User:TPoole/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.

Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather

than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer

reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

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 Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.
+I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.
+In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
+Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.
+{{pg|181|182}}
+But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
+than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
+reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.