Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...correct, as often claimed, that Chekhov became interested in the theatre only in his last years. In his youth, in fact, he enjoyed quite a reputation as an actor in both professional and non-professional undertakings, which gave him a good deal of practical knowledge of the stage...
...specific players--an idea that finds few advocates today, although it is precisely what Shakespeare had done. None of Chekhov's plays was fully understood and appreciated at its first performance, and he was repeatedly plagued with self-doubts. On occasion he vowed never to bother with the stage again. And he got into heated interpretational conflicts with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the two heads of the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre, whose influence still plagues Chekhov's works...
Chekhov once wrote of playwriting "in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are--not on stilts.... Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life." This is a prescription for utter naturalism; and, if followed exactly, it would yield only tedium...
...bird's cremation). The theme of a box-like object or set whose dark exterior contains a bright space inside returns later in exteriors of the cafe which seem Expressionist: the hero wanders through the shadow-filled darkness barred from light, warmth, security. But the stove, like the stage at the end, gives the light a different meaning. Light is the core of the Romantic being, whether sexual (Dietrich, whose skin and hair shine) or metaphysical (the fire in the stove). Janning's pursuit of light, though it leads him into humiliation and death greatens his soul. Sternberg's emphasis...
...purely visual as he goes through hell; the scope of his experience grows and grows, his vision becomes stronger and clearer as his life changes. Finally he is forced to play a clown in his home town while Dietrich backstage messes with a young actor. The ringmaster steps on stage, but Jannings refuses to come from behind the gauze curtain which partly obscures him. Sternberg cuts to high-angle shots of the rowdy audience, instead of stage-level shots which would show Jannings on the same moral plane, and then as Jannings on the same moral plane, and then...