Word: insightfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ISRAEL WHY is a three-hour-plus French documentary that explains very little but testifies to Director Claude Lanzmann's feeling of deep kinship with the country. Lanzmann is not, like Marcel Ophuls, a film essayist of strong and disturbing insight, and he is not an especially acute documentarian either. He has caught some moments of warmth, others of search and irresolution and precipitate fulfillment, but the question posed in the title remains unanswered...
...play offers no new insight and makes no clear point. It pushes nostalgia to the brink of extinction. Queen Mother Mary (Eileen Herlie) is a starchy matriarch with a cast-iron devotion to duty. Edward (George Grizzard) is a kind of superannuated adolescent with vague notions of modernizing monarchy. As for the Duke (Patrick Horgan) and Duchess (Ruth Hunt) of York, they caterwaul incessantly about not having had enough on-the-job training to assume the reigns of empire...
Goldfein's comedy manages the odd trick of being broad and donnish at the same time. He does Hegel with a sauerbraten accent: "Veil, now, vot ve got here? Ve got, for shtarters, ve got Descartes. Him and his Cogito, ergo sum ... Dot's an insight?" Not every one of these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus...
...data, King found no evidence of important crises or disturbances which sparked new insight or quickened personal development. Instead, King found evidence of a slow adaptive process, unmarked by profound changes or powerful experiences--a "continuity model" of development...
...through Nicky's diary: his principal device is the explanatory aphorism drawn from an observation, which, if not handled well, can sound like a annoyingly modern version of Aesop's Fables. Kelman, however, is always in control of this mode of expression; his pithyisms rarely miss with flashes of insight about the way people act and think and structure the world. Nicky, reflecting after Bruce's death, for example, remarks. "We must recognize ourselves as subordinate to the movement of history, not in the sense that history is some moral being but because history is simply a whole...