Over a period of nine years, Mitchell worked at her novel sporadically, composing episodes out of sequence and often drafting multiple versions of single scenes.
And the numbing sameness of every single scene is nothing short of courageous, standing as an indictment of empty consumerism, political gridlock, spiritual vacuity and the general stagnation of our age.
"Matt always explains how every single line of every single scene fits into the momentum of the construction of the story... the theme of the episode and the theme of the whole season.
As characters slide from sympathetic to despicable in the space of a single scene, the filmmaking team of Jan Hrebejk and the screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky ("Up and Down," "Divided We Fall") dares us to judge.
Whichever one you read it's the same book, but for the finality of a single scene at the end of the remaster: where Randall Flagg has survived the novel's endgame, reborn somewhere else entirely, new memories and a new identity, and with a new group of people to try and lead.
The company, which launched in January of last year (in fact, the launch story was the first thing I wrote for TechCrunch), aims to add a layer of interactivity to e-books, for example with multiple versions of a single scene or reader polls to determine the plot of future volumes.
It begins with a fragment of a single scene from a "King John" of 1899, showing the noted Victorian actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree writhing on his throne.
The young Steichen who had dealt and fiddled with the particulars of a single scene or with the contours of one body had grown into the purveyor of all-purpose good will; morally, that is hard to fault, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that it comes with any guarantee of serious art.
Can you think of an algorithm that simultaneously optimizes all attributes of a single scene graph all at once? Please email me your one/two paragraph answer before class on Tuesday, February 17.
I liked the split screens of "Hulk," but they shrivel beside the wit of a single scene in "American Splendor," when Joyce, who has not yet met Harvey, arrives at a train station and stares around, seeing a selection of possible Harveys — cutouts, each sketched by a different hand — lounging in vacant seats.
