Monday, December 6, 2010

Classic Scene #23

As it's started snowing heavily again outside I suppose it's time for some more snow-related movie scenes. The most famous, of course, is little Charlie Kane and that sleigh in Citizen Kane, not to mention the snowflakes skittering through time in the smashed snow globe as old Charles breathes his last. Welles returned to snow as an emblem of lost innocence again the following year in this lovely scene from The Magnificent Ambersons. But in Jim Jarmusch's blank-generation hipster classic Stranger Than Paradise , snow becomes a white-out metaphor for the empty nothing of the characters' lives as they stare out at what's supposed to be Lake Erie, but is really the bleak reality of their future lives. Surely one of the worst tourist visits ever.

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