Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Soldier's Tale, Stravinsky began to take music away from the academicians, the esthetes, and the rapturous-on-demand, and to give it back to the people. The plot, which C.F. Ramuz set down in inspired doggerel, is a folk tale: a soldier sells his fiddle to the devil, and returns home to find that years have passed and everyone has forgotten him. He tricks the devil, cures a princess, and marries her, but the devil warns him not to try to go back to his native village. He tries anyway. The return of music to the people doesn...
...antics which follow, Billy is feted as the boat's resident celebrity, and jailed as an impostor, Reno discovers (although I can't say where) the charms of Sir Evelyn, and true love triumphs. At Leverett House, the slightly lagging pace of the first act pulled the thin plot till it nearly ripped, but it hardly mattered--anything goes...
...where the conventional film engrosses, the Dziga-Vertov film alienates. In place of entertainment, it offers irritation, in place of subtlety, didacticism. Against the passivity of film as diversion, it seeks to provoke an active and critical response. That is the justification for the irrealism of Godard's plot and characterization, for the constant interruptions of the film's movement, for the ceaseless polemic, for the refusal to let the film come to any satisfactory climax...
...last earned the antagonism of bourgeois critics, and proudly he points to the general condemnation of Tout Va Bien. But the politics of self-flagellation can go only so far. If you will use the bourgeois's guns, why not use his critics? And why not a plot convention...
...plot proves a convenient vehicle for an assault on the impressionable eye and idle imagination. Cesar (Yves Montand) is a self-made tycoon, a blustery tough guy with a big heart full of histrionic whimsy, whose larger than life personality subsumes John Wayne and Buster Keaton under a single brow. Romy Schneider, rescued from the anonymity of a screen beauty turned tiresome, plays Cesar's lover Rosalie. She spends a good deal of her time casting long, soft, knowing looks at everyone, liberally displaying her carefully assembled sumptuousness...