Word: nilsson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...general, Nilsson uses his camera with all the pointless facility one might expect from such a veteran of the international festival circuit. If two lovers lie on the ground, he inverts the camera and shoots the treetops. A self-conscious device like this does not reinforce the narrative; it distracts the viewer and makes him think primarily of the cameraman, not the lovers gazing up at the sky. At any rate, it is the worst kind of visual euphemism...
...Italian, French or Spanish, they all amount to the same thing on the screen: vacuity writ large. But the most banal set of all lives in Argentina. Its members are as vapid, unsophisticated and coarse a covey of brightly feathered birds as I have seen in film. Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (director of End of Innocence) records their antics in Summerskin, a cheap and pretentious story in the worst possible taste...
Chronicles of society always run the same risk. To be successful they must contain a wealth of imaginative surface detail; otherwise the fundamental emptiness of high society--its weary monotony and mindless glitter--loom oppressively. Nilsson fails to achieve any sort of dash or verve; he also cheats us by pretending to human insights where there are none...
...morbid romance progresses, there is no way to tell whether Miss Borges falls in love with Alcon or remains simply a cold fish. This is the type of question the story seems to pose, but Nilsson lamely answers it only at the end of the film and never creates more than the machanical semblance of a love affair, or of any clear personal relations...
Wagnerians received their first big jolt at the end of Act I, when Isolde (Soprano Birgit Nilsson) and Tristan (Tenor Wolfgang Windgassen) embraced in full view of King Marke, who usually does not appear -or suspect the illicit love-until the end of Act II. The second act, like all the others, was provided with looming, symbolical sets, dominated by a huge shaft ("Of course, I meant it as a phallic symbol," snapped Wieland. "This is what the entire opera is all about, isn't it?"). The enthusiastic opening night crowd gave the reconstructed Tristan an unprecedented 30 curtain...