When asked “Why do you think Paris, Texas was so successful?” American artist, Ry Cooder, said,
“It was a sound and an image that went perfectly together.”
Reading Arranging Things this week, I immediately thought back to a film that I watched over winter break this year, Paris, Texas. The rhetoric of arrangement is a theme that is an inherent component to this movie. Not a word is spoken until about thirty minutes into the film, but it is the composition of each shot and moving imagery that conveys meaning and wonder for viewers. With so simple a plot, the word choice for each scene serves as what Koren describes as “an incubator of expanded meanings, conceptual dislocations, and perceptual disorientations.” At times the film’s cinematography presents eye popping colors (motifs of emotion) and intentionally arranged characters and objects, but it is also the film’s screenplay that helps encapsulate and elevate moods of sadness, loss, and pain. Often, we rely on visual elements so much, that we forget how powerful supplementary words can be, and I think Paris, Texas hits on all the right notes in this regard: combining visual and auditory pieces that collectively make the viewer feel and think what the creator’s have in mind.
Article Link: https://www.kosmorama.org/en/kosmorama/artikler/gap-media-paris-texas
Paris Texas cinematography: https://velveteyes.net/movie-stills/paris-texas/
S21 DSGN 264-402 