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Not real people, just characters, defamiliarized, playacting through the stage dressing of their unconvincing, plywood lives. In one small spotlight, one character is deciding not to call the other character, and a second spotlight picks out a telephone not ringing, and the second character, who could call the first, but doesn't. Between them, the few metres of darkened stage represent the cold, separating sea, or their emotional estrangement, or the shadowy uknowability of the inner self, or something. They don't elicit sympathy, these characters, only perhaps an intellectual empathy, critical and objective. They are devices by which we might learn some abstract lesson about the human condition. They cry, or don't, soliloquise about their fears, their guilts and their woundings, or are silent; they damage each other, themselves, and seem incapable of learning from pain. But they are not real people, only symbols, only the roles they occupy: Father, Daughter. It might be heartbreaking, if it wasn't all so far away.
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Jan 24, 2017
Jan 24, 2017 at 3:49 PM UTC
Verfremdungseffekt
Not real people, just characters, defamiliarized, playacting through the stage dressing of their unconvincing, plywood lives. In one small spotlight, one character is deciding not to call the other character, and a second spotlight picks out a telephone not ringing, and the second character, who could call the first, but doesn't. Between them, the few metres of darkened stage represent the cold, separating sea, or their emotional estrangement, or the shadowy uknowability of the inner self, or something. They don't elicit sympathy, these characters, only perhaps an intellectual empathy, critical and objective. They are devices by which we might learn some abstract lesson about the human condition. They cry, or don't, soliloquise about their fears, their guilts and their woundings, or are silent; they damage each other, themselves, and seem incapable of learning from pain. But they are not real people, only symbols, only the roles they occupy: Father, Daughter. It might be heartbreaking, if it wasn't all so far away.
nico-reznick
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Jan 24, 2017
Jan 24, 2017 at 3:49 PM UTC
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