Word: moralistes
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Given the political nature of the subject, the temptation is toward a hopelessly academic treatment, but Saura, for the most part, avoids high-minded moralist (though there is in particular one strained metaphor of a paralyzed right hand for right-wing ideology). Like Bosch's fifteenth century painting from which Saura takes his title, the film tries to step inside the allegory it sets up and give itself to a wide-eyed fascination with the workings of vice. Saura has learned from Bunuel, whom he openly imitates at times, how to use sensual indulgences to make an intellectual point...
Nothing less savage-or less funny -than Anthony Hecht's couplet commentary on Aesop, the slave as moralist, should introduce this small masterpiece on man's ingenious cruelty to man. Yambo Ouologuem (pronounced Oo-o-lo-guem), born 30 years ago in the French Sudan, now the Republic of Mali, writes from the point of view of victim. But what a victim...
...interpreters. The past century has piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation as a hearthside moralist and improvising Toby-jug showman. Readers are now ready to acknowledge with Wilson that Dickens "leaps the century and speaks to our fears, our violence, our trust in the absurd, more than any other English Victorian writer." It no longer seems so far from the chancery court in Bleak House...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...
Alongside Chomsky's apocalyptic posture-historian as moralist and trac-tarian-Bloodworth has the slouch of a cynic. He is the professional journalist, selecting the amusing or exotic tidbit for the reader's jaded palate. He has seen too much to be shocked by anything or to believe in anything. He survives by his reflex for flippancy. Yet, by a curious paradox, Bloodworth's book eventually seems wiser and even more serious than Chomsky...