Word: langham
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...Minneapolis theater named for him and served as its first artistic director, was a man of imposing stature and equally imposing ideals. His very first production, Hamlet, in 1963, gave the theater its credo-to strive for excellence in the classics. His immediate successors, Douglas Campbell and Michael Langham, also British, helped to make the Guthrie a kind of flagship of the U.S. regional theater movement. In recent years that image has been tarnished, but the choice of Liviu Ciulei (pronounced Leave-you Chew-lay) promises to burnish it again. A Rumanian who speaks five languages, Ciulei, 58, was trained...
...idyllic greens and pinks of Providence, where all is forgiven, through a series of stylized, surreal encounters between characters devoid of will and wracked by literary torment--this is where Alain Resnais guides us. In Providence,authorial control--both Resnais's and that of his novelist-narrator Clive Langham (John Gielgud)--is harnessed to the nightmare vision of the unconscious, whose repressed contents spill over with a force that blights efforts at artistic ordering...
...from the bodies they are supposed to serve, recur repeatedly in the film, symbols of creation and destruction, of free action and moral responsibility. The first two-thirds of Providenceis shot through a blue filter, evocative of the dark world of the unconscious, which is also the locale of Langham's latest novel. Here, characters wrestling with their inadequacies starkly confront the twin problems of living and dying. Gielgud is himself dying--in the most undignified way imaginable, his colon having acquired a will of its own--as he composes the novel, his final attempt to resolve his tortured past...
...from amidst the debates about fate and free will, imagination and reality, to taunt and finally elude us. In the beginning of the film there is only the blue-green eeriness of the forest, where a man shoots a wolf-man, and then a tight-lipped Dirk Bogarde, as Langham's son Claude, coldly enunciating from the bowels of a courtroom the words which ironically frame the film: "Surely the facts are not in dispute." Resnais's theme is in part the blurring of perception and reality, in part the question posed in the courtroom sequence--should a man have...
...Resnais's chief devices is the manipulation of point of view. Throughout the first segment, Gielgud's voice directs the jockeying between characters, writing and rewriting the scenes they act. Of all his subjects, Langham's daughter-in-law Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) is most completely a literary creation; deprived of a will of her own, she compounds her self-image from other people's imaginings. Her husband--"a sanctimonious sod," his father calls him--is a model of self-control, afraid of violence "because it reeks of spontaneity," of himself because his own urges to violence must be so vigorously...