Friday, January 21, 2011

You can do a feminist reading of anything

I just followed a link someone had put up on Facebook to watch the original trailer of Antonioni's The Passenger, a movie I've always loved.

Here's a quotation from the voice-over: 'The brilliance of Jack Nicholson; the beauty of Maria Schneider; the vision of Antonioni.'

That movie came out in 1976.

Discuss.

(Trollitude will be ruthlessly excised.)

JAN 25: UPDATE

8 comments:

Nabakov said...

I dunno. Jack looked pretty beautiful in the film too. But nothing was as sexy as that last slow tracking shot through the window.

WV has made me type "prout". I guess there's a first time for everything.

via collins said...

The deliciously crisp re-struck print of The Passenger screening at ACMI this weekend for Melbournites that haven't seen it, or need a refresher.

WR: Wredi

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Yes, it was ACMI that put it up on Facebook.

Nabs, that is an excellent point about the beauty of the young Nicholson and in fact is part of the point I'm making, as I'm sure you were aware when you said it.

'Prout' appears to be a word that has either a missing S or a superfluous R.

Anthony said...

Well, it reads itself, don't it. Men have brilliance and vision; women have beauty. Which, as Nabokov points out, means repressing Jack's beauty. And holding to the fiction that Antonioni had vision, which after Zabriskie Point was hardly tenable.

But god it was a great film. Was it really released as late as 1976?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Anthony, indeed.

The date surprised me too, and the one source I checked seems to have been wrong -- it's 1975. which still seems very late.

seepi said...

I did a feminist reading of the CIT enrolment brochure that came in the paper today.

Pictures of the same asian woman on pages devoted to Hairdressing, Hospitality, Floristry and Art.

and a cheesy grinning man on the apprentices page (with power tool), and the accounting page (in power suit.)

We;ve come so far.
Not.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Seepi: quite. And how about the big ad for the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit: the four stars are lined up in the photo, but only the three men are named.

Fine said...

I read today that Maria Schneider has just died at the age of 58, after a long illness.

I saw 'How do You Know' yesterday and I tell ya Nicholson ain't looking really pretty these days. The same can't be said for Owen Wilson, whose persona of Golden Retriever on two legs, I always find irresistible.