Word: writers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More words have been published about Isaac Babel than by him. It is a situation that would have greatly amused the Russian-Jewish short-short-story writer whose work exemplifies Pushkin's golden rule that "precision and brevity are the prime qualities of prose." As a writer who could be economical without sacrificing impact, Babel compares favorably with Chekhov. Even Hemingway, one of the most ruthless wringers of prose, conceded that Babel could "clot the curds" better than he could...
...foundation was set up in 1964 to help Amerasian children in Korea, where youngsters fathered by U.S. soldiers are spat upon for their half-caste status. In April of this year, Philadelphia's Reporter-Writer Greg Walter listened to tapes a local radio station had made (but had never used) in which four Korean boys described unwilling homosexual contact with Harris. He then began digging. He traveled across the U.S., talking to former and current foundation employees, to board members and benefactors, to the young men on the tapes, to Miss Buck herself. Harris repeatedly refused...
...such luck. Instead, she fetches up as secretary-housekeeper to Mark Coldridge, a leftist writer whose crowded Bloomsbury house is a Dostoevskian rendering of the Victorian family. "Everything as sick and neurotic and hopeless as you can imagine. A dominating mama over all, and a wife in a mental hospital, and a man just sitting waiting for some sucker like me to cope with everything," she muses. The household rocks with emotion-pent-up, misdirected, short-circuited. Martha is nearly driven out by the sound of solitary whimpering behind closed doors...
...hands of a writer with a gram of sentimentality the situation would be ludicrous. But as with all Lessing novels, the immersed reader is too involved to laugh. The reaction is more akin to horror. People are suffering because they are caught in the breakdown of society. Private institutions like marriage and the family lead to isolation or madness; public causes and institutions reflect that madness in alternating currents of paranoia and greed. Old activists like Mark Coldridge have quit fighting. His only political activity is to keep two huge world maps, one charting wars and riots, the other showing...
Take another look at the examples and I think you will find that they destroy many accepted postulates of filmmaking. The writer-reality problem, for example, effectively eliminates narrative point of view, that cherished mainstay of the narrative form. The confused character-actor names go a good way towards breaking down the wilful suspension of disbelief which every audience is supposed to have. The game itself serves to destroy the scared concept of the inviolate frame. At one point, Piccoli looks at the television screen, sees his companion running towards a window, rushes off-screen to save him and immediately...