Screen: Altman's `A Wedding':
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
created for Sergei Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes" in 1929, the opment of the great plotless ballets, and it is precisely these year of the latter's...
...The head of the groom's family, Louis Correlli is the character played in each film by Geraldine Chaplin...
...Michael Fahey...
...S..I...
...John whole scene to get across...
...O.S.B...
...deftly, Altman couldn't work on a stage this size, with a cast of O.F.M...
...He becomes the sort of person you avoid in real life, circle and clip you on the chin, too...
...and imitations across the land, providing many with their first Patricia McBride, then the pert, sweet Columbine, is still a exposure to ballet...
...At the conclusion he Since this is what Altman is doing himself in essence, she has announces, like a Christopher Columbus who has decided the to be taken, I think, as a bit of self-caricature...
...Balanchine freshened it first appeared in 1954, the production has spawned hundreds of considerably when he mounted the production in 1965...
...Write: Rev...
...Courses in Reli- everyone off to the bathroom...
...Michael's College...
...The night's alive...
...Balanchine's ballet musical, fluid and exceptionally difficult choreography...
...or M.A.T...
...MICHAEL'S COLLEGE in a few snippets of conversation at the breakfast table, so Winooski...
...Old Testament...
...It's a very pointed and he tends to interrupt a scene and go on to something else telling gesture, I guess...
...Baryshnikov is less fortunate in the totally abstract Screen "Rubies" portion of...
...Balanchine created "Harlequinade" as a homage to the The couple were seen again at the opening of the annual traditional ballets he himself grew up performing as a child- production of "The Nutcracker" that forms the center five and the ballet is as precisely assembled in its parts as was any weeks of New York City Ballet's fall/winter season...
...dancing as envisioned by Balanchine...
...Six-Neck and three-Neck courses in the comfort of scenic Ver- When Altman's wedding party returns from the ceremony to mont...
...gone a bit dead on him...
...In A Wedding, as in Nashville, this surro- for your chance to escape...
...The first act has all the story and the second bright ornament in it as she is courted by the roguish Harle- all the dancing and Miss Farrell reigned strikingly over the quin...
...In Three Women, he Where it belongs...
...Toward the end, our relationship gate figure is the most obnoxious, irredeemable character in with A Wedding, perhaps with Altman himself, gets to be a the movie, the one whom the satire ridicules most pitilessly...
...genres-and revive them for us...
...Vittorio Gassman), makes a speech to his dead mother-inIn Nashville, she plays the BBC reporter who is running law, something about her "mala casa...
...Both directors are masters of the vignette...
...It is her job to MC events like the viewing of the presents, and to see to it that January everything comes off smoothly...
...degree...
...and the ballet sings along at a very high level...
...for enrichment...
...He invests its story with round-house right to the whole society...
...Patrick Granfield...
...for auditors...
...Among the teachers: Pierre Babin...
...Phone: necessarily be in it: yourself...
...In Balanchine ballets, time waits for no man or woman, especially with the musically vigilant Irving in the pit...
...showed us what those feelings were, how intent he is on humanizing such characters...
...You smile uneasily, and look role as maker of it...
...Stephen Doyle...
...05404...
...Yet this is Balanchine's choreography before the devel- another-can do satire on this epic scale...
...Winooski, Vt...
...They breathe new life into Out, out past the lights them in the very act of poking fun, because these movies are so Meadows are storing this gift like cream, original, so full of energy...
...WORKSHOP.Iune everyone's bodily functions, Altman can establish in a gesture 17-22: Fvangelization for Adolescents and Adults...
...Systematics...
...He utilizing music from Gluck's "Orfeo...
...Just as Welles was able in Citizen Kane to describe the entire course of a marriage ST...
...Alexa Suelzer...
...This makes her job not unlike Altman's, which is to dream up activities and intrigues for everyone to become embroiled in, and to see to it that the festivities get as generally screwed up as possible...
...confide in you...
...They're downis paired with another who pulls up on a motorcycle...
...That's why she's so pathetic...
...latter works that Baryshnikov has joined New York City Ballet Barysnhikov, it must be said in all fairness, is attempting to to master...
...middle of interviews, usually at the moment the subject is COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...For M.A...
...An implication of male homosexuality As by a whimsical magnet, at one point is matched elsewhere by one of female homosexu- Snow slung low on the wires ality...
...Thomas O'Meara...
...about to reveal his innermost thoughts, and rushes off after some celebrity she has spotted...
...If you are sending up the whole (802) b55-2000...
...Moral Theology...
...they're one thing in our lives that doesn't just go through the motions...
...trouble you are going to have with one person who must S.S.F...
...Martins, acknowledging their little visitors from McBride...
...S..l...
...Her habits as an whole thing didn't work out, that he is going back to Italy...
...Vermont Altman can neatly create the personalities of a half dozen June 24-Aug...
...John O'Grady, Edward Braxton...
...But when his aspirations for a character like this fail, the character becomes more odious than 19 January 1979: 19...
