Word: realistically
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...sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence is so forcefully stamped on every event and every line of dialogue. She is moralist, realist and magician, an unsentimental Titania gazing coolly at the "enchanted donkeys"-lovers whom she awakens from Midsummer Night's madness...
Scriptwriters aren't the only guilty parties; visual and dramatic direction usually is worse. There's this aesthetic, if you want to dignify it with that name, going around, American audiences accept it because it has a vague respectability-by-association with Neo-Realist methods. This "aesthetic" says that instead of enlivening a slow script with some action and character development, the director should exploit its opportunities for pointless camera essays. Bullitt is an apt example. All scenes last unbearably long because Peter Yates, its "director," didn't know what to do with a slick script except stretch its banality...
Hollywood's new wonder boys have no guts either. Far from being seriously involved in the material they shoot, they don't even take the trouble to punch a little action and detail into it. In visual direction this means the old Neo-Realist aesthetic, that looking at events in the exterior world has a certain necessary validity, is misapplied in a fiction-film context-so that it becomes sufficient to let the camera run in the barren studio set. This discourages work on the images themselves. The structure of a frame composition used to have some meaning in Hollywood...
...weeks Alexander Dubček has been the object of a secret struggle within the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. The ultraconservative faction, led by Deputy Party Chief Lubomir Strougal, has wanted to put him on trial for treason. But Boss Gustav Husák, the Moscow-supported "realist" who last April replaced Dubček as party leader, has sought to prevent a return to the terror practices that gripped Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and early '60s. Last week, after a meeting of the ruling eleven-man Presidium in Prague, party officials announced that some time after...
Though the art forms are present, art, for the most part, is not. The general failure of the literature is akin to the failure of socialist realist literature. Art and ideology are not incompatible when either the art is crafty enough to slip the dogma in unobtrusively, or the ideology is sufficiently original and interesting to justify being dramatized. But in Aphra. the writing doesn't shine, and most of the ideas just aren...