An analysis of Conrad's cinematic mode of regard would perhaps be incomplete without a quick look at the various cinematic devices used by Conrad, and picked up by the contemporary or more modern film- directors.First and foremost are the use of arresting visuals, piling visual detail upon the reader in the manner of a cinematic choreographer.: Tints of purple , gold and crimson were mirrored in the clear water of the harbour. A long tongue of land, straight as a wall with the grass-grown ruins of the fort making a sort of rounded green mound....The great mass of cloud filling the head of the gulf had long red smears amongst its convoluted folds of grey and black as of a floating mantle stained with blood...the glassy bands of water along the horizon gave out a fiery red glow , as if fire and water had mingled together in the vast bed of the ocean...(p.347) These rivetting visuals have not been sketched per se but have a bearing upon the thematic scheme of the novel. The red stains in the folds of the cloud thus refer to not only the blood bath during the revolution but also point to the death of Decoud and the imminent death of Nostromo.Second is the use of parallel montage, a cinematographic methodology used first by Sergei Eisenstein in his movie 'The Birth of the Nation', where he presented two perspectives , at the same point in time but from varying vantage points. For instance in Chapter 7 of The Lighthouse we have a vignette of the trio Charles Gould, Emilia Gould and Dr Monygham discussing the lossof the silver entrusted to Nostromo and Decoud and dr Monygham's refrain that if the silver had been available it would have earned a reprieve from Sotillo : If you had all the silver here', the doctor said ' or even if it had been known to be at the mine you could have bribed Sotillo to throw off his recent Monterism. You could have induced him either to go away in his steamer or even to join you....( p. 345) This reference to moral corruption is stretched further by a simultaneous vignette of Nostromo who emerges from sleep, after safely returning from the Great Isabel and allows us to look ahead to the death of Nostromo who has sold his soul to the Mephistophlean silver : Nostromo woke up from a fourteen hours sleep, and arose full length from his lair in the long grass. He stood knee-deep amongst the whispering undulations of the green blades with the lost air of a man just born into the world....he threw back his head, flung his arms open and stretched himself with a slow twist of the wasist and a leisurely growling yawn of the white teeth...Then in the suddenly steadied glance fixed upon nothing from under a thoughtful yawn appeared the man.(p.347). Conrad, like the various 'auteur' artists insisted on revealing a core of meaning and thematic motifs. His work goes beyond the realm of mere performance and transposes the text into a semantic dimension. In this his work is very similarto the cinematic approach adopted by Howard Hawks,in his films ,( be it,Road to Glory, 1926, Rio Bravo,Air Force etc).
Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010