Word: fictions
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...brilliant opening scene, appropriately set in a movie theater, sets up the strange dialectic between fact and fiction when Dr. Petiot, unimpressed by the evil of the vampire on screen, mutters his disapproval: "This is ridiculous and clumsy." As the camera freezes the doctor's shadow, the viewer is invited to compare the distorted figure of the bug-eyed vampire to the well-groomed physician. Castles and cauldrons are not the doctor's style. He jumps on to the stage and into the screen to show us how real evil works...
...starred in seven Fanck adventures, climbing mountains barefoot, enduring avalanches, crossing deep crevasses on a rickety ladder, radiating alpine glamour. She directed and starred in two innocent, ravishingly visualized fiction features, The Blue Light (1932) and Tiefland (shot during World War II but not completed until 1954). Early in the Hitler regime she assembled two short films about Nazi functions and officials. But it is her feature documentaries that even today make her noted and notorious. Triumph of the Will (1935), a record of the sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, starred Adolf Hitler. The two-part Olympia...
...prize gone to Pynchon, of course, the same skeptics would not have assumed it was because he is a white male. No one can understand, and probably laugh at, this double standard better than Morrison. She has dealt with it, triumphantly, throughout her life and through her fiction...
...suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, earned an M.A. degree in 1955. Her degree qualified her to teach English, which she did, first in Texas and then back at Howard; but her familiarity with Faulkner's work proved invaluable when she later began to write fiction. Incantatory Faulknerian cadences crop up in all her novels, including her first, The Bluest Eye (1970), as in a description of women "old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring...
...practice -- and this is the great lesson that her fiction has to teach -- Morrison does just the reverse. White authors are seldom praised for "transcending" the whiteness of their characters, and Morrison has demanded, through the undeniable power of her works, to be judged by the same standards. She has insisted upon the particular racial identities of her fictional people -- black women and men under stresses peculiar to them and their station in the U.S. -- because she knows a truth about literature that seems in danger of passing from civilized memory. The best imaginative writing is composed of specifics rather...