Word: idiom
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...musician: he talks as much as he sings. His shows have all the character of an evening on his porch, and most of his songs are interrupted in the middle by spoken anecdotes, speculations, or quandaries. Sometimes he stops playing just to talk out an idea. Guthrie's colloquial idiom and sense of aphoristic wisdom are, perhaps, of the Prairie Home Companion school, but his repertoire is not without the socially conscious ire of a draft-dodger. Guthrie is a drawling American peacenik with teeth...
...seemed to stretch on too long, it was perhaps wise to choose Shostakovich's brief, energetic First Synphony to round out the program. The piece's vocabulary was quite different than the Beethoven which had come before, with angular themes, surreptitious-sounding pizzicati, and highly percussive tutti throughout. This idiom seemed to bring out a better side of the orchestra, which took the difficult rhythms in stride, found the wit in some of Shostakovich's jazz-inflected themes, and produced an impressive tone in the louder passages. Maybe HRO felt some affinity with the piece, which the composer wrote...
...also make the plot and dialogue incidental, while giving such elements as setting and soundtrack full narrative weight. In a recent interview with The Crimson, Jarmusch described his latest Miramax release, "Dead Man," as an "acid Western," a term perhaps appropriate to a film which takes the Western idiom and stretches it to its most surreal limits...
...usual Western movie staples there, crossing the tyrannic mill owner (Robert Mitchum), sleeping with Thell (Mili Avital), the hooker with the heart of gold, and shooting her no-good lover Charlie(Gabriel Byrne) when guntoting Charlie finds the two of them in bed. From there, however, the Western idiom begins to unravel as our hero, with a bullet in his heart, disappears into the wilderness to hide from the posse sent after...
...Dead Man" is a strangely compelling creation--unconventionally paced, vaguely plotted, preoccupied with elements of sound and image which would be background in other films. That all this material can be plumbed from the rather sterile idiom of the Western is a major achievement for Jarmusch, and an intense, sensual experience for the audience. While the William Blake theme is somewhat inconclusively handled, it does create a literary feel to the work which increases its intellectual potency. This is also true of the epigram from Henri Michaux which opens the film and gives it its title: "It is preferable...