Word: surrealness
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...brutalized by peasants in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. But Kosinski's martyred child survives with nothing but rage and revenge; Tzili is strangely passive, accepting the insults and the blows as her destiny, if not her due. Kosinski's novel is a series of surreal images; Appelfeld's is a shadow play whose characters move mutely behind a scrim of inexpressible sadness...
...Beckett, no carrots, almost no gloom, but surreal Acts Without Words nonetheless. Scene: a bare Broadway stage. Standing, center, a man a week shy of 60 but supple as a teenager, lean in tights, innocent in whiteface...
...their dates blouses, because it is fashionable. They are in large part the affiliant of the Hasty Pudding past and present. One day they will be Lee or perhaps John DeLoreans but tonight, by showtime, many are besotted. All are happy. Staggering penguins in Cambridge, it is a surreal scene...
Inside the Hasty Pudding, though, it's business as usual, which is to say surreal. Patrons crowd up against the window and wave good-bye to their incarcerated comrade. A couple happily necks in the window, breaking occasionally to beckon farewell, too. A woman taking in the scene shrugs without surprise. "It's the Hasty Pudding, is know.." she says. "I guess we're competing with the Loeb...
MEANWHILE, the movie drifts toward abstraction. The director leads Mauro through surreal landscapes to emphasize the psychological confusion--buildings, yards, and even acquaintances are presented in a manner so stylized that mere vestiges of reality remain. It drifts further: Battalions of ghost-like children in night-gowns prance beneath the ancestral portraits of the venerable Ponticelli apartment. A frosty window frames a child, wild-eyed, endlessly hammering discords out of a tinny piano...