Russian Art - Film - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:
In 2006, the British actress whose first appearance on film was in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, and whose first moment of fame was as Sally Potter's Orlando, Tilda Swinton (now known as the Narnia witch), made this desperate plea at the San Francisco International Film Festival:
"Can I be alone in my longing for inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape?... The figurative cinema's awkward and rather unsavory relationship with its fruity old aunt, the theater, to her vanities, her moues, her beautifully constructed and perennially eloquent speechifying, her cast-iron, corsetlike structures, her melodramatic texture, and her histrionic rhythms. How tiresome it is; it always has been. How studied. The idea of absolute articulacy, perfect timing, a vapid elegance of gesture, an unblinking, unthinking face. What a blessed waste of a good clear screen, a dark room, and the possibility of an unwatched profile, a tree, a hill, a donkey...."
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