Word: witnessing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language...
...plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is meant to save his soul and those of his readers...
What precludes Arachnophobia from such a forgettable fate is Marshall's subtle wit and artful direction of the talented cast...
While Marshall and the film's writers have consciously drawn themes from Hitchcock, they are not above taking liberties with them, and provide Arachnophobia with welcome comic relief. Marshall's wit (he co-wrote Blazing Saddles) is evident in his direction of a series of suspense-ridden false alarms. He keeps the audience off-balance by allowing it at times to come away with a laugh when expecting another gruesome killing. A typical example is the shower scene, an obvious allusion to Psycho, which comes to a far more humourous conclusion than Hitchcock's version...
What redeems the work in the end is the dialogue, in its acuity and trenchant wit. The levels of diction in the production, either through directorial or textual failings, are almost as numerous as the subplots, but it is hard to complain. The moments of lyricism in the play compensate. Chrissy wants to dance ballet and "other dances that tell a story, of which go-go is only a poor fascimile...