Word: absurdist
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Back in 1973, National Lampoon ran a satirical cover image of a very cute, very worried-looking puppy with a gun pointed at its head. The headline read "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" - motivation by emotional blackmail, taken to its absurdist extreme...
...accompanied by a recorded 1950s lesson in dating etiquette. In between, the actors create rickety constructions out of found objects (a football, a blonde wig, a skirt on a hanger); badger audience members for details of their sex life; parade on and off the stage in an assortment of absurdist masks and costumes. One guy clinging to a pole is wrapped up in duct tape; another wrestles naked inside a sheet of translucent plastic; then there's the vaguely threatening shirtless clown, who wanders about tangled in an extension cord, with an iron dragging...
...There's no hectoring in Under Construction, and more moments of genuine emotion too. Amid all the absurdist chaos, there's a brief scene in which all the actors, one by one, pull a ringing cellphone out of a bucket, answer a call and proceed simultaneously to have a hushed, fraught conversation with a lover - a Babel of romantic pain. Later the actors gather to recite a round-robin reverie for icons of mid-century American life, with no irony whatsoever: "I remember my father's collection of arrowheads." "I remember loafers with pennies in them." "I remember game rooms...
Despite the cheerful and celebratory connotations of its title, Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” is existentialist, absurdist, and dark. The latest performance put on by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club inspires moments of snort-inducing hilarity even as it elicits gasps. Directed by Matthew C. Stone ’11, the play skillfully explores the notion of identity, a crucial focal point in existentialist theater, while provoking a wide range of emotions from the audience.“The Birthday Party”, written in 1958, is one of Pinter?...
...from the infamous Imperial forces in Nanking—and the world at large wishes to forget. Carax makes another interesting choice in depicting the trial, itself an invocation of post-war war crimes tribunals, in multi-paneled shots that scrutinize every angle of the scene. A mixture of absurdist fairytale and historical criticism, “Merde,” the second film in “Tokyo!” is by far the most visually and substantively rich.This might be what makes Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo” seem like such...