Dailies#10: The Hurt Cannot Be Much

Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary by Guy Maddin

[1] This week was significant because eventfully I get accustomed with the works of the Canadian experimental filmmmaker, Guy Maddin. As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, "Guy Maddin’s work testifies to the notion that the past knows more than the present and that silent cinema is a richer, dreamier, sexier, and more resonant medium than what we’re accustomed to seeing in the multiplexes." Jonathan later adds " [Maddin] offers a feast of rapid editing, fast lap dissolves, fade-outs, whiteouts, blackouts, tinting, superimpositions, irises, slurred motion, stop motion, and slow motion, along with the delectable textures of light, mist, snow, human flesh, vegetation, and Victorian upholstery. Yet it isn’t so bound by the technical parameters of 20s pictorial film art that it can’t make fruitful use of Super-8 footage and digital effects."


[2] An interview with the great Dede Allen, the editor of The Hustler , Bonnie & Clyde, Serpico and so many key films of the 1960s and 1970s who passed away last April, could be found here in two parts: Part I and Part II.
I also wrote a piece about her for Iranian Film Monthly, which is the first in a series of article, regarding women in motion picture industry. My next subjects/person will be Dorothy Arzner and Shirley Clarke.



[3] If you're living in Iran, these passages from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Act 3, Scene 1) will always make you laugh, whilst you're taking it too seriously, too:

Mercutio is stabbed in a swordfight by Tybalt, Juliet's cousin:

• Romeo: "Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much."

• Mercutio: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man."

[4] It seems all of us are living with war, or the horror of a nearby one, in one way or another. My first post of a series of pieces, based on shots of films, in MUBI (auteurs) is concerned with this fact.