Viewers aren't just encouraged to gaze upon white cruelty and black suffering; instead, they too become complicit in warped memories of historical narratives, rendered from the perspective of the black female artist scouring the mind of the white supremacist. .
Its central thesis, that the abolition of slavery was "Darwin's sacred cause," the driving force that made him develop his evolutionary theory, is not obvious immediately, but a patient reading of the authors' narrative, renders it more plausible.
Thanks to marvelous animated digital re-creations by Gustavo Bonevardi and John Bennett, we can see this narrative precisely rendered into architectural form.
The searing narrative is rendered epic by the use of long repeated passages that make explicit the connections between the stages in Firdaus's journey towards murder.
A complex narrative is rendered through multiple scenes all set in giant plastic cubes that glide about the stage like phantasmagoric art installations, with the aid of a heroic army of scene-shifters.
Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, unfolds with the locomotive elegance of a Tintin comic or an episode of "Murder, She Wrote".
Reading the reviews, I found that there were some familiar gripes: the film Orientalized, it Othered, it had a white-savior narrative, it rendered Japanese people flat and mysterious and inscrutable, and it was part of a grand old Euro-American tradition of white men plundering Japanese aesthetics for their art.
The catch, though, is that while impromptu development in jazz is adventurous by its nature, a dependence on flashback risks rendering narrative inert.
He would later display unequaled skill at rendering narrative texts, whether biographies of saints or stories from Boccaccio's Decameron or Dante's Divine Comedy, into a pictorial form that is at once exact, economical, and eloquent.
It is part of Alderman's schtick to pepper her novel with Hebrew terms, but she scatters words many Jews, let alone non-Jews, won't recognise, and mostly for no good narrative reason, so rendering the language lifeless.
