A good friend of mine, Dr. C. Ed Emmer, is fond of sending me these postcards he creates. I'm sure that he thought of me when he saw the photo, since the time we ran together(mid 80's through the mid 90's) I had a fondness for noir film, radio, television, comics, fiction, etc. Ed loves to play with different levels, and there are a lot here, with the noir figure here behind a microphone, suggesting a blurring between the actor and role; and then he takes it over the top by dropping a dark existentialist line into the proceedings. Good stuff.
I'll try to find some of Ed's stuff and post a link to it, or maybe even post more here. It's really fun stuff.
3 comments:
What a stunning still and very thought provoking. Is it a quotation from somewhere else?
A good friend of mine, Dr. C. Ed Emmer, is fond of sending me these postcards he creates. I'm sure that he thought of me when he saw the photo, since the time we ran together(mid 80's through the mid 90's) I had a fondness for noir film, radio, television, comics, fiction, etc. Ed loves to play with different levels, and there are a lot here, with the noir figure here behind a microphone, suggesting a blurring between the actor and role; and then he takes it over the top by dropping a dark existentialist line into the proceedings. Good stuff.
I'll try to find some of Ed's stuff and post a link to it, or maybe even post more here. It's really fun stuff.
The quotation shown comes from the English subtitles to the French existential sci-fi film by Godard, Alphaville (which the still is also from --- it's simply a screen capture from the film). On the one hand, the quotation is from the protagonist engaging in a war of wits with the computer running Alphaville, but on the other it is almost certainly an allusion to the statement from Pascal's Pensées, "Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie" --- listed in the following English tranlsation as Nr. 206:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-a.html
...and that's also one reason why it attracted my attention!
-- Ed
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