Word: proustians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That intelligence can seldom shine through the film. Director Karel Reisz (Morgan!) has found an appropriately Proustian mode in which to tell the story, pouring time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario -radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes -is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen...
Idiosyncratic as Céline's novels are, they nevertheless offer a mosaic of clinically observed poor and pitiable people. Recent French novels, on the other hand, have abjured any attempt to examine man on a Proustian or Balzac -ian scale in favor of esthetic gimcrackery, narrow psychological study and freakish private experiment. As a literary construction, Castle to Castle is equivocal-a hateful papier-mache funfair castle inhabited by real monsters...
...style: long, slow tracking shots, comic functionaries, vibrant, stinging music. But for the most part, Truffaut is, happily, himself. Even Hitchcock could not stretch so many individual scenes to the limit-and still give them the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. Nor has he the almost Proustian ability to recapture the past in a skein of memories and desires. In its avoidance of a major theme, The Bride Wore Black opts for the minor genre of suspense; but within those bounds it is very nearly a masterpiece...
...first section of the novel, dealing with Weiss's most formative years, is rendered in a mist of Proustian reverie set off by the death of his father. Incidents of incestuous exploration with his sister, her sudden death, his adolescent impotence, his art student's vie-not-so-Bohème, are all presented with a quiet but quivering honesty...
Malcolm Lowry suffered the agonies of a man who combined Proustian ambitions with a writer's block. He conceived of an organic body of work to be called The Voyage That Never Ends, at the heart of which would rest his one masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947). That novel-perhaps the only story of an alcoholic ever to succeed at the level of tragedy rather than self-pity -revealed in Lowry a dark, obsessive genius that kept struggling for light. It never shone fully in his two other novels (Ultramarine, Lunar Caustic), his poems, or in the short stories...