Word: centralized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...exciting way of making his characters come alive-not jump but flow off the pages seep into the reader's mind so that, at a certain point in the novel, the character suddenly emerges, fully-fleshed and fully-human. Quickly and easily Williams skerches the relationship between his central characters: Browning, the Don. a now-inactive Mafia kingpin, and Itzhak Hod, the triggerman...
...strengths, the novel also has its faults. Its ending, for instance. leaves one vaguely disappointed. Everything ends too well for the central characters. Browning, the Don. and Hod all emerge unscathed by the events of the book-as if. after The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams wanted to write a book that would end happily, or at least, not tragically. At the novel's end, the domestic scene is still exploding and another perhaps final international war (the United States versus China) is imminent: but the central characters have been removed from the scene of action...
While not romantic in any articulated sense. Baillic's films are imbued with a strong strain of self-conscious rural nostalgia, a feeling for the past that is at once sentimental and dismembered. His films document man assuming the central persona of conquistador in his environmental relationships. The natural is defined as the pastoral, fragmented by the threatening angles of girders and consumed by the relentless forward movement of concrete progress. More explicitly, the natural world for Baillie is a world in which light plays freely; in man's world light is confined refracted, or invented (for instance...
Baillie's earlier films give a strong sense of internal progress, of work done, despite their non-dramatic form. Pieces like On Sundays, The Gymnasts, and Have You Ever Thought of Talking to the Director ? are unified by the experiences of a central character, whom Baillie uses to explore oppressive physical realities. His basic themes reach their fullest elaboration in his epic films To Parsifal and Mass, and each succeeding work derives its direction and energy from these two productions. In Quixote. the last of his epics, a barbaric technology proves too overpowering, and the sheer visual weight of double...
...works that follow it, less ambitious in scope, are more successful. Probably the best of these later films is Valentin de las Sierras, made in Mexico. Rather than unify the film through a central protagonist's experience, Baillie portrays the world as a child sees it, conveying a clear sense of wonder through close-ups and impressionistic hand-held camera work. Shots with specific meanings reoccur in a variety of contexts, and characteristic Baillie imagery-a dark horse, an unlit entryway-rearranges itself according to a child-like vision...