Word: chekhovisms
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...late 19th century, Anton Chekhov raised the nuance to an art form. The technique moved one of his contemporaries to complain to him of The Sea Gull: "My dear fellow, it isn't dramatic." The paralyzing problem with this film version of Chekhov's first major play is that it is far too dramatic...
...Chekhov's narrative is meticulously simple, containing, as he put it, "much talk of literature, little action, and five poods* of love." Director Sidney Lumet, who hammered home The Pawnbroker, pummels away at Chekhov's plot. At the country estate of a retired civil servant named Sorin (Harry Andrews) is assembled a group of people who over the course of two years will quietly destroy one another: Sorin's sister Arkadina (Simone Signoret), an aging actress vacationing in the country with her lover Trigorin (James Mason), a successful author; Arkadina's son Konstantin (David Warner...
...Chekhov called The Sea Gull a comedy, but any traces of wit have been pretty well destroyed by Lumet's lumbering technique. The actors perform as if they were all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only David Warner as Konstantin and some of the supporting players-notably Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Ronald Radd and Kathleen Widdoes-effectively explore the full dimensions of their roles. Lumet moves his camera incessantly to give the illusion of action, but uses fadeouts to duplicate the curtain falling at the end of an act. He attempts to preserve the tense theatrical effect...
...drama: "A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not a judge; he is a creator. The job of shifting oneself totally from one character to another-a principle on which all of Shakespeare and all of Chekhov is built -is a superhuman task at any time." What makes the playwright's task more difficult today is the death of certain theatrical conventions: "The lukewarm virtues of good craftsmanship, sound construction, effective curtains, crisp dialogue have all been thoroughly debunked...
They're burning books again in Red China. Singled out for censure in Mao's land, according to the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta-a potboiler that likes to call the kettle black-are the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Twain, Steinbeck, London, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky...