Well, we can talk it out. I think to start with you could figure out which context you're speaking of: is it the 'audience reaction' sense, wherein there is a 'comic distance' which 'disintegrates' as the film achieves a 'dramatic closeness'? That seems to make the most sense in terms of typical classification of this sort of subject matter these days. The most simple classifications tend to fail in encompassing all of the nuances of complicated films - what to call Le Quattro Volte? In the City of Sylvia I have no words, I am afraid, but I want them. A task for another day.Cold Bishop wrote:Well, that's the problem: I don't have enough yet to create a working definition of a "Disintegrating Comedy", or whether it holds water as a distinct narrative structure.
I'll work within this 'comic distance'/'dramatic closeness' dichotomy (and if you don't like this frame of reference then you can develop your own line of categorization which makes sense, and in such a case the formulation you choose will probably help us to understand the way in which you are approaching the subject - thereby helping to eliminate semantic ambiguity):
There are a few things to consider that come to mind with this sort of thing, especially speaking in broad terms:
1.) what it is that constitutes the comedy that disintegrates, obviously
2.) what is it that takes the place of the comedy
3.) what the function is of the change from comedy to something else
For tragic farces the formula seems to be consistent: Take any subject which is threatened by excess, strip it of its practical implications through exaggeration, then insert practical implications in toward the end to provide a contrasting frame of reference (a contrast which is tragic - which is the point of the contrast). This sort of structural manipulation (to that I don't have much disagreement with Roger Ryan, except that I think that this manipulation is no more than average, just more clever) seems to most often result in two things: on the one there is the impulse to reconcile one's past reaction with the new behavior, at least in my experience - and for this reason I think it's an excellent way to provoke thought (and often necessitate it, based on how impactful some of these films are) without forcing any certain viewpoint. It is a very manipulative strategy, though, but this is the interesting part: a lot of films use this sort of manipulation quite obviously and even use the act of manipulation as part and parcel of the provocation of thought. In Devils on the Doorstep, mentioned before, the final show of the film is shot in color, as opposed to the rest of the film, and it is a nice hint at the diverging ways of portraying the world which can render it in a number of different lenses and shades and colors. In Greenaway's Baby of Macon I seem to recall that the three central ideas touched upon were these same three: manipulation, the meaning of varying frames of reference, and the practical implications of all that had come before it (all of which had been filtered through a number of 'distancing' framings). This one makes the point about 'distance' extremely clear in that the film's most 'tragic' element arises quite obviously in the 'least abstracted' level of the film (a level which is still abstracted, as a fictional film, and even obscured in a number of ways but wrenches the gut nevertheless like few other scenes) - all to make a point about the perils of failing to view things in the proper perspective. It is almost a manifesto for the pragmatic application of the tragic farce in and of itself. In Birds, Orphans, and Fools the filmmaker tells the audience in the opening minutes what is going to happen, so the manipulation is made completely apparent, but it's still unsettling in the way it plays out.
Of course, this sort of thing needn't begin with farce and end with bleak tragedy - it may merely begin with lighthearted realistic comedy and end with a sobering realistic truth, as your 'imagined' Daytrippers implies. That film would seem to differ in both constitution, construction, and result from the 'tragic farces' that I have documented before.
As such, if you are speaking of these things in the terms I am using it seems that 'disintegrating comedy' could be a fairly broad term. It doesn't stipulate the brand of comedy, the tone it shifts into, or the result of that shift. This isn't a bad thing, but perhaps this is broader than you originally intended and as such you may find that there is a certain particular strand of this 'disintegrating comedy' which you can describe more thoroughly. On the other hand, maybe it's the wide range of possibilities that intrigues you in which case there may be more examples and a wider variety of resulting implications than you had originally thought of. All of this seems like a potentially interesting subject, depending on where you want to take it, and it'd probably benefit from others' own experiences with the subject. Sometimes such categorization can greatly aid in understanding the nuances of films (as long as the codification is used as a potential method for analyzing a film rather than a restrictive method of shutting off alternate methods, of course).
Sure, but in addition to naming films I think there is something to be gained from abstracting into structure and tone, especially when the name of the thread is a descriptor of a structural shift in tone. I'm all for exploring. Let me know how you see things.Cold Bishop wrote:Consider the aim of this thread exploratory: to dig enough examples (as well as films which don't quite fit) to create a working definition.