Word: eisensteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...direction, and all you do is bring on the empty horses. Restrain the impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that the most haunting figures in film history--Griffith, Eisenstein and Abel Gance among them--have both lost themselves and found themselves. It is this terrain Kurosawa confidently bestrides...
Scholarly cinema fans should rewind their Bergman and Eisenstein and grab ahold of some textual analysis of this year's crop of TSFs. BETTER OFF DEAD (Sack Charles) is truly a watershed TSF, a self-referential picture that turns the genre on its head like nothing since David Smith. Students of pretentious but largely irrelevant allusions remember that David Smith made his sculpture by piecing together already recognizable objects and proved that sculpture needed to be no more than the sum of its pre-formed parts. Likewise, Better Off Dead tosses on the screen a collection of objets trouves from...
...point is less authoritative: photographs of anonymous, hermetic white bodies in Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion, a snap of a baboon or a footballer in blurred motion, a wicketkeeper whipping the ball across the stumps, the bloodied face of the nursemaid of the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, her spectacles awry. These and other images begin as clues, holes in the social fabric, and are then worked up, gradually, into emblems. The elliptical lenses of the nursemaid's spectacles, for example, turn into bigger ellipses, without a face behind them; like punctuation marks commanding...
...powerful muse. For Levi, every compound has a distinctive personality. Hydrochloric acid "is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance . . . After having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein's movies." Chemistry's periodic table, which arranges the elements according to their atomic number, is Levi's metaphor for the relationships that compose a human life. The Periodic Table consists of 21 episodes, most of them autobiographical, named after elements from argon to zinc, each with its relative density...
...Maybe I made a mistake in my career years ago," says Prey, 53, reflectively. "I should probably have switched to more dramatic roles earlier." Outstanding as the guileless Papageno in Mozart's The Magic Flute, the rakish Eisenstein in Die Fledermaus and the clever Figaro in both Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Prey has unwillingly become typecast as an operatic nice guy. It is understandable. Who can see him as a villain...