...The leading roles were has succeeded best in those works, notably "Harlequinade," ravishingly danced by Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, who which allow for a little more preparation time such as he was have become the paradigm for the style of seamless classic accustomed to in his native Russia...
...Every character and every incident Autos askew, related and unrelated have their counterpart...
...Price per credit $70...
...for the reception at the house, for instance, Altman just sends special students...
...You have to let that round-house punch come full ever...
...Audio-Visual...
...Paul Couture...
...Since it formula ballet of the 19th century...
...He is the real world while showing them all the Christmas delights at happily paired with her again in Jerome Robbins's "Other their consideable command...
...world, you somehow have to admit your own place among the Commonweal: 18 victims...
...Liturgy...
...It's become too easy and automatic for Over the cordwood and along the house him to do this kind of stuff...
...Donal O'Doherty...
...created for Sergei Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes" in 1929, the opment of the great plotless ballets, and it is precisely these year of the latter's death...
...Christology...
...If he couldn't move so swiftly and McKenna...
...All I know is that if he hadn't made it at anytime he pleases, so she compulsively jumps up in the this point, I might have...
...RETREAT: or exchange of pleasantries what another director would need a Aug...
...They take cliche people and events-and movie But it's not like this at all...
...cally based "The Prodigal Son...
...Altman's films have usually been wonderful because Sirens sound...
...Like Rita, Altman gets very Prints itself silently across our thoughts: caught up in the occasion, the ritual of mating, and practically Blizzard . . . Everything is officially wrong turns his film into an ark...
...It is an act of extraordinary courage will fortunately be repeated at other times in other locales and commitment which requires that he re-educate his mature throughout the year...
...Walter Smith...
...The real significance of cere- The thru-way is jammed monies like weddings having drained away long ago, Rita is And on a quiet side street the sort of person who now tries to dedicate herself to going As a man shovels, an artery closes through the motions...
...And interviewer are even rather like his as a writer-director...
...Electrically, cleanly It may even be that this time Altman is a little too like his The news beeps its alarm, anti-self played by Chaplin...
...5-10...
...He's the type who acts as if you should help Altman's solution to the problem is not to act in his film, but him make sense of his life when in fact you can't figure out rather to project onto one of'the roles in it a parody of his own what the hell he's talking about...
...Baryshnikov's feel for characterization and his careful dream world of the "Land of Sweets" with her dashing study of all dramatic nuances make him a brilliant foil for Miss cavalier Mr...
...Spirituality...
...It's rather incoherent around trying to do a documentary on the Nashville scene...
...It drifts to rest, Altman has always had special feelings, special ambitions, Increases itself for poor, benighted creatures like Rita...
...The program "Choreography Balanchine Part 3" make the leap from the 19th century into the 20th in the full was first seen in New York toward the end of November and glare of massive publicity...
...and rambling, and much of it is in Italian...
...After all, what makes someone who would try to corner you at a cocktail party and Citizen Kane great is that Welles played Kane himself...
...Altman is also like And up your trouser leg Rita in that he is trying hard-too hard-to keep it all from And over the air: becoming just an empty ritual...
...3. 1979 characters at a time...
...Dancers," a work he performed previously with Natalia DON MCDONAGH Makarova at American Ballet Theater...
...As people cue up to use the gious Education...
...Dancing for the television camera is altogether another N ALL his recent films, including A Wedding, Robert experience, but again Baryshnikov does well in the dramati- Altman has made the kind of satire that delivers a big...
...NeN Testament...
...facilities, in that little tension between a formal occasion and Ecclesiology...
...But A Wedding might almost make Tangles of bush and twig fingers us wonder whether Altman's own, self-invented forms haven't Grow soft in its handling...
...Be- ALTMAN'S 'A WEDDING cause of his extreme quickness, he manages to dance within A DEARTH IN THE FAMILY the time of the ballet but still lacks the anticipatory readiness that characterizes the Balanchine dancer...
...Also included on the program was a dancer's body to the velocity and intricacy of Balanchine's specially edited version of "Chaconne...
...It little like this...
...sixty and over two dozen important characters...
...Only a director conviction and energy, allowing us to see him as the great artist capable of great economy as a story-teller-Orson Welles is he is...
...James DiGiacomo...
...Even the event of the wedding itself is neatly balanced by the death of Cold in the walls the family matriarch (Lillian Gish) just as the wedding party And up the stairs arrives back at the house for the reception...
...In A Wedding Chaplin plays Richard A. Hawley the "wedding co-ordinator," Rita Billingsley, who is in charge of all the arrangements for the reception...
...James Dunning and others...
...Pastoral Counseling...
...Susan The more people your satire includes, however, the more Muto...
...Just as off he goes with his long-lost brother...
...One latecomer who arrives at the reception on horseback And pop...
...O.M.L...
...And he's down, too...
...Jewels," but he manages a credible though disconcertingly Russian interpretation of a ballet that sparkles with the playful urban glamour and wit of Broadway or Hollywood musicals rather than rustic naughtiness...
Vol. 106 • January 1979 • No. 1
