william steig drawing

Akira Kurosawa

The Cinema: Deadly & Holy

The other night, in a sleepless mania not unfamiliar to me, I rummaged through all my old school papers. They were abysmal, as unfortunately all academic writing is, but I paused self-beration to read one paper in particular. I remember it was handed in for extra credit in a last attempt to pass Dramaturgy. In it I reviewed theatre and film director (Marat/Sade) Peter Brook’s fantastic book The Empty Space and his categorizations of the theater: Holy, Deadly, Rough, Immediate. And as I trudged through my soulless, double spaced writing it suddenly occurred to me that these categories could be applied to the cinema. With the exception of the Immediate, they really are applied quite neatly, and I admit this […]