"American Buffalo"

American Buffalo Coin

"According to me, yes I am the person it's usually according to when I'm talking. Have you noticed this?" Teach em American Buffalo de David Mamet.

falar do mesmo não chega

"If the word, spoken or withheld, is a central and potent fact of theatre, so, too, is space and the occupation of that space by the body. Nor is it simply a matter of proxemics, of the meaning generated by gesture or appearance; it is that the word is made flesh. The theatre is by its nature sensuous. Even didactic drama alchemises its arguments through the mind made body. The severity of words on the page is corrupted by the mouth which articulates them. The minimalism of the printed word gives way to plenitude. That seduction, implicit in the text, becomes explicit in production. It cannot be extirpated. "

em Modern American Drama de C.W.E. Bigsby
aqui, para ler tudo.
[na loja são quarenta dólares, o que dá que pensar]

Modern American Drama


pensamento limpo também conta.

"we're constantly buying crap" (well)

How do films feed into this?

We have our own film tradition which has created some extraordinary works of film, some masterpieces. Nonetheless, the American tradition of film overall is that it's a commercial medium. That's not necessarily bad. The films of William Wyler came out of that and the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick happened in spite of that. Nonetheless, we don't have a tradition of film as art. As the media gets more and more powerful, film as mass entertainment, which is to say solely as marketing of the consumer product, that tradition gets much, much stronger. The job of mass entertainment is exactly the opposite of the job of art. The job of the artist gets more difficult. On the other hand, maybe that's always been the case.

Why is the job of the artist the exact opposite of mass entertainment?

I like mass entertainment. I've written mass entertainment. But it's the opposite of art because the job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.

- - -
entrevista de David Mamet para a Salon em 97, aqui.

não me surpreendeu. action. prefiro, quem não, as obras do início (e a toda a hora Shepard)
over and out. não sabia que o Carteiro era dele, nem como o teatro ficou tão enleado no cinema.

Mamet on Charlie Rose