Word: lights
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Besides a batch of one-act plays, mostly light "vaudevilles," Chekhov wrote a total of nine full-evening, four act plays. Of the first two, penned when he was 18, we know only the titles: The Fatherless, and Laugh It Off If You Can. At 21, he wrote the sprawling but remarkable Platonov, which turned up only long after his death, in the Soviet period. In his late twenties, he turned out Ivanov, a flawed but great and vastly underrated work capable of packing a tremendous wallop in performance; and the tentative, transitional The Wood Demon, which later also provided...
...city councillors by appealing, each to his own, to small, well defined groups of voters who usually live in one specific area of the City. Given their lack of power, city councillors try to satisfy "their people" in small ways--for example by getting them a traffic light--and by emotion-charged appeals with few implications for concrete action...
...first scene establishes the peaceful, orderly life of Jannings in his apartment. The room where he EATS breakfast is deep and flooded with light. When he sits down to eat, however, the camera a few feet above his head seems to lock him into his chair, between the curved table-top before him and the gleaming surface of a globe behind. While cracking an egg he whistles to his canary; hearing no answer, he rises and goes to the cage. His head fills half the frame; the cage, the other half. His landlady comes in, takes the dead bird...
...depth and sets, set up a pleasant and very restricted environment out of which Jannings' character develops. But the same symbols have a deeper meaning which, through their integration into Sternberg's dramatic and visual scheme, establishes the pattern of the entire film. In this system the attraction of light is a crucial motivation of personal behavior, and Jannings' blindness to the globe behind him appears simultaneously with a restriction of depth that expresses the limitations of his moral and perceptual experience. The sudden manifestation of death (which had existed before the film began) in the canary is part...
...cuts to high-angle shots of the rowdy audience, instead of stage-level shots which would show Jannings on the same moral plane, and then as Jannings on the same moral plane, and then as Jannings comes on stage to a terrifying long shot of the stage, rectangle of light, surrounded by the darkened hall and crowd. Despite the weight of this darkness, our attention is riveted to the personal drama on the bright stage. This finally proves the ideal and Romantic basis of Sternberg's drama as against its Expressionist surroundings...