[Cinemax] Knick (Steve Soderbergh+ Clive Owen)

[Ethan81]

Vista la seconda, il ritmo è bene o male lo stesso ma devo dire che mi piace sia per il tema che per l'ambientazione.
Capisco che è quasi una serie di nicchia, a molti(ssimi) può annoiare dopo 30secondi.

[Zero/1]

Decisamente una serie di nicchia, comunque è già stata rinnovata per una seconda stagione.
Intanto, per pubblicizzare The Knick, Cinemax stessa ha caricato la prima puntata su YT:

[Ethan81]

Ebbrava Cinemax

[ZaNeX]

Ci sono anche io nella nicchia!

[Glasco]

molto bella la prima, meno bella la seconda, abbastanza meh la terza.

forse troppi comprimari che pagano lo scotto di fronte a clive owen ed il suo personaggio. più ci si allontana da thackery e dalle vicende direttamente collegate al periodo pioneristico della chirurgia, meno interessa.

poi c'è qualcosa che mi suona sbagliato nella colonna sonora, soprattutto nella III ogni tanto partiva 'sta base musicale vagamente elettronica che oltre ad essere bruttina ammè pareva parecchio fuori contesto.

[Ethan81]

A me piace, penso sia il main theme

[ZaNeX]

Il main theme è una merda, quando ho visto la prima co 'sta musichetta elettronica come sottofondo ho wtfato

[Zero/1]

Viste le prime tre, mi sta piacendo molto. Come scritto in un post precedente, quello che davvero affascina è la minuzia della ricostruzione storica, da cui deriva una sensazione di immersione nel periodo storico, e di immedesimazione nelle vicende dei personaggi, davvero notevole. Ed ovviamente le pratiche mediche, rabbrividenti anzicheno.
E sfruttando quest'intervento vi consiglio di seguire il twitter della produzione, semplicemente AtTheKnick: è un crogiuolo di notizie e foto storiche .

Per es., foto di un intervento di "rinoplastica" del periodo (occhei, questa è ritwittata)



Circa l'attenzione ai dettagli, notate come la foto di Christiansen e Thackery comparsa nell'episodio 2 sia stata messa in scena riferendosi ad una foto scattata nel 1900

[Glasco]

Circa l'attenzione ai dettagli, notate come la foto di Christiansen e Thackery comparsa nell'episodio 2 sia stata messa in scena riferendosi ad una foto scattata nel 1900

vado in brodo di giuggiole per 'ste cosine, indicano che c'è un bel lavoro dietro

più che messa in scena sembra proprio fotoscioppata

[Zero/1]

Meraviglioso, vero?

Oppure la bicicletta con cui raggiunge l'ospedale l'infermiera Lucy corrisponde ad un modello dell'epoca: https://twitter.com/AtTheKnick/statu...08975916597249


E ancora, la resezione di parte dell'intestino con l'uso di cocaina come anestetico è tratta da un articolo pubblicato su un giornale di medicina nel 1900


E ancora, per citare il terzo episodio: That headline that Captain Robertson reads about Rockefeller is a real headline that @MichaelBegler found. #AtTheKnick @AtTheKnick @Cinemax

[Ethan81]

incredibile

[Zero/1]

Arrivato alla 1X05

La presenza di Thackery è dosata con il contagocce e a ragione: appena compare si ruba la scena Eppure il sottobosco di personaggi che cresce all'ombra di Clive Owen si sta lentamente sviluppando. Molti subplot, forse troppi, che investigano le piscologie dei personaggi secondari e la società del tempo. In alcuni momenti della quinta puntata mi è tornato in mente Boadwalk empire
Davvero rabbrividenti alcuni momenti, penso alla piega innaturale del collo del bambino affetto da meningite

[Ethan81]

Da ing. biomedico ho particolarmente apprezzato l'invenzione dell'arnese per l'intervento di placenta previa
Geniale anche l'idea di riempire il tutto con acqua

[Zero/1]

Da ing. biomedico ho particolarmente apprezzato l'invenzione dell'arnese per l'intervento di placenta previa
Geniale anche l'idea di riempire il tutto con acqua

Immagino tu ti stia riferendo all'episodio 6, che vedro' prossimamente.

