8 mins of lunch break left. Probably wrong for not going at it from the right angle - different works illuminate more brightly from different ratios of each quality, starting with ideas. No ideas, no work
In Parenthesis for a fusion for all redeeming qualities, even if it’s occasionally an awkward, angular, twitchy obstacle course of scraggy, barbed, blocky phrasing. Nothing else like it. Not even Come And See/Idi I Smotri in film which is searing, timeless and equally merciless. Both smash every aspect listed. More of this consideration is my own bias pertinent to Jones who pulls so many references in, the horror becomes both universal to us and for the author‘s psyche changed utterly and nailed forever in this time of conflict
Maybe it’s a British reader’s bias. IP has more trace echoes of familiarity, like an old 78rpm your grandparents might’ve had with its hollowed out crackly patina-rich tinny sound, before an excruciating escalation to the front and the main ridge assault. No other work has filled my inner vision with such sensory detail and dread, populating it with all too human figures who move on, always on as ordered, as casualties before hijacking it further with a mix of drill sergeant, primal hunter/killer, meditative regimental clergy and transcendent goddess of fecundity
Come And See shatters so many differentiated qualities you’d associate with the tagged o.p guides but compare the endings to IP in conveying war. Both capture ghostly attributes of survival and unimaginable mass slaughter at a scale we’ve collectively forgotten. Both go beyond qualitative descriptors and ask - would you rather be spared from either of these journeys, or see death as the inevitable contagion nothing living can avoid in such labyrinthine conditions of chance?
As for the Queen of the Woods, She remains a lone literary figure whose rites brought a tear to my eye re-reading through with a more mature mind in summertime’s heat. Re-read that passage multiple times. Searing, IP’s trauma is ingrained on every page. Every blistered foot. The Queen is as redolent as a second moon. Elemental. Super Nature personified. Maybe even an archaic place/function deity reawakened by the violent onslaught (the morrigan?) who eventually embraces so many of the characters. Add an earlier epic speech from Dai Longcoat whose fate might be the most individualistically monstrous of all and a myriad of trench life details. Was he saved?
Relentless. You can see why Jones subsequently took to tactile works in calm isolated settings, carving materials and epigraphic details by shifting the intuitive guide from eye/hand/killing tool to eye/ hand/tool
Parajanov = style. He has it all. I try not to watch too often. A rare convergence of mesmerism. Kusturica clearly influenced but not even close (imho) and he can be hoot if you don’t take him too seriously eg Time of the Gypsies, Underground. Tarkovsky is maybe finest for quite hard to define ideas which are allowed to gestate in grace and evolve in undefinable ways. How do you describe his films without shitting on them with hindering prose? You don’t, you watch and thank the gods the gulags never came calling
Melville, pap genius with genius casting. Delon, Montand, Volonte! Fuck alarm again. A few examples how all the listed traits click from one pov ..
