Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Family by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, first visible as a New Yorker humorist, then as an observer in Great Plains, an elegiac portrait of the American heartland, turns reflective and inward in this long, moody rummage in time's attic. He began to gather material about his near and distant family after the death of his parents, searching, he says, for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." The journey -- perhaps more correctly his obsession -- began in 1987. Collecting family papers, dating as far back as 1855, he filed them in two boxes...
...best known for two wonderfully instructive non-fiction books that explore the troubled boundaries between civilization and nature, Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams. Their substance is scholarly and reflective (he won the 1986 National Book Award for Dreams), but it is their tone -- highly colored, moody, elegiac -- that speaks unforgettably to de-natured urbanites. And, it could be added, that causes some wildlife biologists to roll their eyes...
...here are Burns and co-writer Geoffrey C. Ward, in the elegiac introduction to the series (as well as to the hefty companion book being issued simultaneously by Knopf): "At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners...
...performers in "Smiles of a Summer Night" are uniformly fine, with Bjornstrand and Dahlbeck leading the elegiac minuet. Dahlbeck's face, no longer displaying the blush of youth, makes a great subject for the camera. While Bjornstrand's features oftern seem a mask concealing his ture emotions, Dahlbeck's face bears witness to all the joys and travails to which life has subjected her. Naima Wifstrand as old-Mrs. Armfeldt steals every scene she in which she appears; her impossibly wise old dragon is as good as anything Edna May Oliver ever did in Hollywood...
...screen is so luminous that at times one is almost blinded by it. Coutard has a feel for the way that summer shirts and the use of a hand-held camera accentuates the kinetic quality of bohemian life. Suddenly, the sunlit beauty of the movie's first section seems elegiac; the world the film portrays is so beautiful precisely because it is about...