Word: camus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...students' wide-ranging curiosity awes English Teacher Anne Wallach of San Francisco's Lowell High School: "They read everything from Greek classics to modern political novels. On their own, they tackle Dostoevsky, Camus, Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Bowen; on picnics they talk about everything from world politics to advanced physics. These students are definitely not dull. They're wonderfully vigorous...
...serious concerns as a writer, serious enough to find all lesser concerns humorous. In a civilization in which artists have taken over from religious leaders the function of conscience to the world, one of the prophets. He belongs with a number of great modern thinkers such as Joyce, Nietzsche, Camus, and Malraux, who aim at the very center of human experience: his subject is the value of life. His attack is similar to that levelled by these, and numerical men. It is an outcry against the world with its mad race for material and improvement; with its growing callousness among...
...Marcel Camus has surrounded a legend that was old when the Greeks told it, with the rhythm of Negro music and singing, with magic borrowed from a dozen lands, and finally with the beauty and color of Rio's carnival. Black Orpheus recaptures not only the myth, but also the frenzied rites of the dancers who made their torchlit way from Athens to the Eleusinian shore. With brilliant color that revels in the setting's crotic intensity, the filming captures visually the vibrant joy and sad lyricism of the soundtrack...
...never succumbs, as his ancient worshippers did, to thinking more of those who came before and will come after than of himself. He carries eternity as a very light burden. Yet there is also a strange incongruity in the Christian touches which Camus tries to introduce. When Orpheus is counseled to trust to charity, as when he thanks the dead Eurydice for the new dawn, the unity of the myth is broken, and the interpolations do not ring true...
...film like this becomes a masterpiece if it succeeds at all: what is remarkable is that the myth does work. Largely, Camus has accomplished his end through surrealism and through appeal to a whole secondary set of myths: the archetypal image the audience holds of the rhythmic and sexual Negro. Only in Kio, and only with black stars could this incredible tale become real. But in this strange, lovely land, Orpheus does live again...