Word: avant
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...TERMS of the redefinition of narrative cinema, Herostrutus is a transitional film, combining elements of narrative similar in their conditional sense to certain strains of the New Novel, with more "poetic" effects dependent upon the associative powers of imagery, traditionally the province of the avant-garde cinema. A balance is struck between the demands of plotted works and those of more abstract compositions. what Levy calls cinema "communicating like music." The structure of the film is determined by how Levy gauges the emotional impact of particular shots at particular times in their relation to a story; images do not develop...
Levy is this the heir to the avant-garde of Ray, Richter. Duchamp, and Dali, and also the most sophisticated of Eisenstein's psychology and his montage of shack therapy. Indeed Levy's ??? on film are built around similar percept?? ??? (though in his case, with a Phl). in theoretical physics from Cambridge, the science is a good ??? more ??? fide) and his recourse to similar language ("emotional shocks." for instance ??? predominantly in his theory...
...whatever the outcome of the debate about its relative merits, or the validities of Levy's theories and ambitions for the cinema, no one can deny that it's an astoundingly original work in a medium where convention is all a film that draws on the avant-garde's history yet reaches its own conclusions. What is most exhilirating about the whole experience is the raw intellectual energy, the pulse beat of an unflagging imagination, the sense that an important artist has places to go and visions to show us if only the industry will let him. The premiere tomorrow...
Soil for the Future. Obviously, the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre has more the air of group therapy than it does of legitimate theater. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as some sort of peripheral fad. The true purpose of the avant-garde is to provide the soil in which future drama will grow. Aesthetic soil means shaping a mentality. For example, the Depression created the mentality of social consciousness, and out of that mentality sprang the social protest plays of the '30s and the Group Theater. The mentality of Freudian psychology prefigured Tennessee Williams...
...Road's peculiar combination of chichi, opportunistic avant-gardism and calculating commercialism makes it far more offensive than the crassest products from either Hollywood studios or the underground. The screenplay is the work of Terry Southern (again), who also acted as a coproducer, Scenarist Dennis McGuire and Director Aram Avakian. The three have taken John Earth's trim, controlled novel about a nervous breakdown in the groves of academe and reduced it to a madman's drool...