Word: mans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...particularly unfortunate since Bresson is one of the few truly great living directors, and the unavailability of his films here makes us truly poorer indeed. Pickpocket, made in 1959, represents the very essence of Bresson's work: tightly controlled, carefully delineated, and concerned with the inscrutable relationship between man's action...
Pickpocket presents the story of a young would be writer named Michel, who, for motives which are never clear to him, becomes a petty thief. Through repeated series of close shots, Bresson chronicles the man's early fumbling attempts, his education in criminal technique, and finally his successive successful efforts in relieving other men of their valuables. Despite the efforts of a friend and an interested police inspector to deter him and prevent his being imprisoned, Michel purposely persists and in the end is caught by a detective who had set himself up as a foil...
...play he sinks to the belief that absolutely nothing matters anymore. So far gone is Carnovsky's doctor that, after washing and drying his hand in a basin, he proceeds immediately to wash them all over again. At the end Carnovsky shows us the mere shell of a man with not a shred of humanity left inside...
...Four-Gated City is very much a nineteenth century novel. However, its concerns are much more contemporary. To simplify matters immeasurably--and, for those who have read the book, perhaps intolerably--the narrative alternates between the two poles of politics and insanity--the public and private responses of modern man. As literary marriages go, it seems the successful offspring of an alliance between George Orwell and Virginia Woolf...
...somehow, all this doesn't lead to despair. Despair--or what would lead to it--is transmorgrified. It is the old ugly duckling routine: man, we are told, is ugly, the uglier the better, because (and this is where the inexorable logic of the human heart denies the overwhelming evidence of history) man is soon to become the swan. What kind of swan? Well, the speculation forms the basis for a whole body of literature, a literature whose only real unity is a pervasive belief in man's future transfiguration. Tolkein, Hesse, Arthur C. Clark, all the fountainheads of their...