Current Forum: Session 12: Independent Films & Overall View	Read 5 times 	
Date: 09-Apr-2001 23:08:34	
Author: THOMPSON, GREGORY J. <gjthomps@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Pi 	
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       Pi presents us with an interest contrast both stylistically and thematically for our final film viewing of this system. Thematically the film deals head on with a greater subject, the existential/theological debate about the importance of the 216-digit number, than any of the "Hollywood" films we have viewed this semester. Although we have constantly dealt with films through out the semester that contain important issues (race class and gender) this was really the first and only that requires some intellectual weight going into the film. 
       As I said the film requires some more intellectual stretching that most others and it gives us information only sparingly and not easily. This is done through the use of the camera as storyteller, recreating for the viewer the claustrophobic and paranoid world of the protagonist. This comes across in such moments as when he is at the sink in which the camera is in a tight close of the sink with Max bent down into it washing his nose. Later in his mental frenzy moments the viewer is subjected to the intensely loud and screeching world he hears a long with staccato fragmenting shots that come in rapid fire cuts from one extreme close up to another to virtually unrecognizable fragments. 
       One, among many moments that I found amusing in the film, was the creation of the interrogation by the Rabbis. This type of scene of course is standard Hollywood fair for detective or noir films but in this case the group around Max is a group of Hassidic Jews in search of the "name of God." The scene even includes the requisite strongman who has roughed up our hero and is reprimanded for it. 
       This film, as an Indy, takes the story and its method of storytelling in ways that only a non-Hollywood style film could do. As the Belton article states the film has the counter cultural feel of something more like Scorsese, in his early days, taking chances and bucking the system. Certainly the most obvious of this commonality is in the non-happy ending in which Max has come to the conclusion that it is better to remove that part of his brain rather than continue with the burden of the knowledge. Further, unlike the films of the Reaganite era Pi plays against those idea that "the system works," the "optimism that the end result is beneficial" and there is something of a timelessness (or a generic late 20th century look) of Pi rejecting the "nostalgia for a pre-Viet Nam Era of the 1950's."