Word: jeu
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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...
...crumble into the sea/ There would still be you and me," and "Inspiration is what you are to me." But the inspiration is unfortunately bathetic, and the sanguine ending is a bit too Panglossian. "Thank You" does provide a needed contrast to the previous songs, amatory alacrity and citrous jeu d'chair, but its flawed beauty recalls Checkhov's reply to a plea for biographical disclosures: "If you haven't facts, substitute lyricism...
...ghostly, pantherlike, a mother bereaved. For every black American, as Claude McKay's poem suggests, makes peace-or else fails to make peace-with ancestors whose names, whose very tribes, were long since lost to consciousness . Henri Rousseau's pitch-black Snake Charmer reigns at Paris' Jeu de Paume. She makes immense cold phallic serpents writhe into the moonlight, sleepily. One may identify with her, or them, but either way one finds Rousseau's image pasted permanently to the back of one's brainpan. Those serpents keep on slithering through the jungle...