Word: dramas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Born in Colorado and raised in New Mexico. Stauder grew up as the son of a rancher. At high school he participated in the drama and the speech clubs. Stander was editor of the school newspaper and in his junior year, he represented his class on a rinky-dink Student Council. Good marks and extra-curricular activities landed him in Harvard despite the disadvantage of coming from a public high school in the Southwest, and having no family history at the College...
...characters, notably in Letter from an Unknown Woman and Lola Montes. The introduction of La Ronde tells us that we are in a studio and, after showing us the artificiality of the lighting and sets, invites us to accept them for their beauty, for the pleasant romance of the drama and its trappings. The first episode continues this artificiality by omitting foreground objects and shoving the characters up against backdrops, divorcing their plain flat facial lighting from the elaborate play of shadows on the flat sets. When the characters decide to join this trivial game of love, the bright spots...
...affairs. The third is a brilliantly played will-he-or-won't-he-fall skit, full of characters walking to and from each other through luxurious rooms, and using astounding angled shots and hard cuts. The fourth episode involves us in a more deeply felt assignation-and so the drama proceeds. Walbrook's appearances becoming rarer and shorter...
...soften, a certain flattening of emotions increases. In the last episode memory breaks down, events lose their poignancy, and the number of characters prevents deep involvement with any of them. A quality of regret and detachment, of precise character-description without emotional immediacy, leads us out of the drama as it completes its circular plan. Ophuls, like Sirk, believes that art should establish distances...
...city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees...