Listening to Thelonious Monk play I Surrender, Dear, or listening to Cecil Taylor play one of his own compositions, we are concern...ed with the struggle of the performer against the predetermined nature of his medium (the theme, the chord structure, etc.). Like jazz performance, film acting is improvisatory, on an almost metaphysical level. In the drama, the aim of performance is to achieve a kind of psychophysical translucence, whereby the potencies imagined by the author of the drama "shine through" the immitigable fasciculate of presence-on-the-stage. In film, however, the dramatic text is--rightly--only a pre-text for its eruption into the moving figures, the absurd images, who are not really there but whom the film, at the height of its artifice, can convince us do exist in their own lucid fasciculate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Teams move in patterns, in rhythms, at high velocity; one must watch the game abstractly, not focusing on any single individual al...one, but upon, as it were, the blurred and intricate designs woven by the paths through which all five together cast a spell upon the opposition. The eye watches five men at once, delighting in their unity, groaning at their lapses of concentration. Yet basketball moves so rapidly and so depends on the versatility of each individual in escaping from the defense intended to contain him that the game cannot be choreographed in advance. Twelve men are constantly in movement (counting two referees), the rebounds of the ball are unpredictable, the occasions for passing or dribbling, or shooting must be decided instantaneously; basketball players must be improvisers. They have a score, a melody; each team has its own appropriate tempo, a style of the game best suited to its talents; but within and around that general score, each individual is free to elaborate as the spirit moves him. Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »