Word: guignol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Critic Goldberg may have a point. Africa Addio is a lengthy rape scene in which the predators are the continent's white and black citizens and the victim is Africa itself. Film Makers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi (Mondo Cane) have assembled a grand guignol of atrocity scenes, strung together with a booming narration and a melodramatic score. Among them: the wanton slaughter of herds of hippopotamuses, zebras, elephants and other wildlife; the execution by a black and white firing squad of black Congolese rebels; mound of 54 amputated hands, the ghastly souvenir of Bahutu reprisals against their Watutsi...
...luckless trollop, and with a knife at least as big as the minute hand on Big Ben opens the poor girl from 'ere to 'ere. At such moments Hill hoses the screen with such a preposterous torrent of catchup that gross horror becomes Grand Guignol, and even the squeamish should concede that his sense of humor is simply ripping...
...York (once) in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Despite the efforts of the fire department, his machine destroyed itself. Since then, his bolt-and-nutty contraptions have been more durable. His Dissecting Machine (opposite page) is a gleeful guillotine a gogo, a Grand Guignol comment on man as the victim of his own existence. Says Tinguely: "Life is play, movement, perpetual change. From the moment life is fixed, it is no longer true...
...unnatural conditions of servitude. But Director Nico Papatakis and Scenarist Jean Vauthier twist this black theme into a cinema of absurdity that falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In its liveliest moments, Les Abysses is unwittingly hilarious, an amateur Grand Guignol about a pair of sleazy, sullen chambermaids running amuck in Bedlam. When they are not dancing or screaming, they stab the furniture with hatpins, chip the plaster, bring in termites, pulverize the best china, wallop their mistress, throw fish at her daughter, uncork the wine vat, scrape rubbish off the floor...
...PERSONALITY." He condemned it in Stalin, but he erected one around himself. His clowning, boorishness, shoe-pounding and endless references to buffaloes, wolves, tigers and housecleaners could at first be refreshing, in a weird way. But gradually Khrushchev became, in the words of the French Communists, "too Grand Guignol." Besides, he was stubborn and intractable. There were growing signs that the comrades were getting desperately tired...