Word: working
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cluttered with Buñuel's standard paraphernalia of stigmata, deformity, mud and fire, The Milky Way offers no unified vision, no system of thought or style. The lack of cohesion is deliberate, claims Buñuel: "Mystery is the essential element of every work of art. If a work of art is clear, then my interest in it ends...
Then, with scarcely a pause, he began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Buñuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin...
...voluntary exile from Salvador Dali and Franco Spain, Buñuel resumed his career in Mexico, where he made his landmark in the Cinema of Cruelty, Los Olvidados, a fierce, searing lament for the Mexican poor. The cinema, he claimed, was "most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep"-and he kept on dreaming onscreen. Soon foreign film makers-and avant-garde American ones-began to imitate his trancelike style...
...Akenfield, plodding, unsentimen-talized detail accumulates, suddenly evoking the devotion of a lifetime's hard work. A shepherd loses himself in telling exactly how he trains a sheep dog ("Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens...
...inhabitants of Akenfield look back to a way of life only just starting to disappear and find it a world well lost. Leonard Thompson, for instance, is 71, a farm laborer from an old family of farm laborers. "Village people in Suffolk in my day," he says, "were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech." The "old ones," he adds, responded to the harshness of their life by taking an almost insane pride in their work. "A straight furrow was all a man was left with." Thompson is typical of his generation. He starved...