Word: moralizers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this Franju follows the visual styles of the great early Continental directors (Feuillade, Murneu), who built their dramas by organizing action within long-lasting shots. Opposed to this is the analytic style (Griffith, Hitchcock) which probes the moral conduct of the action by cutting together short shots of different distances (e.g., from long shot of a group of people to a close shot of one reacting). The latter style attempts a rational understanding of people's action, dramatic events, by setting up rational positions in the characters, through which one can penetrate and divide up the action. The former gives...
...REMARKING a 1914 secret-avenger thriller, Georges Franju has capitalized on our distance from its prewar society. Judex (1963) is designed to lay bare the moral content of people's actions-- of the hero's as much as the villain's. At the same time Franju's treatment makes us marvel at the beauty of those actions, the beauty of everything that happens in this world of the past...
...rich and beautiful. The slowness of its pacing, odd for a thriller, allows a great complexity of events within each shot. Instead of making points, imposing judgments by cutting between one action and another, Franju juxtaposes them within the same space, allows them to coexist without making a moral judgement. Refusing to simplify, he implies wilder and wilder combinations of good and evil in single figures and single scenes. The world of 1914 is complex, but also very ordered, within his frames. One feels that one is seeing everything, that this world is morally complete...
...least of the novelist's functions is to serve as a moral bookkeeper, making all those entries on the liability side of the ledger that a society might otherwise prefer to forget. In his new book, ruefully comic Novelist Jerome Charyn (Once Upon a Droshky) records the shape and the existence of a small, dreadful chapter in our recent national history...
Author Charyn knows how to make a pratfall out of a pitfall, how to convert sordid realism into a sort of surrealism. The residual moral is as harrowing as the punch line of a good black-humor joke is meant to be-what cruelly absurd ends men are capable of reaching simply by being cool and reasonable...