Word: director
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tell us, "and his film credits already outnumber his years"). Once they have this great idea, they don't take the time to figure out how to use it. Herman tells us that he's a movie actor, but a movie actor isn't autonomous. He should be a director, attempting not only to control how we see him, but how we see everything. Often we see Herman from his "own" point-of-view, standing outside himself, and often we appear to see other characters from his perspective too--but what about the scenes where he's not around...
...Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
...ordered, finite world of a novel he writes. Stoppard's great innovation is that he sees the story not from its uniquely literary angle, but from its general artistic one: Is not cinema an art form, too? Can't movies also be perfectly ordered? And can't movie director, if he chooses, be as selective about the details he presents to the viewer as a novelist to the reader...
...view Stoppard's conception from the Eisenstein cinematic angle--that film should not aim to recreate reality as it is but as the filmmaker sees it, that the film director should use every cinematic resource to present his vision visually and aurally to to the viewer in such a way that the viewer has no choice but to experience it emotionally. If you accept this line, Despair, with its struggle between life and art, real reality and film reality, could be the quintessential film, almost an apotheosis of cinematic form. Well...
...includes various witty framing devices, quirky angles and long-shots, and inspired fooling around with light sources (especially neat when Herman talks with Felix in a dark hotel room, and swings the hanging lamp so that each of them is lit in turn while the other goes dark). The director cleverly conveys the crack-up of Herman's perfect work of art by placing him beside a shattered mirror, which fragments his image...