Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that buried Washington just before the Kennedy Inauguration eight years ago. After Nixon takes the oath from Chief Justice Earl Warren at noon on the Capitol steps and delivers his inaugural address, the two-hour parade-shortest in memory, timed to end while there is still enough light for color-television cameras-will get under way up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Nixon, Vice President Agnew and their families will watch from a heated presidential box enclosed in bulletproof glass; lesser spectators will look on from bleachers pounded together out of hundreds of miles of top-grade Douglas...
...never heard of Danger: Diabolik, or for that matter anything else by Mario Bava, Italy's greatest hack (Black Friday, Planet of the Vampires, Kill Baby Kill). In the tradition of Edgar G. Ulmer and the more outlandishly-scripted Charbol melodramas, Bava films wretched nonsense with great style, color, and originality. Don't attempt to inject meaning into this tale of a Super-thief and his sexy girlfriend who inhabit a sumptuous underwater playground which makes Dr. No's look like Rindge Tech. It doesn't matter: film-making as slick and out-landish as Bava's is quite infectious...
Chabrol's camera creates and defines characters, theme, and content, able to articulate everything his characters cannot. His ability to do exactly what he wants is shown in the brutal climax of The Champagne Murders, a one-and-one-half minute montage of all the camera movements and color schemes that have previously dominated the film, which arrives at a shocking (Marnie-like) shot of unearthly colors and images foreign to it. In Les Biches, the soft lighting of the night scenes is as magnificant as any in film history, as are the time-compression montages of Frederique...
...Chinoise reduces style to static set-ups and simple tracks ("The tracking snot is a political act," says Jean-Luc mystically); color is stripped largely to the primary range. Both decisions complement the didacticism of the young Parisian Maoists by omitting all but the starkest and most basic cinematic devices, also by reminding us constantly that we're watching a movie. Perversely, the lean movements and bright colors give La Chinoise charm and humor (not, I suspect, two of Godard's favorite critical adjectives) and make its polemicism entertaining...
...Francis Jeanson's assertion that the students are drasticalliy oversimplifying. But the ending replaces conclusive directorial statement with irony, and signifies that Godard didn't know what kind of statement he wanted to make. I saw La Chinoise in Paris when it opened, and report regrettably that the color of the American prints (I've seen three) doesn't come remotely close to the sharp clear tones of the original...