Word: filmic
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...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...
...strict filmic terms. Brook and his cameraman, Henning Kristiansen, supply plenty of visual pyrotechnics. One decision was splendid. The dominating color, or noncolor, of the film is white. This creates the proper sensation of wintry old age and bleakness. The film gives off an almost palpable and desolating coldness, as if one were witnessing snow on the craters of the moon. But the defect of that virtue surfaces at the fulcrum of the play, which is the vast raging storm on the heath. The lashing rain seems incongruous in such an icy climate, and no one's thoughts should...
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...