Da biologo molecolare, invece, sogno una serie che dipinga la nascita delle biotecnologie negli anni '70, un ibrido tra "Halt and Catch Fire" e "The Knick"

[iltano]

Sono rimasto indietro causa medicina, quella moderna a breve recupero tutto

[Zero/1]

Apparentemente il personaggio di Thackery è debolmente ispirato a William Stewart Halsted.
Siddartha Mukherjee nel suo eccezionale The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer tratteggiava Halsted quale geniale pioniere della chirurgia oncologica, perdutamente dipendente dalla cocaina. Ma vista l'impossibilità di quotare qui tale capitolo, saccheggio il web. Chissà che non compaia

Halsted: The Father of Science-Based Surgery

One (dark and stormy?) night in 1882, a critically ill 70 year old woman was at the verge of death at her daughter’s home, suffering from fever, crippling pain, nausea, and an inflamed abdominal mass. At 2 AM, a courageous surgeon put her on the kitchen table and performed the first known operation to remove gallstones. The patient recovered uneventfully. The patient was the surgeon’s own mother.

This compelling story is the beginning of an excellent new biography of William Halsted, the father of modern surgery, Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted, by Gerald Imber, MD.

When Halsted went to medical school, surgeons still operated in street clothes, with bare hands, and major surgical procedures carried a mortality rate of nearly 50 percent. Suppuration of wounds was called laudable pus. Lister had recently introduced carbolic acid dips and sprays (that were irritating and toxic), but hand washing was discouraged because it was thought to force germs into skin crevices.

Halsted was responsible for the first use of sterile gloves in the operating room, although his initial reason for introducing them was to relieve the skin irritation of the scrub nurse who later became his wife. He collected statistics to prove that gloves reduced the infection rate, although he wasn’t always consistent: he once removed his gloves to better palpate a lesion and the patient got infected and died. In addition to the first gallstone removal, he developed the radical mastectomy (radically improving the survival of breast cancer patients), the first successful hernia repair and aneurysm repair, and many techniques that improved the outcomes of surgery. He established an animal lab to teach surgery to students and to try out new procedures. He kept refining his knowledge of anatomy, used meticulous surgical technique and fine silk sutures to minimize tissue damage (thereby reducing the chance of infection), insisted on hand washing and sterile technique, and kept careful records of outcomes to determine which procedures were best.

With his equally renowned colleagues internist William Osler, pathologist William Welch, and gynecologist Howard Kelly, he helped revolutionize the training of doctors by creating the first modern medical school at Johns Hopkins. Previously, medical schools were little more than for-profit trade schools. There was no laboratory or clinical work and students often did not see patients at all. The course lasted 3 years and had no entry requirements. At Johns Hopkins, an undergraduate degree was required for admission, the program lasted 4 years, there was extensive training in science, bedside teaching rounds were instituted, and there was a hierarchy of post-graduate training with interns and residents.

They even admitted women on the same basis as men. I thought it was hilarious how that came about. After building the hospital they had run out of money and were desperately seeking an endowment to establish a medical school. A committee of women offered to raise the money if the board would agree to admit women students. The board didn’t want to admit women, but they thought it would be safe to agree because they were confident the women would never be able to raise the necessary amount. The women promptly raised more than enough and forced the board to honor its promise! Incidentally, Gertrude Stein was an early medical student there, but instead of sticking around to graduate she went to Paris to write poetry and become famous.

The students Halsted trained (including Harvey Cushing, the father of neurosurgery) developed into a new generation of leaders and teachers: science-based surgeons who were responsible for many of the subsequent advances in surgery. They went on to teach another generation, and many of today’s most prominent surgeons and researchers can trace the line of their teachers’ teachers directly back to Halsted.

