Sol on alice
Alice Mendelowitz
Sister Carrie, 1900 by Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie deals with a young american country girl's realisation of the american dream in the big city, primarily through her use of sex or sexuality and being a bit of a sauce.
Alice suggested that in it there is a general tendency towards things or ideas or stories being vague and open to our knowledge of their occupying a wider world and that this book exists as a template for novels of the american dream, bukowski, etc. As a novel which doesn't take a particular moral stance Alice is interested perhaps in its potential for telling and romanticising a story which not long prior would perhaps have been subject to stylisation as scandalous or a fall or a moral tale for social education.
It also seems to speak to its readership about themselves in a particularly live way, as turn of the (20th) century americans it inhabits the spaces that the nascent nation did.
Alice comment: What I meant to explain was that I was interested in how this book is considered to be such a template for writers like Bukowski and John Fante. And yet whilst theses writers effuse their work with fiction and metaphor, Dreiser's style is very direct. What happens - happens. In the present, artists and writers have moved towards a more ambiguos language.
The American Friend - Wim Wenders - 1977
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hIZ76Zlds
The American Friend is one of many adaptations of many Ripleys novels (Patricia Highsmith). The American friend, played by Dennis Hopper, is an auction house price gamer, he is involved in an artwork forgery ring and appears at auction houses in order to bid on forged paintings to push up the price. The key protagonist though is a hitman with an unspecified (probably) terminal illness who performs hits in order to accumulate money for his soon to be widow. He is commissioned by Hopper to murder first a rival art gangster and then a second man after Hopper character fakes his medical report to suggest his illness is more immediately terminal than it is.
Alice was particularly interested in Wenders particular stylisation of the novel and of Hamburg, the location. He shoots light in a particular (painterly?) way which fictionalises Hamburg as a beautiful location, which She (Alice) doesn't understand to be the case with actual Hamburg, as it exists.
Drive In by Stuart Croft. 2007
Again, Drive In deals with spaces and modes for telling a story, in this case a story is essentially told in the form of a long looping joke, by an american woman to a silent man. The man drives a car at night and the woman is the passenger, there isn't any real indication of the nature of their relationship, but the weight of particular parts of the story and the glances he throws back perhaps suggest that it could stand as an allegory for them.
Within the story a man is caught in a storm at sea, he washes up on a beautiful desert island, alone and without provision. after a while of starving and getting hairy he discovers that a beautiful woman was also washed up, but she is AWESOME. she has a house which she possibly built, livestock, a shower, all sorts and she paints and carves amazing, weird sexy art.
they hook up, he writes a trashy novel, she doesn't like it, he has an affair, nothings the same, he leaves on his raft and hey presto, caught in a storm, washes up on an island, and repeats the story. We weren't 100%confident about it being a single unit loop or if the story is told twice as the loop repeats the double telling.
The camera work is very stylised, very slick, tight shots of the man and woman with rainy windows and out of focus lights from the street and city at night.
Alice feels that something about the piece is perfectly contemporary, or is the best example she has seen lately of how to tell a story as a short film in a contemporary way.
Throughout these there is a kernel which interests Alice about the stylisation of a saga, and about the slickness of an American approach and presentation, and possibly how that can co-opt or reorientate a story or location which is outside the mainstream american lineage. Though she doesn't feel like the saga (as distinct from the story somehow?) exists explicitly in her own practise, its something which bothers her in other work, and perhaps something which she is interested in bringing into her output, working out how to manipulate the particulars and stylisations of her aggregatory/collage based painting to incorporate the toning of a narrative.