Word: duet
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...frequent good intentions, are unable to live up to their promises to blacks. "We have made the gesture, but we have not accepted blacks emotionally," Menotti explains. Musically, The Most Important Man is blatantly eclectic. Strains of Richard Strauss float from the pit during one interlude. By the final duet between Toime and his white girl friend Cora (Soprano Joanna Bruno), Menotti is unashamedly into the heart-throbbing lyricism of Puccini. Much less original than his 1950 Broadway success The Consul, or even his recent and endearing children's opera Help! Help! The Globolinks, the new opera hardly represents...
...simply denounces the interpretation of art as well as works of art which necessitate it. Bazin's doctrine of metaphysical suggestion in portraying "content" is a dead end, then, for radical formalism. Form itself must become the subject, the "content," continually renewing itself in order to transform outmoded consciousness. Duet for Cannibals attempts this, by taking up outmoded conventions and destroying them, each in turn. In "Against Interpretation" (1964) Sontag makes a case for interpreting interpretation (at this time in history) as a social force of repression against new forms, as a purging of "dangerous emotions" (like Aristotelian tragedy...
...goes on to criticize those artists who invite interpretation, Bergman, for example, whose "lame messages about the modern spirit" and "callow pseudo-intellectuality" contradict "the beauty and sophistication of his images." Sontag's first experience as a film director, however, indicates a reappraisal of the concrete cultural situation. Duet for Cannibals openly invites the interpretations that are inevitable anyway and uses them as traps, frustrating slaps in the face with each contradiction designed to break us of our interpretive habit (and of our humanist consciousness...
...arouse "dangerous emotions," and then refusing to purge them. In perhaps overemphasizing Sontag's aesthetics I've neglected to mention how extremely disquieting the film is emotionally, with respect to familiar personal relationships. I'm speaking of monogamy-humanist love-which is crumbling these days anyway, whose foundations Duet for Cannibals digs up mercilessly to expose. Anti-humanism seems somehow progressive, but I'm politically distrustful of this kind of manipulation, which is almost an unconscious, emotional dialectic, primarily destructive (even if it may ultimately be liberating). Sontag goes far beyond women's politics to strike at the outmoded basis...
...present state of outmoded emotional and intellectual consciousness (and not in some futuristic state when we may actually be interested in Robbe-Grillet's descriptions of objects), in order to take us in, to wreck that corrupt humanist tranquillity in which we once thought we existed. If Duet for Cannibals were pushing a Marxist line, an ideological "content," by equally subversive means, we could call it insidious propaganda, pure Stalinist instrumentation of policy formulated in isolation from the masses. But it doesn't push any "meaning" whatsoever, and hardly allows the reflection time necessary for didactic assimilation. Mainly...