Word: filmic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rococo grandeur that has grown somehow galling, for it is the disease of a talent bankrupt for substance. Fellini has lost his sense of connection. The camera flits over the poverty-ridden, the deformed, the filth and litter of fascism and war, turning the plagues of Rome into perverse filmic display...
...idiom of a society based on manipulation, commercial go-getting has been universalized as a private ethic, preservation of personal integrity means self-destruction. These are his cool assumption, the truisms of one who has seen-it-all. Sentimentially is a demon to him, so he lavishes heavy filmic methods in an effort to play it tough, and it is wholly at the expense of his material. He has twisted the form of his film into the shape of his gnomic self-consciousness...
THOUGH HITCHCOCK'S abilities to manipulate plot coincidence and filmic shock properties are vaunted, the best moments of the film occur from ironies constructed by screen-writer Anthony Schaffer (missing from Arthur LaBern's original novel) and from Hitchcock's consequent need to define his characters for us. Though it's true that Frenzy isn't really "about" anything (except, as with most suspense films, man against the modern world), all the main characters illustrate the notion that violent streaks and clandestine desires are natural and sometimes even make sense. The Scotland Yard inspector who sneaks his meat and eggs...
...Clockwork Orange makes it seem that Kubrick did get lost in the stars and has become a spaced-out religionist. Aside from his ludicrously simplistic emphasis on free will, the Bronx enfant terrible has lost his purely filmic bearings. The film shows the limits of crudeness. When it takes an actor three minutes to roll off a provocative phrase like "the old in-out in-out", witty language is killed. When there are no developed antagonisms, and the camera supports the actions of a single group, gang warfare is threatless and meaningless. And, perhaps intimidated by the director...
Apart from the matter of color and cold, there are painterly compositions, off-focus shots, bifocal shots and all sorts of imaginative camera stunts. The most ambitious filmic effect does not really come off. Brook tries to combine highly stylized segments, almost like animated Japanese prints, with segments that are strictly naturalistic in a homey medieval vein. In watching these shifts, the viewer can only fail to pay full attention to what Shakespeare is saying. This is the basic problem of film v. theater. The film's priority is always the visual image, to which the word is subordinated...