sound conveys the illusion of a larger than theatrical stage performance. Film - the technical simulation of action which when viewed on a large screen and accompanied by music and sound conveys the illusion of a larger than theatrical stage performance.
• see
• hear
• sense
The presentation relies on the participant's suspension of disbelief and willingness to follow cues, prompts or deliberate dialogue suggesting a plot that articficially reinforces the notion of a beginning, a mid point and an ending.
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A series of still photographs taken sequentially and run --in timed sequence-- giving the illusion of movement.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Director:Steven Spielberg
Writers:George Lucas (story) and
Philip Kaufman (story)
John Williams (nusic) ...
Runtime: 1 hr 58 mins; Release Date: 12 June 1981 (USA).
Won 4 Oscars.
Renowned archeologist and expert in the occult, Dr. Indiana Jones, is hired by the U.S. Government to find the Ark of the Covenant, which is believed to still hold the ten commandments. Unfortunately, agents of Hitler are also after the Ark. Indy, and his ex-flame Marion, escape from various close scrapes in a quest that takes us from South America to Nepal to Cairo on a non-stop adventure.
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker.
The thrills are fully consumed while you’re seeing this movie, and it’s totally over when it’s over. It’s a workout. You feel as if you’d been to the desert digs: at the end your mind is blank, yet you’re parched, you’re puffing hard -- you want relief."
Vincent Canby, New York Times.
To get to the point immediately, Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made."
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times.
"The movie is just plain fun"
By internet reviewers: (the digerati as a representation of the public)
The year is 1936. A professor who studies archeology named Inidana Jones is venturing in the jungles in South America searching for a golden statue. Unfortunately, he sets off a deadly trap doing so, miraculously, he escapes. Then, Jones hears from a museum curator named Marcus Brody about a biblical artifact called The Ark of the Covenant, which can hold the key to humanly existence.
You're in for thrills as Indiana Jones confronts snakes, Nazis and one astonishing cliffhanger after another--all topped off by awesome sequences involving the discovery and opening of the mystical Ark of the Covenant. Jones has to venture to vast places such as Nepal and Egypt to find this artifact. However, he will have to fight his enemy Renee Belloq and a band of Nazis in order to reach it.
It's one of the greatest adventures of all time.
WHIPPED
by Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, June 15, 1981.
"The marketing executives are the new high priests of the movie business. It’s natural. They’re handling important sums of money. And they dispense the money dramatically, in big campaigns that flood out over the country. It’s not unusual for more to be spent on marketing a picture than on making it, and this could become commonplace. (Everybody takes it for granted that more is spent selling soap than manufacturing it.) Right now, the easier a project looks to market, the easier it is to finance. And the scope of what these priests think they can sell becomes narrower all the time. Except for the occasional prestige picture that offers middle-class group therapy (“Ordinary People,” “The Four Seasons”), it’s all fantasy. There isn’t a human being on the screen. Having lost the habitual moviegoers, the studio heads have no confidence that if they approve projects they like, an audience will be attracted; they’re trapped by empirical evidence to the contrary. And so they listen to the marketing men, with their priestly jargon—“normatives,” “skewed,” “bi-modal audience.” The mysterious phrases are soothing to the worried studio heads."
"These marketing divisions are a relatively new development. (In earlier years, there were two much smaller departments—advertising and sales.) Their growing power isn’t in any special effectiveness in selling pictures; it’s in their ability to keep pictures that don’t lend themselves to an eye-popping thirty-second commercial from being made or, if they’re made, from being heard of."
"But “Raiders” is a machine-tooled adventure in the pulp-esoterica spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs; it appears that Lucas and Spielberg think just like the marketing division. According to modern movie legend, Lucas, who had watched the serials of the thirties and forties on television in the fifties, has long cherished the idea of a hocus-pocus series “following the exploits of an adventurer/archeologist, Indiana Jones,” but he got more interested in his other idea—“Star Wars”—and put “Raiders” aside, for later. Over the years, he worked up the story idea with Philip Kaufman—the first picture was to be set in 1936, in order to take advantage of Hitler’s well-known interest in the occult—and in 1977 he offered it to Spielberg to direct."
"A Lucasfilm, financed by Paramount, “Raiders” is an old-fashioned cliff-hanger produced with incredible sophistication of means. The images have an unreal clarity: the camera shows us more than we could possibly take in if we were there on the spot. And the hero—Indy Jones (Harrison Ford), the daredevil archeologist, whose weapon is a bullwhip—makes the kind of bright-eyed entrance that’s so intensely dramatic it’s funny"
"But Spielberg’s technique may be too much for the genre: the opening sequence, set in South America, with Indy Jones entering a forbidden temple and fending off traps, snares, poisoned darts, tarantulas, stone doors with metal teeth, and the biggest damn boulder you’ve ever seen, is so thrill-packed you don’t have time to breathe—or to enjoy yourself much, either. It’s an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer—for flash."
