Word: orients
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Died. Edouard Saab, 47, editor of Beirut's French-language daily newspaper L'Orient-Le Jour; of a sniper's bullet; in war-torn Beirut, while driving to the Moslem side of the battle line after two days of reporting on the Christians. A Maronite Christian born in Syria, Saab drifted into journalism after studying law at Beirut's St. Joseph University. The author of two books on the Middle East, Saab at the time of his death was writing one on Lebanon's present conflict, which he feared could lead to genocide...
Like Just Jaeckin, who directed the first Emmanuelle, Francois Giacobetti chose to set his film in the exotic Orient, where scenes of ethnic oddities serve as the background to this very weak plot. But where Jaeckin tried to use Bangkok to show the decadence of the French diplomatic corps, Giacobetti's Hong Kong is merely an angle through which to provide new combinations of multiracial sex. Only the photography is beautiful, with occasional panoramic views of the harbor filled with sampans relieving the tedium of those human characters...
...director's absurd vision of the Orient culminates in two scenes, one in a Chinese acupuncture shop and another in Bali. In the first, an inscrutable Chinese man in a grey robe places two needles in Emmanuelle's temples, and the audience--along with Emmanuelle's timid male companion--watches her drift off into sexual fantasies. But it's hard to see why she needs anything to set her off, given her behavior in the rest of the film; all the acupuncture does is serve as an excuse for what, predictably, happens next. The scene in Bali, while slightly less...
Thus catchwords stuck to Tobey's images: "ineffability," "infinity," "the void." The language has dated; the paintings have not. They are, in fact, much more rigorous than it was usual to suppose. Tobey is no longer considered an interpreter of the Orient to the Occident; his calligraphy does not even look particularly Eastern, especially since it has no literal meaning. What we now enjoy is the atmospherics: the coalescence of minutely knitted, sharply registered flicks of line rendering a pulsation of light like that of the moon through rain or neon glow over Broadway...
Though he seems thoroughly at ease, Art doesn't quite know his way around the labyrinth of Perkin yet; he keeps looking through offices as he passes them, trying to orient himself with a glimpse of the outside world through the plate glass windows. Momentarily startled from their contemplation or industry, the inhabitants of the cells look up and smile...