Word: sepia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they smashed the whole instrument. But the rewards of pioneering photographic work could be magic indeed. Masters of Early Travel Photography (Vendome; 352 pages; $50) is a handsome, sepia-tinted sampler of 177 early photographs-small curios and enormous vistas, tattooed men and mountain ranges-taken by adventurers in Egypt, Japan, Brazil, India, China and that most exotic arena of all, the vanished American West...
...Anatol Josepho of New York last week, a few moments after pocketing a slip of paper upon which were written the idyllic figures $1,000,000. His invention was a "quarter-in-the-slot" machine. Out of it comes, not gum or hairpins, but a strip of eight sepia photographs, each 2 in. x 1½ in., showing the quarter-dropper in whatever eight poses it has pleased him to strike. The pictures are photographed direct upon sensitized paper. To make a strip of eight pictures requires only eight minutes. A syndicate of men successful enough to know a real...
Today, 20 congressional hearings and $83 million later, the station is closed, too dangerous to use. Parts of the roof have caved in. Leaking water has spread sepia stains on the gilt-edged ceilings and knocked loose hefty chunks of plaster. Pipes have burst, leaving muddy lakes. Toadstools grow from urinals and floors. Beneath 36 granite Roman soldiers encircling the balcony of the musty waiting room, rats and roaches prowl...
Stevie awkwardly mingles cinematic language (flashbacks in sepia) and theatrical style (asides spoken into the camera). The core of the film - the domestic life of Stevie and her "lion aunt" - is insistently naturalistic, yet Stevie is as cluttered with brickbat metaphors as the cottage parlor is with bric-a-brac. But if the camera eye too often blinks, the film's mind and heart are humanly acute. The dialogue deftly threads domestic chitchat and Big Themes: the detachment of the artist, the terrifying uncontrollability of life. And at the film's center is the simple trust binding...
ULTIMATELY, THEN this film is a high-tech attemp at naivete. The more the director tries to cover up Reeves with swelling music and "magical" sepia sequences, the more frustrated the audience becomes. Enough manipulation. Enough manufactured emotion. Enough preying on private fantasy. Enough of the self-congratulatory "love" of beer commercials and snide movies. It is best to leave this sort of film to future generations who, after they master time travel, may also devise the necessary base for a high-tech future;--the cryogenic suspension of disbelief, wonder, and surprise...