Word: human
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...closest filming of the ceiling ever permitted. Careful tuning of the TV set is obviously required, but The Secret of Michelangelo: Every Man's Dream (ABC-TV, Dec. 5, 9:3010:30 p.m. E.S.T.) is still a rare instance of television illuminating art. The closeups of the human and heavenly throng, many of them unfamiliar except to scholars, are a powerful sight in themselves. But their impact is strengthened by the evocative narration, spoken by Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell, and by the imaginative sequence of the pictures. Sometimes the figures almost seem to move, and the putti...
...Human and Angelic. "So up we go. The tower trembles alarmingly as we ascend, and the faces of the tower crew below us look dime-sized. Now the ceiling seems to tent us in, and there is a vast rush of images, a crystalline turbulence. The clarity of colors is the first surprise. From the floor, the figures overhead look like painted sculpture. Up here you find transparency, veils of atmosphere, light-filled shadows. Perhaps Michelangelo felt that opaque colors would be out of place in a world of legend, myth and mystery...
...Throughout the vast expanse of the ceiling, Michelangelo presents mutually exclusive themes or moments or levels of meaning as simultaneous images. He deliberately interweaves human, titanic, planetary and angelic, and even divine motifs. When you lie atop the tower day after day, his figures seem to be moving and communicating in a thousand ways. At times, the mere glance of a painted eye, an unexpected highlight, or the crook of a finger clues you in to some new turning of the artist's labyrinthine mind. The bonds between his figures are abstract, of course, but no less real...
Equipped with some human motivation, a bit of believable dialogue and a more discriminating eye for the bogus, his film might have been a macabre little study of a pretty young nymphomaniac and her rich old sadist of a spouse. As it is, Birds in Peru has most of the defects of a very bad home movie; it is unintentionally funny where it is not flat...
While the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac, the individual scenes are often hilarious and demonstrate Donleavy's adeptness at using his lyrical Joycean prose to explore human emotions. A scene of touching pathos, for example, is broken up when Balthazar is discovered naked and feverishly ill in Breda's bed by her employer's wife. The female fight that follows is unmatched in literature for its comic ferocity. Hair curlers are grabbed, bellies butted, Balthazar's breakfast food spilled, bottles of urine knocked over, dresses ripped-all while Balthazar lies abed...