Friday, 20 January 2012

Tess
(1979)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Beautiful, lyrical and bucolic with each shot carefully-composed in a very painterly way. Moreover, well acted at the correct leisurely pace to allow the carefully-plotted story to breathe and the individual scenes to generate sufficient emotion to carry the drama forward.

The story depicts a culture so socially confined that respectability is more important than love and happiness - with tragic consequences as a proud young woman plays-out her masochistic fatalism against the changing seasons.

Like the heroine in an Anthony Trollope novel, you admire the stubbornness that makes the eponymous character so sexually-attractive to men; yet no man can really measure up to her child-of-nature qualities - nor tame her. Only when she takes a hand in her own destiny does she begin to live fully.


Copyright © 2012 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.co.uk) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.