Date: Tue, 18 Jul 95 17:43:55 EDT
From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas)
Subject: Re: Short Cuts


> Socio-economic status doesn't serve as a connective form of 
> montage (water seeking its own level) in the film.  Nor does it play a 
> disjuctive role (something organic, like in Griffith).  I don't think 
> it is even dialectic (juxtaposition of class resulting in some "third").  
> Rather, as is typical in ALtman films, chance and accident causally link 
> events, emotions, and people.  The represtentation is not one of realism.  
> Nearly every one of the twenty or so "principals" appears in frame, 
> at one time or another, with most of the others.  I'm not much of 
> a statistician, but my guess is that doesn't happen very often, with 
> such "diverse" people in LA.   For this to happen, and for 
> socioeconomic status to be a principle montage device, it would have 
> to work organically (showing the whole to which the opposites belong), 
> dialectically (cosacks & peasants on the Odessa steps), or merely 
> uniformly (as Fellini arguably does in "La Dolce Vita"). 

It seems to me that you keep giving too high a place to the "linking"
-- as if the primary idea of the film was that people are linked by
chance and accident.  Yet at the same time you also remark that the
stories were filmed first.  To me, the film definitely constists of
separate _stories_, and it is the accumulation of the stories that,
among other things releases the _whole_.  My comment about
socioeconomic spread also has to do with the effect of _accumulation_,
rather than with any kind of organic or even statistical effect.
Perhaps I will provisionally venture to argue that what this effect
is closest to is the mathematical sublime; it arises when enough
disparate-enough things are thrown together in a certain way.  The effect
is of a Whole much more cosmic than what is actually shown.  In my
view, this is how the film becomes a morality play, with its own Last
Judgement; and part of its strength (to me; I obviously disagree
with you in my valuation of this film) lies in the perverse contrast 
between, on the one hand, this vaguely apocalyptic/cosmic thing which
it releases, and, on the other, the insignificance, frivolity, 
and indifferent amorality of the apocalypse it depicts. 


- malgosia 



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