Word: abell
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...also a moral symbolist. His earthy characters journey over a landscape that pulses with the strife-torn dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal Abel. In the American tradition, this links Williams to three 19th century moral symbolists: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville...
System or chaos, Coppola is never dull. Two years ago, he had New York cinephiles atwitter with his presentation of the seven-hour Our Hitler. Last January he put a refurbished version of Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon into the Music Hall, and played host to not just a celebrity party but an exhilarating film experience. After the Napoleon coup, movie wags were wondering which charismatic dictator Coppola would bring to New York in early 1982. Now they know. Frederic Forrest may be romancing Nastassia Kinski onscreen, but center stage will again be occupied...
...DIED. Abel Gance, 92, illustrious French film director who devised such techniques as multiple screens, double-printing and wide-angle lenses to create brilliant silent movies, including the 1927 masterpiece Napoléon; in Paris. A prolific film maker, Gance produced such classics as I Accuse and The Wheel. But his success ended with the advent of talkies. Shuttling between unemployment and obscure commercial movies, he complained: "I prostituted myself not to live but to avoid dying." Five decades later, one understanding producer, Francis Coppola, helped English Film Historian Kevin Brownlow present a reassembled copy of Napoleon, shown last January...
LIKE A REVELATION that appears of its own will out of nothing, Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoleon flickers into the screen and at once flies directly into the face of the current taste in art. Not "bleak" or "austere" or "minimal" like so much of what is now published, produced, painted or composed, Napoleon is exuberantly romantic. Modernism dictates that the artist's "message" be wrapped in puzzles and conundrums. Napoleon is explicit: "From now on I am the French Revolution," Bonaparte declares, and there are no secondary or tertiary meanings implicit in the statement. Symbolism here...
Napoleon [Metropolitan Center]: Abel Gance's long lost cinematic leviathan may well be the War and Peace of the screen. With four-and-a-half hours of film, a new score written and conducted by Francis Ford Coppola's father and played by a 60-piece orchestra, and a three-screen panoramic ending, it may be the biggest thing since The Seventh Seal--or may be even Edison, for crissake...