The hill of beans, the looking at you



Experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold's now aborted project to erase all the human figures from Casablanca (he has recently chosen High Noon instead) seems to me particularly radiophonic. Without the bodies, Arnold would have given a spiritual interpretation to "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." What's left of the text would have been the lines that get repeated by schoolchildren, the music that goes on and on, the plot hinging on detoured radio tower commands. The multiple destinies of these sonic events--including a Woody Allen film that is an extended meditation on syncing the sound of this movie to his own life--is the inhuman appurtenance to the coherent psychological and bodily material that produced the original sounds.