Word: destroys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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McHarg's new book is partly a burst of rage at the lavalike flow of U.S. cities into the countryside, where city dwellers yearning for nature destroy it in the process. McHarg blames the lack of planning on the arrogance of both capitalism and Christianity, cries that man is poisoning the very biosphere that sustains him and calls for a new ecological religion based on living in harmony with nature rather than on conquering...
...rhythm and construction. The plot of One Fine Day is much like an anecdote by Chekhov. A middle-aged Milanese advertising executive (Brunette Del Vita) has led a smug and comfortable life of reasonable success with his job, with his family and his women. Two intimations of death destroy this placid equilibrium: a colleague is stricken with a heart attack at a staff meeting and the executive himself accidently runs over a construction worker. The colleague recovers, and the executive is apparently acquitted of the manslaughter charge, but everything has been changed forever. The last scene finds him huddled...
...empty garden," announces the narrator somewhat superfluously as the camera pans slowly around an empty garden. "It is perhaps a hotel. It is a cold summer. Perhaps everyone is resting." Everything, in other words, is equivocal. The only certainty is that Destroy, She Said is a perfect cinema parody of the maddening affectations of the French anti-novelists. During vacation week at a hotel (no, not Marienbad) in the middle of a forest, Professor Henri Garcin is seduced by another woman (Catherine Sellers) as his young wife (Nicole Hiss) looks vacantly into the camera and does a lot of wondering...
...overlook the fact that Destroy, She Said is mummifyingly boring, it is actually quite a lot of fun. Marguerite Duras, who executed this excellent satire, has good credentials for the job. Besides writing the screenplays for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Une Aussi Longue Absence she also attended the birth of the anti-novel movement, making such notable contributions to the genre as Moderato Cantabile and The Sea Wall. In her directorial debut, she has unfortunately committed one rather crucial error. She seems to have been the only one who didn't get her own joke...
...colleague who proves unsuited to his new role, one must clearly and simply dissent from the value hierarchy represented here (and again in the fourth point, below). Such reasoning manifests a series of traits one would hope it is the office of a Faculty of Arts and Sciences to destroy. If the matter were not so serious, this statement would stand as nothing more than a monument to the possibilities of men's pretensions...