The film is motivated by an idea, but Wenders laminates his idea onto his characters and settings, and freezes his actors, especially Stanton, in his narrow and virtuous design.
The episodes are illustrated by tableau-vivant video images, with actors frozen in dramatic poses but quivering ever so slightly from the effort.
He addressed the audience: "Here I am, supposed to be talking to you… there are you, expecting me to talk…" He got off the stage, past the other actors, "frozen in a kind of tableau".
He films that lofty talk in colorful, shadowy, and high-contrast images; the actors' frozen poses and lilting line readings are set off by copious use of great modern music — including compositions by Sofia Gubaidulina and Igor Stravinsky — that comes off as one of the most strikingly apt scores I've ever heard.
And then, bizarrely, the actor froze, keeping his thumb there and saying nothing for about five seconds.
She said she "froze" after the actor "fumbled with his flies" and then pulled her hand to his lap.
Photograph: Handout/Getty Images Updated at 4.04am GMT 2.53am GMT Winner: best animated feature film Frozen 2.46am GMT Winner: best actor in a mini-series or TV movie Michael Douglas, Behind the Candelabra.
The gallery is offering Georges Barbier's suggestions for ruffled courtesans' gowns, Natalia Goncharova's watercolors of plumed and veiled ballerinas, and Sonia Delaunay's designs for cardboard cutouts that actors stood behind, frozen, in the Dadaist play "The Gas-Operated Heart" ("La Coeur à Gaz").
Visibly startled, the actors froze onstage; the inmates, inured to such disruptions, shifted in their seats.
And there are moments — when the actors freeze to behold the darkening skies — when silence falls like both a shadow and a shudder at the cataclysm to come.
