Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...specific characters. Not only on a script level, but more vitally in Renoir's formal style, so the actions of each man make the Revolution: breathtaking camera tracks sum up their actions into a single forward motion, and the characters are thereby swept into the world of the film, the historical movement that was the French Revolution...
This extraordinary incorporation of individual into collective motion propels the film forward. We are inevitably carried from the Revolution's beginnings in the Midi to the storming of Versailles, a span of several years and several hundred miles. That Renoir can make a film of this scope which scarcely slackens its pace, while sticking closely to the passions and actions of single men, proves (if proof were necessary) his genius...
Robert Edelstein is better able than anyone to make this bizarre fantasy into a film. His three previous films (one, Sally's Hounds, shown this fall in the New York City Film Festival's experimental series) were built on the same themes: the frightening distance between people in love, the ideal appearance of loved figures, and above all the mental experience of people in love. Edelstein takes this mental experience and objectifies it in every shot. The Boys and Their Girls, for example, has a sequence in a swimming pool. Cutting up girls' bodies and swimming motions and intercutting...
...this imprisoning world also contains their actions. Edelstein plays down his actors' facial expressions and impetuous gestures, orchestrating every body motion into the rhythm of the film. Changes in his characters' positions directly express the progress of the plot and establish a system of relations between his characters which you see unfold before you eyes...
...visual style of Rappaccini thus synthesizes personal emotions, personal development, plot, and thematic development into a single drama. It's the perfect way to put Hawthorne's romance into film. This type of romance, designed to describe personal development through emotional (above all, love) experience, requires its characters' sentiments to seem real and strong so that their actions will feel sufficiently motivated. Edelstein establishes the objectivity, indeed the rule, of his characters' emotional experience. Their actions are completely determined by their emotions, and since these emotions form the world of his film, the entire drama proceeds with a chilling inevitability...