Word: edelstein
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Student Film Studies--"Sally's Hounds" by Robert Edelstein and "Bathroom" by Fred Camper, Carpenter Center Lecture Hall. Admission...
...Robert Edelstein is better able than anyone to make this bizarre fantasy into a film. His three previous films (one, Sally's Hounds, shown this fall in the New York City Film Festival's experimental series) were built on the same themes: the frightening distance between people in love, the ideal appearance of loved figures, and above all the mental experience of people in love. Edelstein takes this mental experience and objectifies it in every shot. The Boys and Their Girls, for example, has a sequence in a swimming pool. Cutting up girls' bodies and swimming motions and intercutting...
...this imprisoning world also contains their actions. Edelstein plays down his actors' facial expressions and impetuous gestures, orchestrating every body motion into the rhythm of the film. Changes in his characters' positions directly express the progress of the plot and establish a system of relations between his characters which you see unfold before you eyes...
...development into a single drama. It's the perfect way to put Hawthorne's romance into film. This type of romance, designed to describe personal development through emotional (above all, love) experience, requires its characters' sentiments to seem real and strong so that their actions will feel sufficiently motivated. Edelstein establishes the objectivity, indeed the rule, of his characters' emotional experience. Their actions are completely determined by their emotions, and since these emotions form the world of his film, the entire drama proceeds with a chilling inevitability. The actors' motions and positions of objects--everything in the film moves...
Loosely plotted and indifferently acted, Sally's Hounds succeeds because of Edlestein's skills at shooting and cutting film with evocative force. Concerned with evoking ideas as well as moods, Edelstein pictures complete characters rather than functional ciphers, and uses rather than imitates screen conventions. The movie offers a succession of extremely beautiful shots, but that beauty is focused into specific and meaningful chains of related imagery. He manages not only to realize his major characters and make their destructive interrelations both plausible and touching, but also to expose through visual analysis a contemporary emotional tendency as real...