Word: darknesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EARLIER in the week, a liquid-hydrogen fuel tank had sprung a leak and threatened to delay the launch. Now, less than an hour before the late-morning blastoff, dark clouds rolled ominously across the last patches of blue in the Florida sky; a drizzling rain turned into a heavy downpour that virtually blotted pad 39A from view. But NASA officials, buoyed by a long string of space successes, were undaunted by the dangerous omens. The order was given to proceed. More reliable than any commuter train, the 11:22 moon rocket departed from Cape Kennedy. It was on schedule...
Seconds later everyone wondered where. "I don't know what happened here," Conrad said excitedly. "We had everything in the world drop out." Inside the spacecraft, as it passed through the dark clouds. Astronauts Conrad, Richard Gordon and Alan Bean had been bathed in a sudden, brilliant flash. Immediately, red and yellow warning lights began blinking on the command module's instrument panels. All three fuel cells had stopped working; alternating-current circuits were dead, and the electrically operated gyroscopic platform that allows the astronauts to measure their attitude and velocity was tumbling out of control. There...
...film, unifying them and making them continuous, is a sense of violent personal action. Even the most confusing tracks are extremely dynamic, Renoir's cutting presents a rapid series of events whose emotional strength and content vary widely. Renoir cuts into close-up, shoving the character's half-dark faces into ours; he cuts away to hold them in long shot for extended scenes. But always his characters are acting, pushing, crying out, confused but vital...
...when it's closest to an apparent resolution the film becomes completely chaotic. Octave and Christine. alone in a greenhouse in the park, decide to elope. The light falling on the scene is so broken that their faces and their surroundings are fragmented into patterns of light and dark. It becomes impossible to tell where a character ends and the setting begins; they have become a single meaningless surface. Indeed, one man watching them mistakes Christine for his own wife and later, mistaking Jurieu for Octave, shoots...
...refusing to take his murder seriously the characters remove all ideal depth from life. They dedicate themselves to a world of dark confusion, textures of broken light and shadow without order, violent emotional events with scant meaning. In thus interpreting the continuity of social process and order after individual death, Renoir finally recognizes the seriousness of his material. His fluid and continuous relationships between men, his heroes' deaths at the hands of society are given the atmosphere of horror they deserve. Renoir is morally engaged in Rules of the Game as in few other films...