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One of the most striking aspects of Ang Lee's achievement in Brokeback Mountain--one aspect of many--is the way he squares unwavering verisimilitude with visuals of remarkable beauty and finesse. Almost every frame, though rigorously controlled by its mandate of realism, is beautifully assembled--the textural duplication of sheep's wool in the fleecy coulisses of the pines that frame their ascent when Ennis and Jack shift camp, for instance, or the rhythmic
multiplication across frames of the ogee line--first in the termination of the cliff toward which the sheep are moving in the first aerial shot of them, then in Ennis's hat brim, then in the escarpment edge in the shot that follows (Jack removing thorns from a sheep) and then in the unfocused branch across the following scene. One could point and analyse these beauties ad infinitum, and one could also write at length about the way the nicety of the period detail anchors the experience--detail that Annie Proulx has metonymized in the "speckled coffeepot": "People may doubt that young men fall in love up on the snowy heights, but no one disbelieves the speckled coffeepot, and if the coffeepot is true, so is the other"
Brokeish Multiplication
The formal design of Brokeback MountainPublication: Film Criticism
Publication Date: 22-MAR-07
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Rimsky-Korsakov