Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS
- PART II SCREENING NEW PUNK CINEMA
- 5 DVD and the New Cinema of Complexity
- 6 Digital Technologies and the Poetics of Performance
- 7 Navigating Chaos
- 8 Non-linear Narrative
- 9 Making it Real
- PART III CASE STUDIES
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Navigating Chaos
from PART II - SCREENING NEW PUNK CINEMA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS
- PART II SCREENING NEW PUNK CINEMA
- 5 DVD and the New Cinema of Complexity
- 6 Digital Technologies and the Poetics of Performance
- 7 Navigating Chaos
- 8 Non-linear Narrative
- 9 Making it Real
- PART III CASE STUDIES
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
So let's start with the title. The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain was kind of hard to find. It was a story of chance and destiny, and chance and destiny were deeply intertwined in this project.
(Jeanne-Pierre Jeunet [2001])A fly lands on a street and is run over by a car, leaving a small red spot on the road. In a restaurant the wind causes a table-cloth to billow up, making two glasses dance as if by magic. A man returns to his office and erases a name from his address book. Another man's sperm penetrates the egg of his wife, the wife becomes pregnant, and a baby is born. As these events – including the conception, pregnancy (shown as a fast-motion set of jump-cuts of the woman's changing body) and childbirth – are shown visually, a voice-over narrator describes them with a cool, scientist-like detachment:
On September 3, 1973 a blue fly capable of flapping 70 beats a minute landed on St. Vincent Street in Montmarte. At that moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat on Avenue Tru-daine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased him from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphael Poulin, made a dash for an egg of his wife Amandine. Nine months later Amélie Poulain was born.
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- Chapter
- Information
- New Punk Cinema , pp. 113 - 125Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2005