Word: idyl
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Muriel, for all its flaws, is another absorbing exercise in style by Director Alain Resnais, master hand of the new French cinema. Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which wove past and present into a breathless idyl snatched from the ashes of war, was followed by the romantic, enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad. Now, in Muriel, Resnais plunges into the labyrinthine corridors of memory, suggesting much, saying little, rarely glancing behind to see whether his audience is keeping up with him-as not much of it will...
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa got interested in the movies because they seemed to him unnecessarily stupid. Rashomon was his tenth picture, and since Rashomon he has produced a relentless succession of masterpieces. Seven Samurai (1954), considered by many the best action movie ever made, is a military idyl with a social moral: the meek shall inherit the earth-when they learn to fight for their rights. Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa's greatest work, describes the tragedy and transfiguration of a hopelessly ordinary man, a grubby little bookkeeper who does not dare to live until he learns he is going...
...elected, his symbol of authority a white conch shell; Jack, the head boy of the choir, reorganizes his singers as a pack of hunters. With the sun and eyeglasses belonging to the fat and asthmatic Piggy, a signal fire is lit, in the hope of attracting rescue. Then the idyl-and the movie itself-begins to fall apart...
Douglass' Baltimore idyl came to an end. He was sent back to rural Maryland and farmed out to a cracker named Edward Covey, who enjoyed a reputation as a "nigger breaker." Covey very nearly broke Douglass. Called "the Snake" because he was always sneaking up on the slaves at work, Covey ruled by terror. "My natural elasticity was crushed," writes Douglass, "the disposition to read departed, the dark night of slavery closed in upon me." But Covey flogged Douglass once too often. In a fit of rage, Douglass grabbed Covey by the neck and beat him up. Covey never...
...this childhood idyl comes to a tragic end. A last desperate band of Germans, fleeing before the Allied advance, pass by the villa. Pushing the girls aside, the Germans execute their Jewish uncle's family. Returning to find his family dead and his villa in flames, Uncle Wilhelm shoots himself. Innocence has seldom had a more brutal death...