Yet this man who accomplished so much for science was a drug addict for 40 years. He was given morphine to help him withdraw from cocaine and ended up hooked on both drugs for the rest of his life. He only worked part of each year. He would disappear for months at a time, apparently to binge on cocaine in privacy. He was sometimes observed by colleagues to be suffering drug effects or withdrawal symptoms. Sometimes he would leave in the middle of an operation, saying he had a headache, leaving his residents to finish the procedure.

He was an odd duck in many ways. He was abrasive, abrupt, inconsiderate, forgetful, and apparently unfeeling: his personality quirks constantly antagonized his students and colleagues. His marriage was apparently sexless and his wife was also addicted to morphine.

His story is interesting in more ways than one. It provides insight into a crucial time in history when medicine was transitioning from superstition to science, when scientific surgery and modern medical education were being born. It is also fascinating to realize that this flawed man was able to maintain an incredibly productive scientific career for 4 decades despite his addictions. I can’t help but wonder what would happen to such a man today.

Siamo un thread intellettuale, raga'

[ZaNeX]

Anche il personaggio del medico nero mi piace molto e non ruba affatto la scena a Owen imo

[Zero/1]

Vero, piace anche a me.
Trovo pero' un po' ambigue le motivazioni dietro alla sua pratica clandestina: ha un certo non so che di sperimentazione medica su soggetti umani, nonostante paia avere effettivamente a cuore i suoi pazienti.

[ZaNeX]

Vero, piace anche a me.
Trovo pero' un po' ambigue le motivazioni dietro alla sua pratica clandestina: ha un certo non so che di sperimentazione medica su soggetti umani, nonostante paia avere effettivamente a cuore i suoi pazienti.

Che è anche quello che fa Thackery, con meno umanità di Edwards

[Ethan81]

Caro Zeró, la prima scena della 1x07 ti farà molto piacere

[Zero/1]

Sono alla 1x06, vista (e piaciuta davvero molto), aspetto con ansia la settima allora

Per ora il subplot meno convincente credo sia quello che ruota attorno all'ambulanziere e suora

[ZaNeX]

È una apposto la suora, beve e fuma

[Zero/1]

Caro Zeró, la prima scena della 1x07 ti farà molto piacere

Vista, wow


La 7 è un puntatone, bene bene bene.

[Zero/1]

Interessantissimo WoT sulla regia di Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh Is Doing Some Next-Level Work on The Knick

By Matt Zoller Seitz



Let’s take a moment to appreciate what we’re watching when we watch The Knick: the greatest sustained display of directorial virtuosity in the history of American TV, courtesy of the show’s primary and thus far only director, Steven Soderbergh.

The seventh episode of this Cinemax drama, which aired on Friday, is one of the most exciting, horrifying, beautiful, and clever hours of filmmaking I’ve seen this year—and that’s saying a lot, considering how great the year has been. The show is created and written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, and set in and around the titular hospital circa 1900. This episode, “Get a Rope,” shows what happens when an incident of racial violence touches off a wave of vigilantism, pitting African-Americans against Irish-Americans and plunging the neighborhood into chaos.

“Get a Rope” contains many harrowing setpieces, starting with the inciting incident (an off-duty Irish cop mistakes a black woman for a prostitute, scuffles with her boyfriend, then gets stabbed and taken to Knickerbocker Hospital) and continuing through the inevitable escalation. When I watched “Get a Rope” the first time, it seemed almost unbearably brutal, but on second viewing, I was struck by how Soderbergh had pulled a Hitchcock or Spielberg, never showing us as much as we think he’s showing us. The initial stabbing and a subsequent scene of a white mob dragging a black man off a bicycle are filmed from a distance (which makes them more horrifying even though, or perhaps because, the direction isn’t rubbing your face in gore).

