postcard

[fflo]

     






 

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

One train, a thousand stories.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

:)

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

They look like characters from movie musicals--From the Oklahoma farmboy hoping he can lure his sweetheart back from the big city, to the flim-flam man in the white suit singing his marriage proposal to the lovely lady he just spied for the first time five minutes ago, to the slick producer offering to back the has-been mivie star's comeback, to the mother gently reassuring her daughter that there's more than one fish in the sea, and that she's young yet.

Each is happening in song, and the surprise is how each song was cleverly designed to harmonize so that we hear all the songs together in one crazy carefully-planned accident of a contrapuntal production number.

By the end of the movie, They'll all find true love, but not with who you think.

Oh, and before the movie ends, there will be a synchronized dance number with the Pullman porters that you just know is racist, but you're not sure why.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

i noticed there were no afr-american pullman porters. and the use of red and turquoise would put this in the 50s, i think.

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

The fuzziness of the close-ups reminds me of the Zapruder film (or other such obsessed-over footage: One Day in September, Bus 174, etc.), and makes me look at the original postcard in a completely different, more sinister way.

Good thing we've got Homeland Security to protect us from scenes such as this!

[fflo.livejournal.com]

yeah, at first i was thinking what a shame i'd not scanned it at higher res before posting (and selling) on eBay, but i kinda like the spooky graininess, too. esp. with Death [at bottom]. is he sabotaging the train, do you think, or just going to pick out someone(s) from the crowd to spirit away?

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

That's not Lt. Columbo finding evidence of a murder at the bottom?

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

No-- Definitely Ddeath! the SANTA FE lettering (font) is sinister.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

If it were raining in New York City, he'd just be an extra, but your right, he is sinister (though I think the font on the train is simply authentic, and not at all sinister). In fact, he might be responsible for the death of the husband of the woman in the red skirt and black top (the father of the girl in the turquoise dress).

But rest assured he will be stopped. I suspect that the businessman and the flim-flam man are in greatest need of redemption. Perhaps one of them will stop him, showing unexpected strength and decency.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

So what's going on with these people?



Death he definitely is. It's not just the shadows. He just had his hood down and his scythe obscured.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

The white-haired man in the leather jacket? Mid-life crisis in the 1970's. The woman in the yellow pantsuit with her son looking on with the theatre professor? They are from a different time, and they are not part of the story at all. They are audience. That post the boy is leaning on marks the fourth wall.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh yehhh--- NOW we're gettin' somewhere! I like this development.

I thought the boy had a box he was travelling with that had a kit for something in it. Something like, say, a rocket. (Power of association.)

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Oh, I sort of assumed it was the kids staring passively through the window, idly sucking souls from all life they survey, like Harry Potter's Dementors.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

i'm curious about zapruder films now.

[mattcallow.livejournal.com]

Great post...