Word: flashback
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...book, the young Southern narrator, Stingo (Peter MacNicol)--evidently based on Styron himself learns only gradually that the beautiful woman who lives upstairs in his boardinghouse is haunted by a terrible past. Extended flashbacks, shot on location in Europe with English subtitles, slowly unfold the extent of that terror up to Sophie's final and tragic "choice," so that the viewer's reactions parallel Stingo's own. Longer than the conventional flashback, these sequences demonstrate Pakula's scrupulous care in reproducing Styron's tone. An actual concentration camp in Yugoslavia forms the background, and Meryl Streep as Sophie appears with...
Benton's pacing accentuates this type of suspense. He makes frequent use of flashbacks, as Rice goes over his notes regarding his sessions with the murdered man. Rather than gimmicks to fill in gaps in the plot, however, these scenes are shown clearly as Rice's mental processes. In one scene, for example. Rice is distracted by a sound in an adjacent room. The flashback suddenly breaks off and the camera once again focuses on Rice in the present, wondering what the noise was. A moment later, he dismisses the sound and returns to his memory; the flashback continues precisely...
...there were problems in adapting Styron's tale, to which Pakula deferred in his dogged fidelity to the book. For one thing, the choice Sophie must make takes place years before the main story begins; so the film must switch tracks halfway through for a half-hour flashback to a Nazi death camp. Though the sequence is as strong and beautifully detailed as the rest of Pakula's work, the events it depicts could have been narrated by Sophie in a few minutes, and should have been. (The film runs about 2½ hours.) But Sophie...
Written by Dramatist. Mikhail Shatrov, Thus We Will Win uses Lenin's surreptitious visit to his Kremlin office several months before his death in January 1924 as the starting point for a three-hour flashback through the early years of the Bolshevik regime. Soviet audiences sit rapt as Actor Alexander Kalyagin, a startling Lenin lookalike, voices concern that Joseph Stalin, who succeeded him and later presided over the deaths of millions of suspected opponents, has "concentrated enormous power in his hands." The stage Lenin calls for more openness and democracy in the party. "There are three things I cherish...
...with startling insight. Sure, there are some problems. A few scenes too many end with a shouted "Oh, go away!" or a slamming door. The character of Natalie seems nowhere near as complex as Johnny's so that the story she narrates occasionally seems to escape her comprehension. The flashback monologues that tic the play together are its weakest stretches, whether because of the lines--which tend to spell out undertones that should be shown--or Thomas' occasionally uninspired reading of them. But such flaws are unimportant alongside a plot which, astonishingly, justifies not only the play's occasional lapses...