Word: detailing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WEARING spectacles of the wrong prescription usually results in a headache. Likewise, the near-sighted squint with which In Cold Blood inspects its subject matter only strains the viewer. With meticulous regard for detail the film attempts to relate the facts surrounding the murder of the Clutter family by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Drawing from Truman Capote's research, the film version of his book reproduces the chilling aspects of this so-called "senseless" crime--the paradoxical motives of the killers, the inability of social conventions to adequately explain the atrocity, and the irony by which the state executes...
...puzzling tragedies of the killers are distorted by distracting practices of the camera, which fastens itself on details and on nothing else. At one moment it takes a coldly distant perspective and at the next becomes the eyes of one of the characters. Too many points of view, too many exacting detail counts substitute trivia for what could be absorbing and coherent action. Perhaps these failings are the result of an attempt to film precise history (even though it may not even be good history). Scenes succeed each other for no apparent reason except to suggest a superficial contrast...
...Price Administration?and price control czar of the entire country, with a staff that swiftly swelled from ten people to 16,000. It was a thankless, nearly impossible job, complicated by the guidelines laid down in his own treatise, which proved in practice to be "inapplicable in every detail." He quickly dumped it. In 1943, having irritated just about everyone by his zealous performance, he was dumped himself. A year on FORTUNE followed?he credits Henry Luce with teaching him to write?and then it was back to the Gov ernment, first to gauge the effectiveness of U.S. strategic bombing...
...that they resented subsequent speakers who dealt with ordinary concerns. He notes that a similar reaction occurred after President Kennedy's assassination. To accomplish what Freud called "the work of mourning"-the process of coming to terms with loss-Americans remained glued to their TV sets, absorbing every detail of the killing and the funeral. When the stations returned to routine programming, many viewers felt annoyed and let down. The work of mourning had "opened them up," and had given them a sense of belonging to a continuous human race...
...degree from the French-run University of Hanoi and finally emerged as a history teacher at Hanoi's Thang Long School. His idol, even then, was Napoleon. "He could step to the blackboard," one of his former students recalls, "and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon." But his admiration for the French stopped there. A fervent Vietnamese patriot, he had joined an anti-French clandestine organization when he was only 14, later became a member of Viet Nam's fledgling Communist Party...