[Last month, Anthony Lane, former boy newspaper editor, a literary scholar, and now dean of American film critics, wrote 6,200 words in The New Yorker describing how] every now and then, one finds a fellow-Keesian. ... We are led ad infinitum: to the Golden Gate, and to the empty Plymouth; to what did or did not happen next, and so to the reflection, as in a rearview mirror, of all that had come before. |
Deaths and injuries from the holiday celebrations had exceeded the wildest prophecies, he noticed, |
Explosion after explosion followed. One looked for the buildings to topple over, to see passersby clutch at their hearts and fall over into the street. The effects of the day's celebration were wherever one looked: the street, caught in the light of the burned-out sunset, resembled some thoroughfare in Hell. |
In July 1955, Weldon Kees's car was found abandoned in a parking lot near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There was no trace of Kees -- no body, no suicide note -- and to this day the mystery remains unsolved. |
It breaks the heart to see |
pioneered the promotion of avant-garde film in America. |
The Evening of the Fourth of July. |
This was the first time anybody had gathered together a critical assessment of him. I gathered together his stories. A lot of people saw that, and I think it had a snowballing effect, |
We present for you this evening a movie of death. |