Word: dramas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that through images he can best link the particular, moment-by-moment physical and moral situations of his characters to the moral and dramatic scheme of the entire film. His particular, momentary conception of character and dramatic situation are unified with his general view of life and conception of drama by the continuous development of the characters' situations we see on the screen. Films actually do what novels only metaphorically do to create a drama: put characters in situations. The fact that film requires mise-enscene explains everything. It also makes Lola Montes possible, for the film is above...
...performed at its world premiere by the venturesome Hamburg State Opera, the three-act music-drama is a lurid vision of hell on earth. Horror builds to a crescendo as sacral scenes of church and cloister are followed by wild orgies of the possessed nuns and a ludicrous exorcising ceremony in which the crazed sisters howl, shriek and twitch like wolverines in heat. Present in nearly every scene is a revulsive chorus of guttersnipes, beggars, epileptics and whores who leap and leer with a demonic joy reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch...
...Missed Drama. For the zealous reader interested in a genuine perspective, Jacob Burckhardt's masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published a century ago, is still unmatched for breadth and depth. Prescott's anecdotal effort does not bear comparison with it. Playing Leonard Lyons to the age, Prescott not only misses the central drama but often seems to substitute bizarre performance for more illuminating characterization. Perhaps it is simply that there are too many characters: in a book that revolves around famous families, there are no fewer than 29 d'Estes, 23 Sforzas, 23 Gonzagas...
What originally attracted Godard to American movies was their dramatic and visual design. They were narrative dramas of personal experience and development in which the characters expressed whatever the film's makers wanted to say. The physical and spiritual effect of events on the characters was the means of describing their physical and social environments. (An example of a different sort of drama is seen in Eisenstein. He composed masses of people in images whose dynamics directly express his intended meaning without the mediation--reactions--of individual figures...
Godard further made the subject of each film work as its method. Thus Pierrot le Fou is a romance (subject) realized in flowing colors, soaring music, and a hero whose journey through this setting is the motive and organizing force of the drama (method). Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they...