Word: imagistic
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...business of the tireless and insinuating Kazan in the 1940s and '50s, when he was something no one before or since has been: simultaneously America's leading theatrical (A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman) and movie (On the Waterfront) director. He was not so much a great imagist as a great listener to, manipulator and appreciator of, the sometimes dissonant music of volatile personalities. What he sought was not so much acting, the way it had been conventionally understood, as it was heartbreaking, sometimes heart-stopping, moments of emotional reality that transcended the dramatic conventions of whatever...
...Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than the music-hall syncopation ("O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag") and the pub vulgarity ("What you get married for if you don't want children") of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem went off like a bomb in a genteel drawing-room, as he intended...
...have rarely seen, in a picture intended for mainstream audiences, the kind of sustained suffering Moore's character endures here. But the director, Ridley Scott, a great imagist, imparts a bleak, often astonishing beauty to the brutal, frantic (and generally drenched) scramble of training exercises. And he does not eroticize the movie's violence, handling the kinky, if unspoken, attraction that develops between O'Neil and Viggo Mortensen's master chief, the man in charge of clubbing the baby SEALs into fighting trim, with sardonic objectivity. We know where Scott's sympathies lie--he did, after all, make those terrific...
Francis Ford Coppola made nudie films; Martin Scorsese's first feature went out on the grind circuit. Meyer (with his giddy editing style), Radley Metzger (who made elegant variations on Euro-smut) and R.L. Frost (a versatile imagist, heavy on the rough stuff) could have played in the majors. But most exploiteurs were amateurs--like Doris Wishman, with her mesmerizingly absurd tales of good women gone bad. The husband-and-wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, who, Weldon says admiringly, "made the most twisted softcore adult movies of them all," later concocted the fake snuff film, Snuff. They specialized...
...Scott's luscious style or a parody of it? Maybe it's the spectacle of a director running for cover. Scott's last hit was Alien, a decade ago; these days his brother Tony directs the blockbusters (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II). So Black Rain catches a gifted imagist between inspirations, biding his time without quite wasting ours...