Sunday, February 6, 2011

Rush #2 - Sullivan's Travels in relation to "surging" and "bleeding"

In the film, Sullivan's Travels I found a few instances of surging and bleeding through the entire film. Some were hard for me to classify but I found a few I felt were good examples of "surging" and "bleeding."

An instance I found of "surging" was in the beginning scene where Sullivan is convincing his co-workers he wants to act as a poor man and argues his point how it will help him create his next film. The man are talking and go back and forth about "trouble" and Sullivan is going on about how he knows about trouble and as he's saying his piece starts to realize his troubles haven't been anything compared to the true poor. The man to his right then starts to go on into real troubles he's been through, making it look like Sullivan is re-thinking what he said.

An example of "surging" I found was actually in a conversation between Sullivan and the woman in the car where they were talking about a film of his ( which she didn't know was his film- yet another instance of bleeding) and she asks him if he remembers when the boy and girl were the hayloft in "Hay Hay in the Hayloft" and she asked him to close his eyes and count to 3, and she made him kiss a pig instead. I felt like this is an example because he thought they were on the "same page" and realization set in when he kissed the pig and realized they weren't the same thing. This might be a little off of the exact definition of bleeding but I felt through a bit of interpretation it could be an example.

1 comment:

  1. I'll focus on your second instance. I can totally see how the pig scene (from the movie-within-the-movie) would seem to resemble the kind of surging that Zupancic talks about. But "true" comedy involves the collision/unification of two dimensions of the same thing (two "sides" or "surfaces" of one and the same experience). So this is different from a "collision" resulting from deception (as in the case of the pig scene). Sullivan's travels is a bit tricky in that it involves both kinds: the type of collision that results from simple deception and the kind that's associated with comic surging/bleeding.

    100/100

    CS

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