Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TELESCOPING A LIFE. Russell has descended to pure scandal-mongering. It is simply naive to explain artistic creation solety by sexual trauma, and cheap to elicit sympathy for an artist by the sordid expose of private scandal. Russell twists the facts and fabricates the milliew. The result is an hysterical film, rather than a film about hysteria. Even worse, Russell revels in his gossip--he has a fiesta turning a genuinely moving story into a turgid peephole show...
...problem is that Russell's idea of a psychological study probes no deeper than surface sensuality. He is indifferent to the artist beneath. For his empathy with Gaudier-Brzeska is based on no more than the latter's rebellion against society's distrust of freely expressed emotion. It is finally a shallow empathy that perverts sympathy into sensationalism. He sees himself as the artist messiah, bridging the gulf between art and life with a film style incarnating creative energy. But his subject depends on its special social and artistic history for its form and interest, and Russell piles on period...
...only as offensive as Russell's earlier films, but lacks their only redeeming virtue, the power of visual shock. Its ingredients are the same: scenes of destruction and decadence, of incredible decor, exaggerated sentimentality, twisted passions and a non-stop dialogue of references to the terrors and joys of artistic fervor. But by now, this melange of heavy drama and unbroken noise-making is as old as Hollywood's infant epics. The vulgar baroque that once amazed, is muted in The Savage Messiah and serves only to exacerbate the bankruptcy of Russell's vision. He projects his messiah pose...
...lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial...
...view of a train rushing through the industrial wastes of Tokyo into a sight as pleading as a misty seaside mountainscaps. One has often been criticized for sets that are too neat, tidy and unnatural, but his love for the smallest details reveal the perceptions of a superb visual artist...