Word: visualizers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Harold Prince directs with pile-driving force and thereby sacrifices the characters' personal emotions to visual and aural dynamics. If, as in Sweeney Todd, he has tossed away the key to the human heart, he is a master strategist of the stage. He deploys his acting troupes with brilliant precision at a crackling tempo. It is Prince, aided by a huge gray screen whose cyclopean eye brims with historic film clips, who hurls the dramatic thunderbolts of the evening. In two scenes of mass turbulence, with banners flying and the crowd in a hypnotic roar...
Luna's images are so hypnotic, erotic and beautifully shot (by Vittorio Storaro) that we enter the movie's unpleasant milieu easily and remain captivated throughout. While the film is full of golden Parma landscapes, the dominant visual fixture is the moon: it is the film's metaphor for characters whose mysterious dark sides only gradually reveal themselves. In Bertolucci's brilliant climax, set at an open-air opera rehearsal, his artis tic conceits all converge. As the camera constantly shifts its point of view, we see that Luna 's events form a different drama...
...scene is different at the seven-story ABC News center on Manhattan's West Side, which, in the hours before World News Tonight hits the air, becomes a busy electronic workshop. In little warrens crowded with equipment, teams of directors and technicians labor to give visual excitement to the taped voices of ABC correspondents, patching quick-shifting background scenes, stunting with double dissolves and freeze shots to fill the exact 47 or 73 seconds allotted a story by the producer. Then comes a final mixing of words and pictures, with a Chiron machine imposing labels or texts in front...
...Wagner's meticulous structure of leitmotifs crumbles to the ground. But from the opening of Rheingold, when Sellars' voice and the rustle of silver paper (standing in for the Rhine) nearly overpower the river's flow in the orchestra's string section, we know this is to be a visual, not a musical Ring...
...production savors the visual opportunities of Das Rheingold, wringing it of every bit of spectacle--including towering potato-sack giants. Die Walkure, the best of the four adaptations, flows well musically; Sellars cuts out nearly the entire second act. Though that act, with a 25-minute monologue from Wotan, is the ideological lynchpin of the whole cycle, it rightly is the first to go in a conception of the Ring as entertainment. Walkure also benefits from the absence of Sellars' sometimes-intrusive narration. The presentation races through Siegfried, barely pausing for Siegfried to slaughter a garbage-bag Fafner, and into...