When we see shots of African-Americans being battered by a white mob, the camera tracks the action laterally through a chain-link fence in the foreground. The fence creates a kind of “scrim” effect: You see the gist of the horror, but not every detail. The fence bit consists of three acts of violence that last about 12 seconds total, but they’re so ugly that 12 seconds is all Soderbergh needs to get the point across. Even the most prolonged moments of savagery, such as a fight in a hospital hallway and a scene of a prone man being kicked, are shot so as to obscure the bloody details. I wouldn’t call this approach “tasteful,” exactly. There’s a touch of the documentary to it; it’s journalistic, perhaps cold. It’s unflinching, but not exploitive. It feels right.

But there’s more to this episode’s great direction than adroit handling of brutality. About 21 minutes into the episode, there’s a marvelous example of how to lay out geography, ratchet up tension, and advance the plot, all at the same time: A group of doctors and nurses in the main operating theater barricade a door against the mob, which then shatters the door glass and pushes through. This frightening moment is conveyed with one shot that pans from the hospital staff, screen right, to the mob, screen left, and back again.

It’s worth noting here that a good deal of The Knick’s coiled power — conveyed not just in this episode, but in all of them — derives from Soderbergh’s economy. He directs the way Joan Didion writes. He often seems to be challenging himself to see how little he can get away with and still give the audience the information it needs to make sense of a moment. He never covers the action in a scene with ten or 15 angles when just one or two will suffice. If you rewatch pretty much any episode, you might be struck by how many moments play out in just one take — and I’m not talking about showily choreographed long takes, where the entire point is to wow the audience into realizing how much is going on in the scene, how many moving parts it has, and how daring it is to convey it all without cuts. That “wow” factor is what made the six-minute tracking shot at the end of the fourth episode of True Detective, and the warehouse shootout in episode six of Fargo, so pleasurable (I mentioned both here). But for the most part, Soderbergh is doing what film geeks call a “stealth oner” — a one-take scene that’s so subtly executed that you may not notice the lack of cuts until you watch it a second time.

An example of a stealth oner can be found in the second episode, “Mr. Paris Shoes”: the scene in which Dr. Thackery (Clive Owen) and other hospital staffers argue in a ward while newly installed electric lights flicker. The camera follows the staffers from bed to bed, weaving among them with a dancerlike grace, the tension building until Thackery blows his stack and attacks a fuse box. In his recap, my colleague Keith Uhlich called it “sublime.” It is, but there’s more sublime direction where that came from. Episode seven contains several more instances. One is the moment where Dr. Algernon (André Holland) hides under a gurney surrounded by a sheet while traveling through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and we hear Nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson) talk her way past a cop: We hear the exchange but don’t see it, and the camera remains on Algernon for the length of the scene (about a minute). The episode ends with two elegant but rather spare love scenes. One consists of a very long shot illuminated by a single lightbulb (Algernon cozying up to his boss and childhood friend, Julet Rylance’s Corneila Robinson); it moves from a wide shot to a couple of close-ups along different axes, the camera getting closer to the characters as the characters get closer to each other. The second love scene starts with Thackery and Elkins entering Elkins’s apartment building, builds with a faintly McCabe and Mrs. Miller–like shot of Thackery and Elkins in front of Elkins’s makeup mirror lit only by an oil lamp, then, ahem, climaxes with a modified version of the “before and after” montage from Soderbergh’s 1998 classic Out of Sight (itself an homage to the love scene in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now). The first love scene is dominated by a shot that goes on for about three minutes without a cut. The second love scene is busier, by Knick standards, but there aren’t a lot of different angles: The episode keeps returning to the same ones, intertwining them via judicious editing, building it into a memory anchored to Hewson’s expressions.

I don’t mean to diminish other great directors’ work on TV. In fact, as I’ve written many times for New York and Vulture, TV has always been hospitable to smart and/or inventive filmmakers, perhaps more so recently than in the past. There have been many examples of excellent direction in recent years — I highlighted just a few of them in a 2013 magazine piece — as well as examples of filmmakers directing several consecutive episodes of a TV series. The most acclaimed recent run happened on HBO’s True Detective, all eight episodes of which were helmed by Cary Fukanaga.

