Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Stavisky. More beautiful than Barry Lyndon considerably shorter. Thirties tale of a high-living swindler, with nice Trotsky bits thrown...
Part of the film wants to be a fairy tale, part a travelogue, part a Victorian novel, part an accurate reconstruction of eighteenth-century life. At least Kubrick can't be accused of what many critics are now attacking Costa-Gavras for, being a director condemned--as a bad director might have been in Dante's Inferno--to making the same film over and over again. Barry Lyndon is as unlike anything Kubrick has ever done as it is below the level of anything Kubrick has ever done...
This time, though, this tried-and-true approach doesn't work. You can't--even if you're Kubrick--tell a three-hour tale of adventure and a struggle to regain an inheritance without characterization. And you can't make a picaresque film with next to no action. Very little happens in Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's success in 2001 seems to have convinced him that playing the camera lovingly over a tableaux while playing highbrow music on the soundtrack is a substitute for thought and action. Kubrick's sets are at first startling--the lush green beauty of Irish hills...
...left a blank. The witnesses quickly left Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy heading to Hyannisport and an emergency meeting of the New Frontier brain trust, where a statement explaining the affair was hammered out. On the night of July 25 Kennedy told a vast television audience a well-scripted tale of mental confusion and fear after the accident, heroic rescue attempts, and a half-crazed swim back to Edgartown. Most remained unconvinced he was telling the full story...
Peasant Formula. Russian tales in the oral tradition have a distinctive diction, which is here brilliantly rendered by the translator, Norbert Guterman. This involves such conventions as repetition and introductory and concluding flourishes. The traditional "and they lived happily ever after" may be replaced by the more homely peasant formula, "They celebrated their wedding, and are still alive to this very day and chewing bread." Many stories end with a hint by the storyteller that he is hungry and thirsty after his labors. "There's a tale for you and a crock of butter...