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February 17, 2006

Faust's Men and the Mountains

Mountains have been a literary device since Moses came down Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. In the 20th Century, for a few examples, Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain, and Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms, depict characters hiding from war in the mountains. Moving to the western genre, in 1949, Houghton Mifflin published Shane by Jack Schaefer: Shane seeks strength from the distant mountains during his inner conflict as he wrestles with his gunfighter past and his farmhand present. So it's no surprise that Frederick Faust used mountains in many of his stories.

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February 10, 2006

Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow: A Review

A viewer doesn't have to watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes to know early on that Sky Captain is a labor of love -- specifically, a dream come true for director Kerry Conran and, by force of his enthusiasm avalanche, his brother Kevin (the production designer) and everyone else (all the techno-CGI-animation artists) who worked in post-production.

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February 03, 2006

Frederick Faust’s Use of Landscape: “The One-Way Trail”

In many cases, Frederick Faust uses the landscape as a character—it provides an obstacle for a protagonist to overcome, much as a dragon or a chapel perilous might serve as a test for a hero on a quest. In other cases, the landscape serves an expressionistic role that highlights or reveals something about a character’s qualities or psychological makeup, much in the way the expressionistic film directors of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s used scenery and sets to create an atmosphere of menace and visually portray a character’s psychological state.

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