Word: visualizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whim of Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, former Wunderkind of European opera. Ponnelle attired his Electra in a red fright wig and managed the considerable feat of making Soprano Carol Neblett look less than gorgeous. Electra may be a mixed-up lady; she does not have to be a visual horror. As Idamante, Mezzo Maria Ewing sang with enough splendor to suggest that the gods had blessed her early and often. Unhappily, she had been garbed too boyishly for the youth capable of slaying a sea monster and making women swoon...
...couple of weeks ago in the Times Sunday Magazine that he was surprised sound lasted back in 1929; after all, directors had made film into a great silent art form. Well, Vidor was wrong, of course, but Fritz Lang's 1923 murder story M. stands in tribute to the visual sweep and eloquence of silent film. Lang and Lubitsch made the German film industry in the 1920's the most technically brilliant and intellectually stimulating of any in the world; Lang's later Hollywood efforts were mostly cliched and dull. The movie stars the young Peter Lorre, not the simpering...
...wrestling with this decade's disillusionment. Ten years ago, with films like Weekend and Pierrot Le Fou. Godard became renowned and revered as the most blatantly political, and radical, of the French "new wave directors." His movies shocked and stirred with bitter anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois visual polemics. But just as Godard was then trying to translate radical ideology onto the screen, with Numero Deux he seems to have set out to create a visual reflection of his recent frustration. The result thus deliberately lack focus. Yet in its confusion this movie is more human, more personal and more...
Unfortunately, Anthony Page's film adaptation of the novel fails to evoke a similar sympathy. His direction lacks the subtlety and intelligence needed to render the difficult subject of insanity on film. Apparently because he feared the visual shock of insanity's bizarreness combined with an overdose of empathy could disturb the audience too deeply, Page takes a superficial, rather sentimental approach to the innter anguish of schizophrenia. The appeal of Green's story is lost in the process, along with any deeper meaning the book might hold...
...described a world complete with a separate language and gods who alternately seduce and torment Debby; but such a world could only be shown on film by a master like Ingmar Bergman, who can create powerful, metaphorical dream-images that evoke our own hidden anxieties through the use of visual symbols. Page's portrayal of Debby's private gods as primitive tribesmen--who induce her to mutilate herself because she poisons other people--implies that she is possessed by these gods, rather than the expressions of selfhatred that Green shows them to be. The jolting images of insanity, in which...