Word: segmenting
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WHEN HARPER'S MAGAZINE published a segment of Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer,it seemed that here was another normally-incisive writer succumbing to just one more California fetish. While the National Enquirer alone had been interested in investigating Henry Kissinger's trash, everybody--and we're talking here about the well-established publishing world--wanted to know about Patricia Hearst's closet sex life and continual menstrual cycle. (The California papers followed this latter issue quite closely and the ever-staid New York Times devoted several columns in its Sunday magazine to the constant period...
Throw terms like those around and you are bound to lose a large segment of the American audience of the '50s and early '60s. Compound that with the way in which the black press is generally received by white America, and you get a clear picture of why nobody listened to Worthy in 1954 when he predicted America's tragic involvement in the Viet...
...music is one of continuity. Lieberman and Kushnick seemed aware of this: they integrated Kushnick's five songs with Lieberman's virtuoso a capella opening song, "Poly Waly," and Lieberman's own version of the Stevie Winwood tune, "Can't find My Way Home." The Lieberman-Kushnick segment of the program began forcefully, and later drifted to the ethereal with "Holes in the Sky," a 32-bar rendition of a poem by Louis NacNiece. The next four songs formed a cycle beginning with the straightforward harmonic piece, "Velvet Sportcoat," followed by "Ode to the Apocalypse" and its fast-paced thematic...
...Resnais's chief devices is the manipulation of point of view. Throughout the first segment, Gielgud's voice directs the jockeying between characters, writing and rewriting the scenes they act. Of all his subjects, Langham's daughter-in-law Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) is most completely a literary creation; deprived of a will of her own, she compounds her self-image from other people's imaginings. Her husband--"a sanctimonious sod," his father calls him--is a model of self-control, afraid of violence "because it reeks of spontaneity," of himself because his own urges to violence must be so vigorously...
...SHADOW of the earlier part of the film hangs over this segment, clouding our faith in the idyllic surfaces that greet us. Gielgud's torment seems sharply discontinuous with the mildness of this family reunion. And yet a certain continuity is present in seemingly chance words and images, in Bogarde's attack on his father's desire to disembowel people for artistic purposes, in the very preoccupations which mark the dinner conversation. The resonances are different, however, the tone flatter. Where the dialogue was highly abstract and the characters rigidly controlled, there was a sense that Gielgud and Resnais were...