherous chair falls over) – evoking the familiar dream sensation of impossibly heavy feet, and suddenly multiplying obstructions. – Michael PigottRead More »
Quote:
The image of the fountain returns in Angel (1957; color; 3 min.), one of Cornell’s most poignant films. Dedicated, as Cornell said, to his friend, the painter Pavel Tchelichew, who had recently died, the film offers a rather moving meditation on mortality. Comprised of static shots of a statue of an angel and a fountain in a Flushing cemetery, the films elegant and quiet close-ups against an expanse of blue sky of the statues solid yet partly decaying marble brilliantly capture a sense both of the earthly and time-bound and the unworldly and eternal. The films stylistically innovative dissociation of moving image from moving subject (a technique Cornell also largely deploys in “Centuries of June” from the same year) anticipates by several years the daring cinematic experiments of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), foregrounding duration, in contrast to movement, as cinemas true subject.Read More »