Word: chiaroscuro
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...Sorcerer's Scrapbook (Random House; $6.95) is an ideal guidebook. Michael Berenstain's straightfaced account purports to be the Life and Times of Nicodemus Magnus, Doctor of Magic and Sorcerer to the Duke, told in his own words. But its true power and humor lie in its chiaroscuro Dark Ages illustrations of dungeons and dragons and a whimsical text that Merlin might have written on the wind...
...might have invented them. The whips and whimpers, the glistening boots, the macho marching songs, the sado-chic -my dear, the divine decadence. It's all so terribly cinematic. Cabaret and The Night Porter set the stage; Just a Gigolo lights it in elegant chiaroscuro and populates it with every species of eccentric known to Weimar Berlin. Marlene Dietrich (her first film since 1964) intones the title song. David Bowie makes love to Kim Novak in a cemetery. David Hemmings (who also directed) plays a Nazi who turns Bowie's corpse into Horst Wessel. The stars keep straight...
Scorsese underscores this by keeping the direction flat, or at least flat for Scorsese. Camera angles are straightforward and conventional, and the only "cinematic effects" are subtle ones: the way he almost always has DeNiro in the frame, ever when he's not talking; marvelous chiaroscuro effects with the black-and-white film; remarkably restrained glimpses from subjective angles. This approach not only fits the material--flat, quotidian life--but it allows Scorsese a creative contrast in technique in filming the boxing sequences...
...contemporary fascination with photography has not elevated Muybridge to his proper place. These volumes may redress the balance. With the exactitude of a scientist and the dramatic sense of a stage designer, Muybridge observed lions, donkeys, dogs, deer, even elephants as they strode and ran. Their movements, caught in chiaroscuro, give the studies an eerie, dreamlike quality that has never quite been duplicated. Other series of nude men, women and children are done without a hint of prurience and provide a brilliant study of anatomy. The price tag on this rediscovered classic is prohibitive, but no library can afford...
What then was the secret of Edison's inventiveness? The core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized...