Both avenues of getting to the end of this film with a positive opinion were stolen from me. And as for the negative, I ve seen so many god damned crappy movies that I feel myself hardening like the boxing gal in Girlfight . Bjork s voice and the length of this film. Dancer in the Dark clocks in at two hours and twenty minutes, and bogs down so drastically in the last hour that not even the fancy new stadium seating seats could keep my ass from hurting. And from the video work, he might actually learn how to make video look good .
Video really can look good.
It ll probably never look as good as a 35mm print, but, for what it is, it can be fairly attractive. It s not even hard to do, so long as you pay attention to people who ve done it, with success, before you. There s a scene in Dancer in the Dark , on Bjork s presumably non-retarded son s birthday, when the boy is given a bike, and pretty much the whole cast stands around looking dorky and watching him ride his bike which seems to me the epitome of everything that can go absolutely wrong with the use of video. Fuck the endless swaying, and fuck the loss of image quality, because comparatively, that shit is miminal. The catch with that removal from the purely retinal aspects, which Duchamp first understood and failed to impress on basically everyone who came after him, is the hope that with that removal, you have an intellectual process going on.