Date: Mon, 17 Jul 95 20:38:48 EDT
From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas)
Subject: Re:  Short Cuts


> And Altman 
> doesn't really question the traditional notion of causality, as does 
> Resnais at times.  However, the accidental and shifting, local, 
> perspectival nature of causality throughout Short Cuts is "bookended" by 
> instances of more global causes.  The effect of this montage, I suppose, 
> is to show the "smallness" and unpredicatability of individual action.  
> I'm not sure it would take most people three hours to get that point 
> across, but Altman is no stranger to accusations of tediousness.

Me, I don't think this film has very much to do with showing anything
about causality.  I see the film's "causalities" very much as montage
devices, like the linking together of dance figures.  They are like
the fishing theme, or like the ubiquitous TV: they help knit the episodes
into one whole, which can then -- as a whole, a single world, rather than
as a bunch of episodes -- be visited by the earthquake.  I don't think
either Zoe's suicide or Casey's death have specific "causes"  --
rather, like the omnipresent rage, they are expressions of a general
malaise.  Characteristically, for instance, the final murder does not 
lie at the end of any meaningful causal chain; it is a _culmination_,
rather than a causal effect.  

To me, the "whole" of the film is a moral whole.  I perceive the film
as an episodic morality play similar to "La Dolce Vita".  But a very
sardonic one: for instance, the final earthquake, a device traditionally 
employed to punish the iniquitous, here has the single effect of
covering up the murder.  

So what is interesting to me is what kinds of things create this perception 
of a single moral universe.  For example, it seems to me that the fact 
that the characters represent a wide range of social/economic milieus 
should be counted as an important montage device.  


- malgosia 


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