What's it Meta For?: The Holy Mountain (1973)

By Tom Swift

This movie is Metafor the totality of transformation and its unbearably promiscuous scope, going out and banging all the possible perspectives it can wrap its lusty, signifying limbs around.

What's it Meta For? : 8 1/2 (1963)

By Tom Swift

This is the first installment in a group of reviews I’m doing on the use of meta in film. Meta, vaguely put, is when a concept is abstracted from another concept which is then used to inform or complete the latter; some well known examples are A Midsummer’s Night Dream’s or Hamlet’s play within a play, Italo Calvino’s hypernovel If on a winter’s night a traveler(1979) - a novel imbedded with 10 false novels - or Roland Barthe’s Criticism and Truth (1970), a critique on traditional literary critique in France. Film achieves this most frequently by producing films about producing films or making a film about the failure of its own production, each using the film inside the film to establish a more oppositional realism, but each to their own respective ends. I will be exploring their ends, one by one and attempting to find out how deep each goes.