Word: silents
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that has had some beneficial side effects. The President seems to have knocked the Soviets off balance a bit. If the history of the past 25 years tells us anything it is that when the Soviets are a little scared they complain bitterly and constantly in public. Beware a silent bear, as before the Cuban missile crisis or the invasion of Afghanistan...
...reduced a pageant to an anecdote, and sacrificed sweep for nuance. Grateful as one is to have this Ragtime, with its many thrilling performances and its spurts of emotional grandeur, one would now like to see the adaptation Altman might have made. And after that, if you please, the silent version. -By Richard Corliss
...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
DIED. Abel Gance, 92, illustrious French film director who devised such techniques as multiple screens, double-printing and wide-angle lenses to create brilliant silent movies, including the 1927 masterpiece Napoléon; in Paris. A prolific film maker, Gance produced such classics as I Accuse and The Wheel. But his success ended with the advent of talkies. Shuttling between unemployment and obscure commercial movies, he complained: "I prostituted myself not to live but to avoid dying." Five decades later, one understanding producer, Francis Coppola, helped English Film Historian Kevin Brownlow present a reassembled copy of Napoleon, shown last January...
...autobiographical essay for a tenth grade class, makes it pretty far across the historical gulf. The scenario is ticklish and one need not have a turn-of-the-century birth certificate to appreciate it. Another, Wanted--Short or Long Respite by Former Cineaste, a meandering through some silent film memories, just doesn't make the leap, though. And, unfortunately, there are several others which fall in like manner...