Word: schepisi
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THROUGHOUT the opening of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith director Fred Schepisi continually dissects static tableaus. The camera suddenly cuts from the scene at hand to a minute corner of the picture: In the lapse of conversation suddenly one is looking at a swarm of termites on a windowsill. A domestic portrait gives way to an extreme closeup of a rusty knife cutting through bread--the sound suddenly amplified and grating. Idyllic farm panoramas are interrupted with scenes of chicken roosters being slaughtered, huge shears go through sheep's wool, the camera slowly absents itself from a sermon and creeps...
...CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH Directed and Written by Fred Schepisi...
...singular. His skill at wringing terror out of emptiness and silence, his sense of the fragility and smallness of Europeans cast up in the vastness of the Australian landscape, give the film a distinction that could well bring him an international reputation. Along with Noyce and talented Realist Fred Schepisi (The Devil's Play ground, Jimmy Blacksmith), Weir forms a nucleus of directorial talent that could do for Australia what the New Wave did for France in the '50s and the Prague Film School graduates did for Czechoslovakia in the '60s ? make it at least an aes thetic force...