THE LOTTERY - 1969 from Gonçalo Brito on Vimeo.
This short film based on Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is a stark affair. The fact that the film stock has obviously decomposed a little in the 47 years since it was made actually enhances the effect. There's no music until the end. The shots are carefully careless, nothing that looks composed. The cast is actually professional - they include a very young Ed Begley, Jr. - but that's not always obvious.
Jackson, whose centennial was this week, had died just a few years before. No doubt that pushed ahead the recognition of her story as classic, not just notorious, leading to this short being produced by Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet it still feels timely.
This short film based on Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is a stark affair. The fact that the film stock has obviously decomposed a little in the 47 years since it was made actually enhances the effect. There's no music until the end. The shots are carefully careless, nothing that looks composed. The cast is actually professional - they include a very young Ed Begley, Jr. - but that's not always obvious.
Jackson, whose centennial was this week, had died just a few years before. No doubt that pushed ahead the recognition of her story as classic, not just notorious, leading to this short being produced by Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet it still feels timely.
2 comments:
whoa! talk about the 'not ready for prime time players'. weirdly complimentary to the material, tho. like some kind of late 60's reproduction of the mid 50's? if it feels a bit dated, premise-wise, i'd say it's only because there's an assumption of an inherent sense of community that, thanks to the elimination of main street via walmart, no longer really exists in many places anymore...
i've recently been reading another american 'strange fiction' author, ambrose bierce (in particular, his collection 'can such things be?'). what was interesting about bierce, was the fact that, as a reporter as well as a writer of fiction, it was often left to his readership to determine whether or not his stories were real or not (making him, i guess, an early forerunner of the 'fake news' phenomenon? :) )...
anyway, here's one classic for another: 'an incident at owl creek bridge'...
Yeah, it's what you might imagine Rod Serling coming up with if they had budgeted color stock for an episode of The Twilight Zone, but cut the budget for everything else down to the bone. True that the sense of community isn't much there anymore. The point of the story was that in any community there are those liable to be turned on by others, but maybe that's not as much of a surprise anymore.
I've loved Bierce for a long time. He was something of a protege of Mark Twain, although you could say his sense of humor was darker and somewhat drier. Because he was a journalist his fiction stories did pick up some of that reportorial style. I doubt many people were really confused, but then he had to go and disappear in real life.
Ah, and we're back to The Twilight Zone, albeit an outsourced, French episode. Truly one of the wilder things ever seen on American TV.
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