Word: waked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FINNEGANS WAKE. American Producer-Director-Scenarist Mary Ellen Bute, 60, has made a brave effort to translate James Joyce's monumental work, and does remarkably well within the confines of 94 minutes...
mastersinger's verbalmusic still works its magick in the broadest way immarginable, from the clearheaded images to the twoddle of a fuddled brain. In the beginning was the whirred, whorled prose of James Joyce; now a group of unknowns have transformed Finnegans Wake into a movie. Surprisingly, many of the book's Eire-borne visions work as screedwriter becomes screenwriter and his prose gains the breadth of life. A tavernkeeper, H. C. Earwicker (Martin J. Kelley) sleeps drunkenly dreaming of his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, his daughter and his two sons Shem and Shaun. In the back ground...
...gleanings of meanings. Finnegan, for example, is a Franco-English pun: fin-again-literally, resurrection. In a word, it sums up Joyce's epic of eternal recurrence in which Finnegan-Earwicker goes through mankind's plunge and rise as he "falls" asleep only in the end to "wake" to life. H. C. Earwicker's initials, as he himself explains, also stand for Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere; his dreamscape is like a palimpsest in which myth overlays legend overlaying lore. Anna Livia Plurabelle (Jane Reilly) is also Dublin's river Liffey (life). His sons...
...filming of Finnegans Wake required a Joycean energy from Producer-Director-Scenarist Mary Ellen Bute, 60, an American whose previous movie experience has been confined to short ; subjects. Almost inevitably, her brave effort suffers by comparison with Joseph Strick's recent version of Ulysses (TIME, March 31). Part of the problem is in the size of the task undertaken. For all its mythic dimensions, the huge superstructure of Ulysses is based largely on a single classic theme. But Finnegan cosmically takes on all history-Critic Frank O'Connor shrewdly accused Joyce the agnostic of egoistically revising...
...other actors ornament rather than illuminate the proceedings. Still, its dream sequences are far more audacious than Ulysses' pedestrian efforts, featuring reverse footage, collages and montages that frequently are as challenging and witty as Joyce's prose. The author spent 17 years on his 628-page Wake; a film might have to labor as long to represent it all. Within the confines of its 94 minutes, the movie does remarkably well and remains true to Joyce by coming full cycle. It employs all the author's devices to suggest eternal recurrence; for example, it begins with...