Word: pirandellian
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International finance was dominated last week by a Pirandellian discussion of a statement that everyone solemnly insisted had never been uttered. The alleged non-remark was a request that Japan increase the value of the yen, and it supposedly was not made by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Trezise at an informal meeting of U.S. and Japanese government officials at Lake Kawaguchi near Tokyo...
...film is worth seeing, both for its isolated insights into the life of an aging easy rider, whose crazing shock-treatment morality has outlived its initial impetus, and for the scenes which point to the possibility of a Pirandellian cinema. From his work here (Schiller credits him with organizing the individual scenes) and in David Holzman's Diary (in which he starred and improvised), Kit Carson seems to be heading towards a purified art, reordering basic human inter-actions with society and environment. The attitudes the film's subject expresses and the values it places on surrounding materials would determine...
...sacerdotal days of moral philosophy, political ethics was a self-confident teleology of actor and attitude. Now it is a demonology which defies system, scares off common sense, and in outlining political obligations, gives the citizen a Pirandellian sanction to do whatever it is he thinks he is doing. Perhaps it has always done so. But it took until this century to realize what an indiscriminate string of relativities shores up, say, even the treatises of John Locke. The Republic itself is built on sand...
Furious, Lena picks a fight with Börje, who takes off back to the city in his MG. At film's end, the two have paid a joint visit to a delousing clinic and have effected a kind of Pirandellian reconciliation, applying less to their roles in the movie than to their extracurricular relationship. Intercut with this dreary dramaturgy are endless man-on-the-street interviews conducted by Lena ("Do you think that Swedish society has a class system?" "Do you belong to the labor movement?") and lots of shots of Sjöman making the film...
Their torment is increased by the suggestion of incest, and by the fact that their father killed their mother and committed suicide. Outwardly, this seems like native dramatic country for Tennessee Williams. But the new note is a Pirandellian ambiguity as the characters continually shift between their two poles of reality. Are these actors 'playing a mad brother and sister, or are they a mad brother and sister playing actors? In any event, the psychic locale of the play is a kind of streetcar named despair; the loaded revolver that glints with menace in the closing scene...