Word: surreal
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...story, visually and dramatically. He injects the outre in the form of a headmaster who is three feet tall and a drawing that comes to life, and he slants his scenario so that the children win. Still, he never departs far enough from normal experience to enter the surreal, and this is precisely what makes one feel that a dream has become real, for it is the nature of most dreams to distort waking life only slightly and make it bizarre without making it totally unrecognizable...
...were wooden moons and seas by Max Ernst, a geometric Anthony and Cleopatra by Philadelphia-born Man Ray, a couple of dreamy street scenes by Italy's Giorgio de Chirico. Among the younger artists, none were equal in quality, and some seemed to be more action painters than surreal. Robert Rauschenberg's Bed -sheets, pillow and quilt daubed with paint-and Jasper Johns's Target, with its anatomical sculptures, including a penis, were merely repulsive...
...novel begins. Instead of depicting love and marriage, the U.S. writer customarily projects a spectral landscape dominated by death, pursuit and flight. The U.S. novel does not derive its power from skill, according to Fiedler, or from its vaunted realism (from Poe to Nathanael West, it is often surreal), but from something like Jung's "collective unconscious...
...script calls for dusk at this point, and Ben Edwards provides splendidly perceptible and atmospheric gloom to emphasize the foreboding mood. But the almost surreal quality of this passage, its combination of mystery and sublimity that survives the most dreary Shavian bathos when read with half an ear and half a soul, is turned by its current interpreters into a distracted pandering for tepid chuckles. Mr. Clurman has caused the weird chant to be accompanied by a jolly jig, and Maurice Evans delivers Shotover's curtain line with a phlegmy ingratiation that completely drains it of grandeur...
...surreal ravings still tell a real story -of a young university graduate educated beyond his background through the goodness of the welfare state, frustrated in a nation living in twilight, a second-class citizen in a society where the first-class citizens "spend their time mostly looking forward to the past." He has captured his wife Alison (Mary Ure) from the enemy above. With her and his business partner (excellently played by Gary Raymond), he lives in an attic in a Midlands town so bleak that it seems to smell of soft coal and leftover herring. There, University Man Porter...