25 May 2006
modernist monkey contribution
From owen:
'Wierdly, (and you knew I was going to say this) the 1933 Kong is one of the most Modernist films made in Hollywood in the 30s. No other film of the period, certainly not the more ‘acceptable’ modernistic filmmaking of someone like King Vidor or Orson Welles, makes such gleeful use of technology. By essentially having the film revolve around the antics of a giant gorilla, it can revel in skyscrapers, sending the unfortunate simian up them, violating their privacy by peeking into the bedrooms; can show off military technology, with its machine-gun equipped fighter planes, circling around Kong like the dodgier products of Italian Futurism. All this ostentatious progress can only be celebrated by setting it against earlier stages of evolution - something that can also be seen in the outrageously racist first half of the film.
Also, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects kind of work as a ‘bastard Brechtian’ to go along with the bastard Modernism. Impressive as they are, even the eye of 1933 would have been able to see the joins, the gaps and the sleights of hand. It’s like a kind of special effect that doesn’t rely on illusionism...viz too the framing devices - this is all taking place for the sake of a movie, of course. Also the sex thing is deeply odd and impressively so for the time - Fay Wray’s character is presented as a bit of a slapper, a shoplifter picked up randomly on Broadway, fit only for having her clothes torn off in little strips by the grandiose monkey, as happens in one particularly rum scene. Anyway moral of this = giant primates have symbiotic relation to technology.'
'Wierdly, (and you knew I was going to say this) the 1933 Kong is one of the most Modernist films made in Hollywood in the 30s. No other film of the period, certainly not the more ‘acceptable’ modernistic filmmaking of someone like King Vidor or Orson Welles, makes such gleeful use of technology. By essentially having the film revolve around the antics of a giant gorilla, it can revel in skyscrapers, sending the unfortunate simian up them, violating their privacy by peeking into the bedrooms; can show off military technology, with its machine-gun equipped fighter planes, circling around Kong like the dodgier products of Italian Futurism. All this ostentatious progress can only be celebrated by setting it against earlier stages of evolution - something that can also be seen in the outrageously racist first half of the film.
Also, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects kind of work as a ‘bastard Brechtian’ to go along with the bastard Modernism. Impressive as they are, even the eye of 1933 would have been able to see the joins, the gaps and the sleights of hand. It’s like a kind of special effect that doesn’t rely on illusionism...viz too the framing devices - this is all taking place for the sake of a movie, of course. Also the sex thing is deeply odd and impressively so for the time - Fay Wray’s character is presented as a bit of a slapper, a shoplifter picked up randomly on Broadway, fit only for having her clothes torn off in little strips by the grandiose monkey, as happens in one particularly rum scene. Anyway moral of this = giant primates have symbiotic relation to technology.'
