Word: styles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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STAVISKY, Alain Resnais's first feature in five years, is a sort of symbolic biography of the French swindler (nicely played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose exposure almost brought down the Third Republic in 1934. Resnais has had the movie photographed like a posh '30s illustration, a style made fashionable by films as varied as The Conformist and Chinatown. But Resnais undercuts all his images of antique chic (among which may be counted Anny Duperey as Stavisky's wife) with symbols of death: orchids, cemeteries, the funeral pyramid in the Pare Monceau. Resnais and his screenwriter, Jorge...
...development of Something Happened parallels the development of the novel. Beginning with a straightforward realistic style, Heller progresses into an elliptical series of dreams, flashbacks, news bulletins, and small pieces of philosophical graffiti; more contemporary modes. At several junctures the process of fiction becomes self-conscious, as when Slocum says he's afraid of becoming repetitive because everybody will ignore him. The novel itself becomes repetitive when memories come back again and again to Slocum, but always to underline what's most important to him: his missed opportunities in sexual conquest, his fear of the new, and of death...
...your new book, Something Happened, the style is radically different from Catch-22. Do you see any parallel between...
...only parallel there is the fact that each has a very conspicuous style which I felt was appropriate to the content of the book. With the subject matter in Catch-22 I tried very much to make the style part of the content--maybe you found that yourself--the method of telling being as important as what's being told. I think the same is true with Something Happened. What I want to tell in Something Happened is so much different in terms of emotions and viewpoint than Catch-22. The choice of style I think is very much different...
...really don't believe me. With Catch-22 there was a paper strike, there was a copy-editor who misunderstood her instructions and rewrote whole paragraphs and changed the names, and made corrections. She missed the whole style. She'd edited--and very well--William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was very good at that. Well, she took Catch-22 and began making it historically correct; putting in dates where I didn't want dates. So all that happened during the four weeks she was working on it, all that was useless. Not only...