Word: floridity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style...
...past camp masters as the '50s Hollywood director Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession) and the '60s Warhol disciple Paul Morrissey (Flesh). But unlike his predecessors, Fassbinder does not recognize the limits of the form. Camp is fine for movies that want to trade exclusively in offbeat humor and florid emotions. In Maria Braun, Fassbinder makes the serious mistake of try ing to convey ideas...
Vocally, Pavarotti in recent years has skillfully negotiated the most treacherous shoals that face a tenor. Early in his career he was a classic tenore lirico, ideally suited to lighter lyric roles like Rodolfo, and florid bel canto roles like Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore. With age, however, a tenor's voice takes on a heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like...
...scenes: briefing scenes, bombing scenes and tearoom scenes. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish among them because every set in the film, indoors and out, is flooded with mist. The sound track is inundated with John Barry's crashing score, next to which Michel Legrand's florid music for Summer of '42 sounds like Hindemith. Yet the plot does somehow manage to emerge. About halfway into Hanover Street, both of the heroine's men end up on the same-secret intelligence mission behind enemy lines in France. Things get tense. Who will live and who will...
...that Italian Director Ermanno Olmi is no fan of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. Like 1900, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a lengthy (three hours), luxuriously photographed film about Italian peasants, but after that all similarities end. 1900 was a didactic epic that attempted to merge the florid drama of opera with the tenets of Marxism; Clogs is pointedly a tranquil, nonpolemical attempt to describe the peasants' daily existence in the objective manner of documentary cinema. Given their respective goals, Olmi's movie is the more successful of the two- yet at what price success? The Tree...