Word: realisms
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...piece until the hero is left on a small island. His use of visual puns and slapstick is very effective. The director does, however, make an unwarranted use of a New Theater style beginning. The play is meant to start off as a slow and sleepy slice of traditional realism and gradually snowball into chaos. Lasky's use of an unconventional beginning undermines this potential effect...
...note: "the invention of photography: for whom? against whom?"-an advance determined by class relations, a perfection of bourgeois cultural oppression, as he explains in Wind From the East ) based on a more "convincing" and "realistic" image with more spatial and dramatic ambiguity. Orson Welles first developed the new realism in Citizen Kane -its elements of symbolism, multi-level causality, mystery, and am biguity (tragedy, too)-and Andre Bazin glorified it in criticism, developing a metaphysical formalism that invests the most innocent pan or track with human Significance. Auteurist critics go even further in this direction in order to justify...
FILM creeps toward realism, and the supernatural gathers dust. Meanwhile, NASA has institutionalized the imagination, leaving us with a choice of moon-landing simulations or reruns of Star Trek. Psychology, politics and religion, all conspire to rationalize the unknowable. Terror is reduced to neuroses, and fantasy becomes photographic gimmickry. We are, it seems, afraid to be afraid...
Fantasy is a disadvantaged genre that is always at the mercy of the audience. And it is quite possible to step back from these films in contempt, dismissing them in the name of realism or scope or any other arbitrary criterion. But I suspect that would say more about us than the films. They promise nothing; they explain nothing; they give us only simple unaffected fantasy. But they succeed as far as we let them and, deserters all, we owe something to the supernatural...
...with us for a long time, especially since The Wild Bunch made it artistically valid; Clavell's new film is an attempt to make a dirty swashbuckler. Clavell fails, but not totally without honor; he fails, in fact, because of his integrity. There was always a kind of folk realism to the Western. Audiences related to the films historically: this was their image of their past, a totally moral one, and the Western was as popular during good times as during bad. The swashbuckler, which was regarded as epic only when stricken with elephantiasis, was always a totally escapist form...