Word: moralizers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they see. Consequently the film's meaning depends on the audience's reaction to these events and their condemnation of the characters for not reacting...
...EARLY scene between the principle characters, a married couple, establishes their social and moral passivity. As the woman tells her husband about a sex orgy (also involving money and cars) in which she recently took part, the camera tracks very slowly from one to the other. They sit, scarcely moving, in silhouette--two-dimensional figures whose only reaction to the story (husband's) is to say, "get me excited...
...king in the first of the four-play series of which Henry V is properly the shining culmination. Richard II and the two Henry IV plays are markedly greater and more complex works, but Henry V--when allowed to do so--compensates through its ringing patriotism and its moral, legal, and divine certainty. The play is really nothing short of dramatized hagiography, and one should accept the fact or leave it alone...
...true that an intense, emotional atmosphere can push people strongly in the direction of what a radical-romantic believes to be the right decisions. This raise a fierce moral problem: there is a question of individual conscience, the right to remain constricted, one might say. I hear my heroes laughing at my rhetoric, so I will switch to a tactical argument: stable liberation, whatever it might mean, must be reaction to internal needs, not to external circumstances. It is mere intellectual arrogance to point our to a Harvard student that the life is being squeezed...
...game. But today, most men are not so sure as they once were of just what constitutes "appeasement"-or whether a policy of "get tough" is a winner's game either. Still, if the tactical lessons of Munich seem less and less simple to apply, its moral implications are not. The tragic events of history, so often in retrospect accepted as inevitable, were shaped by human will and wisdom-or the lack of them...