Point+Blank+(dir.+Boorman,+1968)

=__Readings:__= =[|A Man Out of Time: John Boorman and Lee Marvin’sPoint Blank]= =[|The Art Of Dying: Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)]= =[|Point Blank (review)]=

=__ Points of discussion from our screening __=

Style

 * Film Noir elements + Nouvelle Vague stylings
 * Odd rhythms - Quiet, long scenes punctuated by flashes of speed and violence
 * An ambiguous subjectivity

Possible Themes/Meanings

 * Walker is a mythic, near indestructible force, a brutal throwback, a “caveman”
 * The film as an ambiguous crime thriller
 * A ghost story?
 * A dream while dying?
 * [|Soderbergh] calls Point Blank “a memory film”
 * Criminals = Businessmen
 * Organized Crime = Corporations (The Organization)
 * Yost as a puppet master (He's always turning up from seemingly nowhere)/The organization/the meaning and reality of the film world are hidden and unknown
 * Walker’s desire and quest is absurd (He want only his money and then doesn't claim it at the end)
 * The film uses elements of absurdist drama
 * Some scenes cenes shot as tableau (dialogue is hypnotically minimal or not emotive)
 * Chaos vs. Order/Walker vs. Los Angeles/"The Organization"
 * Modernism-Los Angeles is an oppressive monolithic setting
 * Technology (Walker shoots a phone and "kills" a car, the running kitchen devices)
 * Walker is in a world in which he doesn’t fit (existentialist?)
 * Walker's myopia (difficulty seeing clearly) through the screen, through architecture, through light

Cinematography

 * Low key lighting, and often bright sunlight
 * widescreen
 * 40 mm panavision lens (crisp deep focus on all visual plains)

Color

 * monochromatic scenes that move from grays to hotter colors as the film progresses
 * pop art elements crop up (the nightclub film screen, Chris' (Angie Dickinson) home)
 * Influence of Antonioni’s Red Desert

Editing
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 * Complex matching of physical actions mix time and space
 * Repeating and a-chronological scenes
 * elliptical action

Sound
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 * Minimalist score
 * Disorienting
 * Sound effects run over their diegetic sources to other scenes (footsteps, gunshots, dialogue) -Consider Michel Chion’s ideas of added value in terms of sound. Are the footsteps a vector leading to the inevitable door?


 * The empty hallway ( a trajectory?)
 * oppressive planes and lines of modern architecture
 * Walker’s huge gun
 * contemporary bourgeois design
 * broken bottles/ liquid colors
 * film screen in the club

Actors

 * Lee Marvin’s physicality/stoicism
 * Marvin’s lack of emotion punctuated by violence
 * John Vernon’s snakey, weasel of a character
 * Yost’s smugness (seems to me a bit like a depiction of the devil)