Post by StevePulaski on Sept 15, 2013 16:00:21 GMT -5
Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)
Directed by: Alan Parker
Directed by: Alan Parker
The most iconic image from Pink Floyd - The Wall.
Rating: ★★★½
Pink Floyd began to reach its heyday when rock-and-roll music was still viewed as "the devil's music" and was negatively received in circles outside of its core fanbase. Let it be known and heard that the band's cult film Pink Floyd: The Wall has more knowledgeable and thought-provoking things to say than anything any of those circles ever said.
The film is a deafening, absolutely incomparable movie-experience and an aesthetic and narrative breakthrough for music-documentaries. The film doesn't assume the basic qualities of conventional rock-documentaries, not becoming a concert-film or profiling a band and getting down to what makes them unique and noteworthy. It destroys conventionality within the genre, assuming the qualities of startling and powerful impressionistic and expressionistic cinema simultaneously.
The Wall assumes a loose narrative, following Pink (Bob Geldof), the increasingly detached narrator of the film who has wicked, often explicit hallucinations. His hallucinations feature violent depictions of war, disturbing videos of children singing harmoniously to music, and many others that I do not want to spoil. The film is only disjointed if that's how you choose to view it, meaning if you seek to find meaning and piece together its small vignettes into something larger and more universal, you'll have an effective picture in terms or thematic relevance. If you watch the film solely for the images, sound, music, and content, then you get the expressionism I spoke of earlier.
Ultimately, the film's central theme - at least in my eyes - is self-destruction, from a domestic and global perspective in addition to a more personal one. Its constant images of violence, torment, and the dehumanization of children can effectively state that the film's central ideas deal with that of destruction from the inside rather than outside forces. Combined with these live-action and animated clips (brilliantly directed by Gerald Scarfe) are the songs of Floyd's enigmatic masterwork of an album The Wall, which was released in 1979.
Rarely has rock music achieved heights these high. Rarely have themes such as isolation, desperation, and self-destruction been so prominent and affecting on the viewer. At ninety-five minutes long, Pink Floyd: The Wall has the impact of an epic, and works on levels from an excellent portrait of a rock album to a compelling and elusive tone-poem on the state of the America and the common man.
Starring: Bob Geldof. Directed by Alan Parker and Gerald Scarfe (animated scenes only).