Darjeeling SOOO Limited?

In several recent conversations, it was brought to my attention that Wes Anderson's last film, The Darjeeling Limited, is nothing more than a poorly-sketched drama "against the backdrop of a third-world country" -- namely India. I am skeptical. Having seen the film three times, I am most interested in Anderson's use of music, with its obvious sense of rhyme and repetition. Are the three slow-motion sequences more significant and effective than the character development? Are the three brothers merely two-dimensional characters who serve as pawns in the game known as satire? Are they intentionally cartoonish just to be juxtaposed against a real world with real problems and trauma? Watch the film and then express your opinion in a short blog entry. Why is this film flawed? How does it succeed?

Sugar Water: Duplicitous Structure is Sweet?

When filmmaker Michel Gondry wanted to film a music video for the Japanese-American band Cibo Mato's "Sugar Water," he came up with a brilliant idea: create a split-screen video where two narratives were told side-by-side. One video is played forwards (to a designated point) and the other is played backwards. At the exact moment when the split screens "sync up," they reverse course (with the one originally going forward now running backwards). But that's not to say that each narrative doesn't haven't a story. No, each split screen presents a different "take" on what happened surrounding a fatal car accident. You decide which wins out here: content or structure?

Simply square or out of the box?

Piet Mondrian angered many art critics and enthusiasts with his purely abstract compositions. Sure, they were "paintings" but Mondrian was careful to always refer to them as "compositions." This signifies the significance of symmetry, design, and structure and less on content or "message." What is the stronger component of this work entitled "Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red" -- content or structure?

Opening the Gates

"What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its styles, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a think is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe that the future of Art lies in this direction...It is for this reason that there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject, style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things."
Gustav Flaubert

Flaubert's idea that a novel could have merit based solely on its style or structure was revolutionary and was not rapidly adopted by other writers. Painters, photographers, and composers have continued (to this day) to craft works that are content heavy and that rely more on the 'what' rather than the 'how.'

This blog is designed for viewers to view/read/absorb works of art and then to decide whether the 'how' outweighs the 'what' or vice versa. Students read a literary work or a visual/musical composition, analyze it, and then write a 300-500 word response arguing for the superiority of either the structure (design) or content (plot/message).