project / process / anvil

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Each project requires its own process: how does it need me to toil – beyond the universal dayin/dayout ass-to-chair / feet to floor in front of standing desk – to bring it to life? Hurl passages and broken rhythms at the screen until something sticks? Draw it? Hurl drawings and broken rhythms until something throws passages back at me?

All I know is that the actual process won't resemble anything I had envisioned amid the non-working hours of accumulation and subconscious processing. Sometimes it changes midway.

Frustrating, to be certain – especially when the project won't budge and stares back at me, arms crossed, from across the chasm between notion and reality as I stare at it, from the other side, waiting, like Wile E. Coyote, for the anvil to appear.

Worth noting: my week tends to go better if I shift between different projects and different processes – which would make that part of the process of each, I suppose. Exercise each part and give the other some space to work itself out.

(Meep meep)

NIGHTMARE ALLEY (Goulding, 1947)

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(Directed by Edmund Goulding from a script by Jules Furthman based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham; starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, and Mike Mazurki. Released 09 October 1947; watched fri/20230120 via Criterion Blu-Ray. )

While (I'm loathe to base my notes on a film on a fleeting comparison between it and its remake) GDT's version had a more powerful final third (mercifully devoid of the Zanuck-required hope for redemption that hampered this version's finale), that not only does Goulding's telling have none of the fat of Stan's backstory – his motivation for being such a shit is immaterial – but features commanding, visceral – and possessed of none of the sense of homage that took me out of 2021's story (exceptions being Rooney Mara and Richard Jenkins) – performances from Power (who played it as though he had everything to lose), Joan Blondell, Ian Keith, and Helen Walker (and Mike Mazurki, still my favorite on-screen Dick Tracy villain, 1945's Splitface) makes it, for me, the best. Wish I'd seen this one first – the Blu's been on my stack since it came out, months before GDT's landed in theaters, so I only have myself to blame.

links/20230123

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Trying to get in the habit of the occasional linkblog-gy posting here if only for myself…