Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with the article in the current book, in which he presents several years' reflection with no condescension toward the reader. When the film was first released, many baffled reviewers gave up, terming Persona a work of poetic images with no substance. The first intelligent analysis was Susan Sontag's essay reprinted in Styles of Radical Will...
...Simon, in his longer essay, goes beyond Sontag. He is much clearer than she, to begin with, in his framework of a meditation on the numbers one and two. He explores the film as a perfectly realized experiment, the Ulysses of the cinema, and, putting scholarship before pleasure, even admits that there are influences from Godard. In the Persona essay, even more than in the other three, Simon's presentation is helped along by his editors' useful choice of stills, many in sequences, which clarify important scenes and give a feeling for the marvelous texture of Sven Nykvist's cinematography...
Simon did not choose the structure of his book, Since it is the second volume in a series, he inherited the organization set up for the first volume--an interview, a short essay, detailed analysis of four films. Had Simon written according to his own desires, he might have written a survey work. That would have been too bad. Several fine general studies of Bergman exist now, and Simon's disagreements with Wood and Cowie and others are not so major as to warrant another. So Simon has written essays on just four films. They are the best, most thorough...
Orwell's autobiographical essays are better written and more interesting than any biography. He was one of the finest prose writers in this century. Abrahams and Stansky may claim that in an essay like "Such, Such Were the Joys" or a book such as Down and Out in Paris and London Orwell picks and chooses his incidents to make points, distoring his own life to develop a theme. But it does not take an extraordinarily keen intelligence to recognize that any writer does pick and choose events, even biographers such as Abrahams and Stansky...
...would take a failure to astonish anyone, and Simon seems incapable of one. All of which drove Simon into a deep depression last year, a gloom from which he is only beginning to emerge. He is, in brief, a character in a Neil Simon play. In preparing an Essay on Simon and American humor, Kanfer found that the notes from his interview with the playwright mystically rearranged themselves into dramatic form. 2 a.m. on Third Avenue, Manhattan. NEIL SIMON is walking his shaggy dog and, improbably, swinging a tennis racket. An AMORPHOUS MASS suddenly takes the shape of an ageless...