Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though it may have been absurd, there was nothing contemptible about the antiquarian passion that swept a good part of the British upper classes at the time, when architects like Sir George Gilbert Scott and A.W.N. Pugin were creating hundreds of Neo-Gothic churches and restorations throughout England, and Sir Charles Barry was faking the medieval Houses of Parliament. For a generous spirit like Morris, it was an easy step from saying that life once was beautiful to believing that it could and should be beautiful again...
...laugh; the development of her character through the years is the rock on which Gone With the Wind is built. Indeed, all the Negroes (even Butterfly McQueen, with the immortal "Lawsy, Miz Scahlet, Ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!") are so carefully individualized as characters that it is absurd to label them stereotypes or criticize the film for racial naivete...
...grows madder because some woman runs a comb through her hair. A lady sees a hand, mysteriously unconnected to a body, flip-flopping at her. A man gets off his death-bed to lie quietly on top of anybody who isn't his wife. A collection of private, fairly absurd, moments...
...reason people don't move from the room isn't so absurd. They have been running and suddenly can't take the next step. Bunuel shows how agonizing apathy is. You want desperately to go forward, yet you're in a sort of vaccuum. The longer you remain in it, the more you try to fill it up. You bitch and invent distracting crises. The host, upon urging, offers to shoot himself for inviting everybody over. People begin to thirst and starve so that a piece of fruit, rather than departure, occupies their minds...
...Exterminating Angel is that it transforms inner struggle into something almost physical. Bunuel speaks through his company, paralyzed in one room, of the human condition. He prevents the movie from disintegrating into the mysterious-accident type by injecting symbols--the sheep, for example. We always know that the absurd situation and the not-quite-tragic characters are part of Bunuel's allegory. JOEL DEMOTT