"The central story is the search for the Ark of the Covenant (a chest holding the broken stone tablets of the Ten Commandments). Hitler, we’re told, means to use its invincible powers to lay waste opposing armies and proclaim himself the Messiah. Indy, working for the United States government, races to find the Ark ahead of his arch-enemy, the suave, amoral Belloq (Paul Freeman), who is in cahoots with the Nazis."
"But “Raiders” is so professional and so anxious to keep moving that it steps on its own jokes. You can almost feel Lucas and Spielberg whipping the editor to clip things sharper—to move ahead."
"The frames fit into each other, dovetailing so tight that sometimes it seems as if the sheer technology had taken over. It’s all smart zap—a moviemaker’s self-reflexive feat. Yet it isn’t beautifully made—not like Spielberg’s other pictures, anyway."
"It’s so quick it’s a visual haiku. Yet in the very next shot Spielberg blows what should be the capper: when Sallah shows Indy that a pet who stole a date from the dish lies dead, the timing is slightly off, and Spielberg fails to give the pet its due. It’s an unfeeling shot, when it could have been a beautiful little sick joke. Spielberg rushes; he cuts corners and takes the edge off plot points. I’ve never seen him settle for approximations before or just throw effects at you, hoping that some of them will stick."
"Does the film reproduce the plot holes of the serials deliberately, or does it stumble into them? (Why is the Well of Souls, where the Ark is buried, so exposed that it could hardly have escaped discovery before? Why isn’t Indy’s dig at least over the next ridge from Belloq’s, so we can believe that Belloq doesn’t spot it until the crucial moment? Why are we shown scenes that prepare us for Belloq to have a change of heart when he doesn’t? And so on.) John Williams’ pounding score could be the music from any old Tarzan movie, though with a fuller orchestra and at ten times the volume. Like just about everything else in the picture that misses, the klunky music can be said to be intentional—to represent fidelity to the genre."
"So the script doesn’t seem worked out. There was something else basic about cliff-hangers: our longing to know who the real evil power behind all the crimes was. This mystery has been eliminated, without any other kind of suspense replacing it."
"The actors are mostly just bodies carrying pieces of plot around. They sound as if they were ordered to read their dialogue on the run—....The character of Sallah is defined completely by the word “friend,” and the film continues the process of turning Nazism into comic-book mythology—the Nazis are fiendish clowns."
"the filmmakers seem to have a fix on tomboy gumption. There’s no space for sex. When Marion and Indy finally kiss, the music rises with such a clatter and shriek you think the theatre has been nuked."
"are those puppets."
"Indy tries to keep the Ark from falling into the wrong hands because he’s the intrepid archeologist hero who goes after treasures; to him the Nazis are no different from the half-naked tribesmen shooting poisoned darts in South America—it’s all in the day’s adventure. The holy artifact itself is just a MacGuffin, and a dull one at that—one more super death machine that could enable Hitler to win the war. And when the Ark must do its mystic tricks it sprouts poltergeists that recall the impish flying saucers of “Close Encounters” without living up to them. There’s nothing at stake in “Raiders”—no revelation, and no surge of feeling at the end. (The Ark is disposed of in a sour, open-ended modernist way.) The thrills are fully consumed while you’re seeing this movie, and it’s totally over when it’s over. It’s a workout. You feel as if you’d been to the desert digs: at the end your mind is blank, yet you’re parched, you’re puffing hard—you want relief."
"Despite its daring surface, “Raiders” is timid moviemaking: the film seems terrified of not giving audiences enough thrills to keep them happy. It’s an amalgam of Lucas’s follies—plot for its own sake, dissociated from character or drama; the affectless heroine, who’s a tougher version of Carrie Fisher’s spunky Princess Leia in “Star Wars”—and effects that Spielberg the youthful magician has already dazzled us with."
"But Spielberg fumbles a lot of his action sequences, such as the ones on a tramp steamer and a U-boat, and even the early chase, in which Marion disappears. And some of the episodes are simply tired: a fight between Indy and a huge, sadistic German wrestler; a sequence with Indy jumping on a moving Nazi truck that’s full of soldiers, chucking them off one by one, and ramming other cars in the convoy, to the accompaniment of soul-grinding music. Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit."
"The whole collapsing industry is being inspired by old Saturday-afternoon serials, and the three biggest American moviemakers are hooked on technological playthings and techniques.
Behind “Raiders” is the soft-spoken George Lucas, who says things like “I’m really doing it so I can enjoy it. Because I just want to see this movie.” I believe him. I wish I didn’t. I wish I thought he talked that way just as a come-on for “Raiders,” because if Lucas, who is considered one of the most honorable people who have ever headed a production company, weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result. (There might be miracles.) I don’t think the deterrent to his producing movies with human characters is just financial risk. Lucas, who keeps a tight rein on budgets, probably wouldn’t stand to lose too much of his own or other people’s money. The bigger deterrent may be Lucas’s temperament and tastes. It’s not surprising that he takes pride in the fine toys that “Star Wars” generated, and controls their manufacture carefully; essentially, George Lucas is in the toy business."
1981.
