Word: strickly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seeing. A POV shot that makes us aware of its presence can easily seem ostentatious gimmickry on the part of the director, like the shot in Sundays and Cybele where Hardy Kruger holds up a cocktail glass and we see the room through it as he turns. In Ulysses Strick establishes early such an extreme convention of point-of-view narrative that nothing subsequent seems gimmickry. Stephen Daedalus (Maurice Roeves) walks on the beach as we hear his voice speaking the "Ineluctable modality of the visible" interior monologue. When he shuts his eyes our screen goes black until he opens...
Like Joyce, Strick doesn't follow a conventional, chronological narrative line. We are accustomed to flash-backs, but not to such brief flashes as those Strick introduces in his first scene: at the Martello tower, Buck Mulligan says "The aunt thinks you killed your mother," and Stephen sees, and we see, his mother's deathbed, an image that recurs in the drunken hallucinations of Nighttown. Except for Resnais's films, we are not at all accustomed to flash-forwards, and Strick uses them liberally: as Bloom leaves home in the morning, he imagines Blazes Boylan, his wife Molly's lover...
...Strick's enormous success at translating the "interior monologue" into images defies, for the most part, any specific analysis of his method. He has simply exercised great perceptivity of the mind's movement--its means of wish-fulfillment fantasizing, its rhythms. But one aspect of his method that can be identified is his use of close-ups. Objects inherently grotesque, though subdued by their everyday contexts, often fill his Panavision screen: fishguts on a butcher's block, kidneys plopping into a cat's dish. The viewer perceives that what might have been a "shock image" in Polanski or Hitchcock...
...Poldy. Give us a touch ..." At Dignam's funeral, later, some men are gossiping about Molly ("a good armful she was"), as they file under the towering rows of crosses on the tombs. Joyce's sense of the everpresent union of disparities is well dramatized in Strick's Ulysses...
Critics will never shut up about the beauties of Joyce's fiction, and one could ramble on just as interminably about those beauties that Strick has transplanted intact into his film. But Strick has created beauties more or less on his own, Joycean beauties intensified. The proximity of opposites is dramatized sometimes in his images as they could not be in prose, as when a beautiful girl Bloom ogles on a beach stands and limps off with heartbreaking awkwardness. A row of sandwich men, at another point, file down the street, each wearing one letter of some product's name...