Activity

“Across the fields many a path is winding,” he sang, and we all felt entranced and thrilled. I must confess I have seldom heard such a voice: it was a little broken and had a sort of cracked ring; at first, indeed, there seemed to be an unhealthy note in it; but there was in it also genuine deep pa…

For example, there’s a sequence in the film Bicycle Thieves that starts about fifty-four minutes in. The events in that sequence are: A father and his son are searching for the father’s stolen bicycle. A lead they’re following slips away, because of a mistake the father makes. When the son asks him…

The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way.

We will henceforth refer to this as “the Cornfeld Principle.”

In …

Chekhov is averse to making pure saints or pure sinners. We saw this with Hanov (rich, handsome bumbler and drunk) and we see it now with Marya (struggling noble schoolteacher who has constructed her own cage through joyless complicity in her situation). This complicates things; our first-order inc…

A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

Marya’s dilemma is still in effect. She’s still lonely and bored. By removing the first-order solution (Hanov), Chekhov has made his story more ambitious. In its…