Friday, November 20, 2009

GC

I'm beginning to think that George Cukor understood more or less everything. Maybe he had the movies in his blood, maybe he spent so much time around them that he'd become irradiated. There is no experimental aspect to Cukor productions. I don't mean that Cukor was unadventurous; it's just that when he appropriated an element, when he used a new technique, he seemed to have already understood it. A Star is Born might've been his first full-color feature and his first one in 'Scope, too, but, goddamn, the man simply understood it, and not on a visceral level, like Ray, but in the way a person comes to understand the world through experience. That is: Ray lived through cinema, but Cukor lived so he could make cinema.

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