Word: ironist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...audience. This is not new. All humor is a detached analysis, an autopsy of the society's dreams and demons. As the sit-down iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The post-funny comics go a step further by taking the ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes and failed jokes; they rob graves of moldering bits of business; they read the requiem for popular...
...American audiences this may sound rather obscure. But Director Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal) is a subtle and often witty ironist. He is also a wise and compassionate artist who never allows a political message to dominate the human story. Though they never meet, the man and the woman become, in effect, antagonists. Each represents the idealism of a particular moment. The crusading journalist must reveal the "secrets" of an evil system; he must resist, as he al ways has, the disaffection implicit in self-awareness and worldliness. Better to bury himself in the bitter anonymity that she succeeds...