Word: dedalus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Charles Dickens drew Mr. Micawber straight from the outlines of his own bumbling, eternally optimistic father. When James Joyce created Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, he took a cold look at his da and virtually transcribed the old man's boozy conversation. Examples proliferate, but the point is clear: lucky the writer who is blessed with a vivid parent. The childhood may have been hellish, but the material supplied by domestic drama can be invaluable. In the endless quest for characters that is a writer's lot, there...
...attention and awe. And there is simply no way to construct a film that can contain more than a suggestion of the verbal richness of a novel. Interior monologues lose their power when they are transformed into voice-overs or dialogue scenes. Those long, obsessive scenes in which Stephen Dedalus flexes his revolutionary's muscles in aesthetic and theological debate with school friends become strangely wooden when, instead of reading them on the printed page, we are forced to watch actors trying to speak these abstractions with realistic spontaneity. As for Joyce's famous epiphanies, they seem disastrously...
Visions of spending eternity in a Steven Dedalus-like hell flashed through my brain, reinforced by Joyce's smile on the wall...
Cranly was a friend whom Dedalus rejected in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, just as he will later reject Mulligan. The description is not complete (it is not designed to be), but it is more effective than the full front all shot of Mulligan in the movie, which in its lack of focussed detail adds nothing to the dialogue...
...hard to imagine college students who are caught up in the film-as-film trip using films made from novels as entertaining forms of learning. All they have to do is skip the reading and use them as a kind of celluloids Monarch Notes. As for Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus refers to "the cracked looking glass of a servant" as a symbol for Irish art. It's also an appropriate symbol for Ulysses the movie--a broken reflection of an inimitable world...