Word: berrie
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Written by Claude Berri and Gerard Brach...
JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING Forget Wall Street. For a really savage study of greed and relentless connivance, see Claude Berri's double- decker movie. His tale of fate-haunted French peasants is also that movie rarity: tragedy on the grand and classic scale...
...threat to Syria's position in Lebanon. He also came to understand that an Islamic stronghold in Lebanon might eventually undermine Assad's own secular Baath ; Party government in Damascus. In 1984 Assad threw his support to Amal, the mainstream Lebanese Shi'ite organization and militia led by Nabih Berri, but Hizballah's influence continued to spread. One reason Assad sent his army into West Beirut in February was to bring the Iranians to heel...
Above all, the money bought Berri amplitude. His people are almost never isolated in close-ups that would falsely heighten either their emotions or the audience's reaction. The characters are mostly seen at some distance from the camera -- framed against and dwarfed by the abrupt Provencal landscape. Not one shot ever implies that they might achieve even momentary dominance over this country and climate. Quite the contrary. Even when they are sheltered from its wayward tempers, their comforts -- even Cesar's -- are at once crude and fragile...
...spaciousness of Berri's style is, of course, old-fashioned, so much so that it strikes us with the force of something new. But its most important function is to link his work with two currently disused narrative traditions. One is that of the naturalistic novel, which insists on locating characters within a detailed rendering of their world, forcing the reader to recognize that the seemingly minor incidents of life reveal the workings of vast, elemental forces. The other, astonishingly enough, is Greek drama, in which the psychological intimacy among characters is irrelevant, since their destinies are determined...