Word: documentarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long passages in Hotel Terminus (the title refers to the hostelry where Barbie had his headquarters) in which the picture's failure to select and shape its materials seriously vitiates its power to grip and instruct our consciences. Worse, there are deeply disquieting moments when Ophuls abandons the documentarian's traditionally modest on-screen role as a reporter in search of a story and presents himself instead as an egotist in search of a platform...
...rather a television and movie documentarian ("The Selling of the Pentagon" and "Hearts and Minds"), and his technique in Hometown draws on this video background. The book consists of several contiguous but not exactly connected vignettes: a high school basketball game, a murder and subsequent trial, a bitter strike, a hot rumor. These usually fascinating little dramas, it seems, are metaphors for life in Hamilton, which is, in turn, a metaphor for life in these United States Sort of a little far removed...