Word: voyeur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wondering why she did it, and where we missed something. Less self-explanatory still is David Carradine's portrayal of the photographer-suitor, Bellocq. When he first intrudes on them the house madame calls him an "invert"--he begins to just hang around, looking less like a sinister voyeur than a dazed peanut vendor at a ballpark. The scene where he finally admits his love for Violet lacks both preparation and emotion: I'm all yours, Violet," he says--but Carradine doesn't seem to be all there. Occasionally he is testy and impetuous, presumably because all artists should...
...subbasements of the id. However, the effects are too explicit to be truly erotic. In sequences of simulated copulation, such as "The Dream Barre" and a pot-induced orgy called "Joint Endeavor," a playgoer may have the distasteful and disconcerting sensation that he has been cast as a practicing voyeur. This, indeed, is the underlying trouble with much of Dancin'. It is as if a parade of fertility rites were un der way, always titillating on the surface but devoid of any celebration of life. A guarded cynicism pervades Fosse's work, as if to immunize everyone against...
...bathers--gave him leeway to play fast and loose with neo-classical conservatism. He tested the capacity of elegant design to withstand challenging poses. With the dancers, Degas takes on very difficult ballet postures and flirts wtih disequilibrium. With the bathers--and some of the horses--he plays the voyeur, catching his subjects in ungainly and at times vulgar contortions. Yet throughout his eye for "arabesque" (a term borrowed from dance, meaning "overall pattern of line") prevails, and his statuettes withstand his often perverse challenges. It is as if Degas wanted to tease his audience by effecting the spontaneously...
Neruda prefers to stick to the philosophical rather than the mundane and perhaps it is the voyeur in us that is left feeling unfulfilled. We learn about Neruda, the poet-philosopher, but little about Neruda, the fallible man, demystified and much like us. The impression left from the Memoirs is of a man almost too selfless, too moral, too forgiving. His only flaw seems to be a culturally-determined sexism...
...introduction of this Pascalian connection raises an intriguing question--is McCarthy's inspiration traceable to an Ostrovsky connection, too? In 1971 Erika Ostrovsky published Voyeur, Voyant, a romanticized but keenly intelligent biography of Celine, cast in elegantly spacy prose. In it, she lets fall the word divertissement with McCarthy's meaning but without Pascal's support. Elsewhere she undermines Celine's pretence that he resented public interviews and solicitation of his advice by jibing, "Somehow, he protested too much." When relating how Celine insisted that he did not believe in love, the Frenchman's latest biographer sounds a rather pompous...