absoluteness in movies

From: Brighita Lungu [[email protected]]

Hello everybody,

I was wondering if any of you can give me more suggestions/examples of
scenes in movies that allude to the Absolute.

For example, in Blow Up, the last scene with the pantomimes' tennis  
game,
they use an imaginative ball to play with (which reminds me of architect
Mies van der Rohe's obsession with the corner of a building - as the  
corner
is never a perfect construct, is never an absolute corner; only through
imagination we can have access to that absolute corner, so he would  
always
leave a void at the corners). In the same way, mimicking the tennis  
ball,
making the outsider (the main character) eventually see it, as he enters
the game, is a form of acknowledging that the real is what we make of it
(with reference to the main theme of the movie, the crime in the  
photo, a
crime that probably never existed).

Another example I have in my mind, is in the Clockwork Orange, the scene
when the lead of the group beats the hell out of his partners/friends.
Before that scene he had full power, and right after the scene he  
becomes
very weak. The fight represents that absolute condition; what seems  
like an
absurd thing to do was actually the only option. Thus, the absolute in  
this
scene is a sort of absolute that can be expressed by limiting to only  
1 way
the whole array of choices - antonioni didn't give any option to his
personage. From a more ontological perspective, is the cancelling of  
free
will.

Thank you!

Brighita Lungu

PhD Candidate
School of Architecture
McGill University