Hacker Cinema
To the Lighthouse
1983 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Colin Gregg
A faithful dramatization of Virginia Woolf's novel. A lecturer, his family, the spinster Aunt Lily, an old friend, and a student, Charles Tansley, spend a summer in an isolated house in Cornwall just before World War I. The stern Mr. Ramsay scolds everybody, while Mrs. Ramsay is the linchpin in keeping the family together. Aunt Lily paints, and the family talk about sailing to the lighthouse, but the trip is always postponed.
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1 comment on Hacker News
The Martian Chronicles is more like a concept album, but with short stories instead of songs, than a novel. There are some connections here and there but the vibe is always more important than the details or any broader narrative, as far as linking the stories together.
Fair warning: To the Lighthouse is a (gently!) stream-of-consciousness work of Modernist fiction, and the entire middle act is mostly a description of a vacation home aging for a time, largely absent any people. It's also one of my favorite books, but it's, ah, subtle, I guess. Think a series of impressionist paintings of everyday life, nature, and empty rooms, but in book form.
I hadn't thought about it a lot but on reflection that "satisfying melancholy" effect is one of my most treasured feelings I can get from fiction. There's something childlike about it that really appeals to me—and now that I think about it, a lot of the big children's classic films, especially of 80s, went for this in a big way. Almost everything by Don Bluth. The Neverending Story. That kind of thing. Might be why I make that association.
Just scanned my shelves looking for more. The short stories of Dinesen, a bit? The Call of the Wild, but I think that might just be a "me" thing. It's a lot more common in poetry, where you can read through an anthology for any famous poet and probably encounter it many times, than in fiction. Possibly it's more common in bodies of literature outside of English—I'm thinking especially of Russian and French—where I'm even less well-read than I am in English. I just don't know.