Word: surrealness
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...incense of the East. The effects could be silly: " 'Govinda,' said Siddhartha to his friend, 'Govinda, come with me to the banyan tree. We will practice meditation.' " Hesse hung his earlier stories with necromantic swags. In the middle period of Steppenwolf, he contrived a surreal kind of existentialism. In his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi, the English title), composed during precisely the years when Hitler consolidated his power, Hesse invented his own classical serenity, all civilization encoded in an infinite chess game to be played like the Pythagorean music of the spheres...
American Graffiti. George Lucas' best movie. A recollection of the end of an era--glossed over, perhaps, but that's part of the concept, and the film glistens with a dopey, wistful irony. Lucas combines shimmering, colorful, almost surreal sequences of cars drifting down "The Strip"--heads craned out car windows, bare asses pressed against glass, hoots and come-ons and dares--with plain, naturalistic, informally posed medium shots of his characters; or he sets them against neon. Underneath it all--almost without a break--rocks the music of Bill Haley and the Comets, The Platters, Buddy Holly, and everyone...
Buried Child. Sam Shepard's saga of primal fears and lusts is shot through with sunbursts of surreal humor. As the dying patriarch, Richard Hamilton casts the blistered shadow of Lear on a blasted prairie heath...
This may sound doom-laden, but the plays are redeemed by irrepressible freshets of surreal humor. Buried Child, now at off-Broadway's Theater de Lys, concerns itself with a zany Illinois farm family. Dodge (Richard Hamilton), the grandfather, is a prickly relic whose security blanket is the whisky bottle under it. His wife Halie (Jacqueline Brookes) is the voice of the nag incarnate. The eldest son Tilden (Tom Noonan) is laconic, even for a neo-Neanderthal. For him, the barren fields yield armfuls of corn and carrots, which are duly shucked, sliced and nibbled onstage...
...Highway One to the noisy decadence of Saigon, is no less harrowing. Throughout the film, Cimino draws visual parallels be tween the grimy blue-collar town of Clairton and the mess America created in Asia, until finally America and Viet Nam seem to share a single bastard culture. This surreal device reaches brilliant fruition when the film re-creates the fall of Saigon: in the holocaust the city starts to resemble a Western ghost town...