Word: jeu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...favorably compared with those of Vladimir Nabokov, Jasper Johns and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even Leonardo da Vinci is hauled in to serve as an artistic ancestor. The aim of this coercive litany is to persuade doubters that Nauman is a home-grown successor to Marcel Duchamp, whose every pun and jeu d'esprit, no matter how limp, must be given the solemn study once reserved for Holy Writ. In short, Nauman has had the full treatment. Mount Culture labors, and out he pops...
...most part, however, Alan Arkin's first job of direction is marked by the conscientiousness and compassion that he has shown throughout his acting career. Arkin has stated that the films which he most admires are Renoir's Grande Illusion and Regle de Jeu; the latter film has obviously instructed him more than any American comedy could in the use of setting to explain character, and the need to root a danse macabre in thematic and dramatic progressions. Like the early Renoir, he is very much an actor's director, using his characters' figures and reactions to make comic points...
While later masterpieces like Le Crime de M. Lange (1936) and La Marscillaise (1938) are more consistent on a directly formal level, they still depend on acting for their impact and, indeed, are still films about social acting. This becomes transparently clear in La Regle du Jeu (1939) and its kindred masterpieces of the fifties. Throughout Renoir's films all characters' actions are social in nature; scarcely a man performs an action by himself, or for himself; every act is a species of public performance. Even when Michel Simon awakens in La Chienne (1931) and goes to shave, a window...
...recent show of works from 1964 to 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York made clear. Rivers' output is a highly intelligent mixture of both. Black Olympia is an example. It is one of Rivers' retakes: a version of Manet's famous painting in the Jeu-de-Paume with a black servant girl offering flowers to a white mistress. But Rivers made two images, one with the black maid and the white girl, the second with the roles switched. The political point about racism and master-servant relationships is concisely made. It stems from a seminar...
...entire literary career. Verisimilitude is heightened by various Nabokovian cartouches, including an appendix containing Henry Bech's "Russian journal" and an introductory letter to Updike from Bech that shrewdly stops short of being a seal of approval: "I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm...