In relation to OUTSIDE / INSIDE, Albert Lamorisse's 1956 multi-award-winning film offers up the following ideas and influences:
- fantastical journeys
- magic-realism
- the carefree
- symbolised dreams
- social outcasts
- entrapment
- cruelty and destruction
- fierce mobs
- war and post-war ideologies
- peace ideology
- cluster ballooning
- freedom and space
- earthbound and airbound
Philip Kennicott's review in The Washington Post on 23 November 2007 provides a critical development and counter-point to all other reviews. Review extract:
"... Lamorisse's Paris is basically photographer Eugene Atget's glistening and empty city peopled by characters straight out of the old "Madeline" children's books. It doesn't exist, it didn't exist in 1956, and it probably never existed, except in carefully constructed French fantasies. And Lamorisse's vision of peasant life in the South of France, in the Camargue, never existed either. These films take place in a world of lies.Innocent lies? Not necessarily. "The Red Balloon" may be the most seamless fusion of capitalism and Christianity ever put on film. A young boy invests in a red balloon, the love of which places him on the outside of society. The balloon is hunted down and killed on a barren hilltop -- think Calvary -- by a mob of cruel boys. The ending, a bizarre emotional sucker punch, is straight out of the New Testament.Thus is investment rewarded -- with Christian transcendence or, at least, an old-fashioned Assumption..."
So does the medium of film and theatre; the novel and poems; the song and composition; the painting and installation; the television and radio; the news and blogging; et al: falsely, subconsciously, quite consciously... sensationalise, romanticise, stereotype, distort, deceive, re-enforce... the politics, the event, the story, the images, the words, the happening?
Perhaps.
Sometimes.
But maybe not in a red balloon...
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