Point Blank
The Secret Agent Network
January 7 - 13
Left for dead after a heist gone wrong, Lee Marvin’s aptly named Walker crosses Los Angeles with an eerie resolve to find the money and men who betrayed him.
Left for dead after a heist gone wrong, Lee Marvin’s aptly named Walker crosses Los Angeles with an eerie resolve to find the money and men who betrayed him: a faceless corporate syndicate known only as “the Organization.” Boorman takes this ostensibly straightforward revenge plot and turns it into a kind of modernist ghost story through abrupt flashbacks, unexplained shifts in mise-en-scène, long stretches that unfold under ambient noise or near-silence, and widescreen anamorphic compositions that estrange the city around Walker. The cumulative effect places us in the liminal headspace of a man who may already be dead, and transforms the Organization into an embodiment of diffuse, indestructable institutional power that erases Walker’s personhood even as he guns down its underlings one by one.
"Point Blank was shot in Panavision, 1967, if I'm not mistaken. The whole thing about photography from that era I find incredibly exciting At the time, of course, television was already an important part of many people's lives in the United States. But still, somebody like John Boorman would never really think about the 'tube.' It would be very wide. The compositions are the classic anamorphic widescreen. Not only the tone and the style—he was very laconic and violent—but also the way it's shot. I find that film quite an inspiration. It's very hard to describe references because it's not about tracing paper, it's more about what you get out of the feeling of watching that film. Point Blank is one of the wonderful thrillers from the late '60s."
—Kleber Mendonça Filho
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