But what Soderbergh is doing here goes above and beyond because it’s a feat of multitasking and physical endurance as well as artistry. He did not just direct all ten episodes of the show’s first season, which would be impressive in itself. According to Cinemax, it takes about seven work days to shoot an episode of The Knick (fewer than most dramas), which means Soderbergh is directing and editing for 70 days without any significant break. He also serves, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, as its cinematographer (overseeing lighting, composition, and camera movement) and its main camera operator. A great percentage of the time, when you see the camera moving with the actors, it’s usually Soderbergh holding it; there is sometimes a second camera getting another angle, but Soderbergh is always the primary. When the production wraps each day, he assembles a rough edit of everything the crew shot, and eventually does the fine cut himself; the show’s editing credit, Mary Ann Bernard, is another Soderbergh pseudonym. This is not how things are usually done, at least not at the level of a lavishly detailed pay-cable period piece. There are other people doing all of these jobs, under the supervision of the showrunners, who tend to identify themselves as writers rather than as directors.

Soderbergh told me recently that a lot of the show’s simplicity is driven by time and budget constraints. They’re working on a tight schedule and have to shoot a lot of script pages every day, so they don’t have the luxury of shooting things five different ways and deciding later which one they like the best. The use of compact, high-definition, light-sensitive digital cameras allows Soderbergh to shoot with one or two visible light sources, often of fairly low wattage, and achieve naturalistic lighting effects that Stanley Kubrick spent a fortune on when shooting the visually similar Barry Lyndon (the first movie with interiors shot entirely by candlelight) on 35mm film 40 years ago. I’m almost reluctant to convey all that information here, though, because it might make it sound as if what Soderbergh is doing is easy. It’s really not. That fusebox scene I mentioned earlier is so complex, in terms of choreography, that a lot of period shows and films would set aside a day to block it, rehearse it, and shoot it. Soderbergh did it in two hours, from start to finish. You can’t work that fast and get such great results unless you’re absorbed in your craft so fully that it has become instinctive, in the way that a painter’s brushstrokes are instinctive, or a great basketball player’s moves are instinctive. At some point, intelligence becomes physical. The eyes and hands are just taking dictation from the subconscious. That, I suspect, is the level at which Soderbergh is operating now, 25 years after the premiere of his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape.

All of which means that when you watch The Knick, you are seeing the closest thing to an undiluted filmmaking vision as top-shelf TV drama has ever given us. Not even Louis C.K. is as hands-on as Soderbergh; he writes and edits Louie himself, but somebody else is lighting and shooting the series. The Knick is not just directed: It’s direct, in the sense that it visual sensibility is going from the filmmaker’s eyes to yours, without layers of other people as intermediaries. The camera and editing software are expressive tools as intimately connected to the artist’s mind and body as a paintbrush or a pen.

This would all be meaningless if the show’s direction were terrible or merely okay. But it’s consistently so extraordinary that after finishing episode five and seeing Soderbergh’s name flash onscreen yet again, I was reminded of a story a relative told me years ago about going to the West Side piers to watch Jackson Pollock do one of his drip canvases. Soderbergh is making art in collaboration with Amiel and Begler and their outstanding ensemble cast, but he’s also putting on a show. He’s performing, turning creative expression into a real-time display of physical assurance that’s as much an athletic event as it is an artistic one.

In particolare, per chi avesse skippato:

According to Cinemax, it takes about seven work days to shoot an episode of The Knick (fewer than most dramas), which means Soderbergh is directing and editing for 70 days without any significant break. He also serves, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, as its cinematographer (overseeing lighting, composition, and camera movement) and its main camera operator. A great percentage of the time, when you see the camera moving with the actors, it’s usually Soderbergh holding it; there is sometimes a second camera getting another angle, but Soderbergh is always the primary :O

[Zero/1]

Noto solo ora